TrueLife - Cole Butler - On the topic of Psychedelics

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Today we talk w/Cole Butler. An amazing individual who has not only seen but researched and help facilitate the integration of psychedelic medicine into today’s marketplace. He’s incredibly intelligent, insightful, and a lot of fun to talk to. You can reach out to him here:http://linkedin.com/in/cole-butler https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cole_Butler2

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.

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 this Friday edition of the True Life podcast. We are here with an amazing individual, someone who is hit the ground running. If you're on LinkedIn, you probably see him making a few posts a day and you've probably read some of his stuff and you're probably excited to talk to him just like I am. Mr. Cole Butler, how are you, my friend?

Very well, George. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here, feeling good, beautiful day in Colorado. So great energy today. Yeah, it is a beautiful day. And so for people that may not know you, can you tell them a little bit about yourself? Yeah, sure. I'm pretty involved in the psychedelic space here in Colorado.

I'm in Fort Collins, a beautiful area. Let's see. I'm mostly work at Holness Center. So currently my main job is coordinating the M-Med-O-O-8 study, which is an LSD for anxiety clinical trial. Super excited to be a part of that. I was actually just left, but I was a part of the MDMA for PTSD clinical trials with MAPS as well. So as a backup study coordinator on the phase three trial and then also coordinated MT1,

the therapist training study. Other than that, it's just like a lot of random little things going on. I do ketamine therapy groups. technically I'm in a master's program but you know do a little bit of that yeah I'm an intern let's see I read grants trying to do research stuff try to do therapy like to go outside you'll probably dive into any one of these things by just trying to give the broad picture what I have going on right now so yeah yeah that's a lot I want to talk about all of them and let's start off with the LSD and anxiety like how does that before we talk about like some of the

on it. Tell us how you got involved in that. Yeah. So Holness Center has been a site for the maps trials for about four or five years now. We were one of the first sites. And really, I mean, I don't know how far to go back here, but I wanted to work for maps for a long time. I've been wanting to be involved in psychedelic research for a long time. I was doing research coordination work before and have my degree in psychology. So anyway, yeah, so came to Colorado, reached out to an organization called Prati, which is a psychedelic research training institute. They do ketamine therapy trainings, one of which I've also done. Through them, I got hooked up with the maps people down in Boulder, which eventually led to the maps people here in Fort Collins.

started working on those projects. And yeah, so basically since I was involved with them and we were a site for the MAPS clinical trials, mine med reached out to us and said, hey, we want you to be a site for our LSD for anxiety study. And we were like, that sounds awesome. So I've wanted to work professionally with LSD for a really long time.

It's kind of been one of my professional goals. And yeah, I pretty much found out that there's 20 different sites, and they wanted us to come on board. We're kind of one of the last ones to come on. So we're very much in the early stages of like setting everything up. We haven't even started enrolling yet. But yeah, so, yeah, we had all the right history, all the right things. And they wanted us to be a site.

We said yes, and now we're doing it. congratulations on achieving i always find it very rewarding whether it's myself that does it or somebody i'm talking to or somebody i know that sets goals and then accomplishes them or gets really close to them like i i feel that it's um it is contagious and i like being around it so thank you for coming on and talking about that you know there's a i think you i think you recently posted um some stuff about which which fits into what we're talking about the icpr and the recent basal study with LSD and anxiety. Can you talk a little bit about that?

And is what you're guys trying to do similar to what those results were found to be? Yeah, absolutely. So my understanding is that the individuals there, I believe it was Peter Gasser and Matthias Liktie. They are, I want to say, don't quote me on it, but scientific advisors or sort of scientific consultants

for Mide. So if you look at the trial design for that study, it's very similar to ours just in terms of timeline and how everything's conducted, looking at anxiety. So I believe MindMed was very much informed by the work that they did and has been working in collaboration with the people who ran that trial to design the current phase to be clinical trial that we are running now. Yeah. And do you, I don't want to, maybe there's things that you can't divulge or whatever. So I wanted to put a, you know, you don't have to answer that is out there. Have you, on this study, are you, are you, is there a certain dosage? Are you trying different types of dosages or placebos? Or is there some sort of literature that you've read that you think would be advantageous to the people in there? Like, what does the setup look like that you could talk about? Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, as you mentioned, a lot of it's confidential. You know that the protocol is confidential. So I don't want to put myself in a bad spot there. But, you know, there's a lot of information that's come out from my med and press releases. And, you know, just on the clinical trials.gov page, it's public information. So I can kind of speak to some of that stuff. And then my own personal opinions and things that I've read on my own time. So yeah, so basically it is five different treatment arms. So we're looking at randomly assigned to one of the five, placebo, 25 micrograms, 50 micrograms, 100 micrograms, and 200 micrograms. So it's a dose finding study.

So essentially, which dose works best? There's no therapy involved, surprisingly. It's just what we call dosing session monitors, which are, I like professional. trip-sitters, but same thing. Our quaint language has been LSD SM, so LSD session monitor. But anyway, so I think, I think that around 100 micrograms is closer to the ideal dose. The literature supports that, and that 200 is start to where you get extra anxiety symptoms, people get nervous. And so, you know, the trial is to figure that out, you know, which dose is ideal. I would say I think that the sponsor believes around 100 micrograms might work best.

I think that too. I think anywhere from 100 to 150 seems to be the historical kind of range. And it also, you know, like a lot of the psychedelics, like I don't want to say they have a ceiling effect, but they get to this point, and then it's like doing more isn't really going to help you, right? Like MDMA, you know, you want to take an amount maybe around 150 milligrams to 200, depending on your weight, where you're like really in a good space, but you take too much MDMA, you're going to get sick and not have a good time. So, you know, just one of those, there's kind of a sweet spot,

and that's what the study is kind of trying to figure out. it's such an exciting time to be able to see these types of medicines being used to help people. And I know we should be skeptical of panaceas, but it seems like there's so much that can't, so much good that can come out of it. Is there something that maybe you've seen in the world of LSD that you didn't expect to see as far as helping people? Well, yeah, as you say, a few things there with being a panacea, it's, I want to address that first. Yeah. It's like, I don't know, we should all be rational.

Absolutely. Reasonable human beings. And I think that, you know, we shouldn't just give these to everybody all the time, unregulated. But they're very powerful. And I've seen that with a lot of different psychedelic agents. I've decided to work with ketamine as well. So I think, you know, for a lot of different conditions, there's broad sweeping effects.

And, you know, the interesting thing is that it's so different from person to person the experience that they're going to have. So in terms of classifying the experiences, like, this thing's going to happen, and then you're going to get this result. It's hard to do. And if you read some of Stan Graf's work on LSC psychotherapy, he's done over 4,000 sessions. as a therapist. But, you know, and he's kind of got his way of conceptualizing it,

but you read it, and it's just like a manual of all the different things that can come up. And I don't know, there's just such a broad array of experiences that it's hard to say, like, it will work for this condition. And then what even is like this condition and what does that mean? And it varies from person to person. So there's so much there. my personal sort of philosophy is that you need to build a container, right, a safe container for the psychedelic experience for somebody to feel safe, to feel held, to have that trust,

and also build in all these different elements of intentionality, set in setting, you know, the environment, understand their family history. You know, I think all of these things play in a lot to somebody getting the healing effect, being very intentional about their usage and seeing real-life changes. So, you know, I've seen in some of my work and just observations. This is like a very important point, like all the different factors that also play into the experience and what the individual is going through and then what the psychedelic experience might show them, you know, it's going to be dependent on all of these things. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is.

There's so much interesting tangents we could go down. I think one interesting one to me is the idea that it was used to help people get off of alcohol. I think that was the inspiration for Alcohol Anonymous. So in a way, there's almost like a strange precedent set by it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's so much exciting work that happened, you know, back in the early mid-1900s. And reading about the history is fascinating, you know, from half. to send those pharmaceuticals to Bill Hicks with AAA using it.

It's like so much exciting stuff happened. And they were running those studies, you know, and we have that data. It's funny, like if you look at the way science is done now versus how it was done 50 or 60 years ago, it's so different. You know, it's like computers from 50, 60 years ago, you know, what those even looked like. They barely existed, I would say, probably at that point in time.

So I've read a lot of those original 70s. studies and it's like very fascinating but there's so much like variability in the methods and things like that there's like not a lot of careful organization and structure so one of the things like it's kind of hilarious but maybe not in a good way i don't know is like in one of the studies they strap people down to a metal table like strapped down no music no therapy and they give them 800 micrograms of LSD. That's crazy. That's a recipe for disaster, it sounds like.

Yeah. So you see the, I mean, you see the positive results. It's hard to like, like basically combine them all into like one conclusion because there's so much difference in methodology.

But these guys, Johansson and Krebs, they wrote a meta-analysis of all of these studies in 2012. to describe all of this. And so it's really great to reference if you kind of want to dive deeper into some of those effects. But yeah, you know, and then I've become very interested in the history of LSD as well being used by the CIA and sort of the bad ways that it was used and how we think about, you know, what are all these factors? What is the methodology being employed?

and how are bad actors using these in bad ways for things like brainwashing and mind control? Or how are you being very intentional about how you're setting up, you know, the experience to really facilitate somebody's healing? Because if you have the full force of the government, nobody's checking them, nobody's protecting these people. And then you drug them unwittingly, like, you're going to have a very bad experience, you know. Yeah. Versus if you really want to heal this person, you care about them, you set everything up right. You know, I think that that's where the real magic happens. So that's really sort of my take on it these days is that there's so many different factors of play and set up the factors right.

And you're going to get a good experience. Yeah, that's well put. Talk about two different intentions from like the CIA to today's modern people. trying to use it for therapy. You know, I think we've all, maybe not all of us, but a lot of us have read the studies where they would dose some gentlemen that were going into the house with like some,

you know, like the cat house or whatever and then like watch them through the one-way mirror. There's the Good Friday experimented. That's an interesting one to think about. And then there's the story of Ted Kaczynski. I mean, here's a mastermind. I mean, you're like, oh, yeah, Josh. Yeah, a lot going on with that one.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting to think about all of the influence that LSD has had on our past, and probably a lot that we don't even know about that has maybe influenced people or you got Francis Crick with the double helix and all these different people that have come up with ideas. and maybe we're able to see the world differently because they had tried these. I guess you could call it a therapy back then as well. It's interesting to think about. What?

Now, you were also involved with the Maps study. Can you tell us about that study a little bit? I mean, up to what you can. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so super fascinating. Love Maps. Working with them was so awesome. You know, it's another one of those things that's delicate.

I can't say I worked for them because I, as I actually worked for these sites and they paid the sites. So I work for the sites, not for the sponsor. It's just important to clarify. But, you know, there's 12 or 13 different sites on the MDMA trials. And so I was originally at Boulder. Like I said, I came to Colorado, got involved with Prattie. And actually what happened was I've been applying to maps for like four years.

Or sorry, one year or four times. But I had met some of the people that work for Maps, Evan Sola. He's a psychologist and researcher, a really cool guy. I met him in Washington, D.C. And another guy named Jonathan Lubecki, who is a veteran that was healed by the treatment. Very powerful story that guy has. He's awesome. Yeah, so I met those guys when I was working in Washington, D.C. in the surrounding area.

just kind of trying to network and get involved in the space. That was a few years ago. And also met somebody on the board of directors, actually, Victoria Hale. Got to see her speak as well. And just was super excited, fascinated by the work. So I met them. And then my job wasn't really going well. COVID and everything happened.

And so I was just trying to apply, trying to get a job. with maps and like nothing was happening. I was dropping these people's names. And then I moved to Colorado and met these people on Prattie. And as soon as I got on this call, it was a research call. These guys, Derek May and Scott Shannon are on the call. And they're the principal investigators at my current site at Fort Collins at Holness Center. And Derek's like, well, I'm a PI at the Boulder site and we need a study coordinator. And that's exactly what I've been doing. It's being a study coordinator and I'm like what this is a dream job so I go on there I apply it's like who referred to you I'm like Derek May and yeah so shortly thereafter I got in

contact with somebody and talked to them was a previous study coordinator now she's a clinical trial leader Amanda Nary is her name yeah so she's a clinical clinical tri-leader for MAPS BBC now. Yeah, and then I got in contact with Marcella Otolora, who is a pretty big name, I guess, in MAPS. She's a pretty big deal, pretty close. Actually, my understanding is that she was kind of patient zero for MAPS because she was friends with Rick Doblin,

and before this was illegalized, you know, she went through the treatment with Rick, actually. I hope I have all these facts correct. Yeah, and it healed their trauma. And she decided to go to Naropa University down in Boulder and then set up a clinic right down the road. And I'd heard her talking about how to become an MDMA therapist on the Tim Ferriss podcast like years ago.

So I'm like, this lady's a celebrity. So I get on a Zoom call with her and I'm like, oh, Marcella, you're awesome. Like I've heard about you on this podcast. She's like, oh, stop. And anyway, she's a really sweet lady. She owns this clinic with her husband, Bruz, down in Boulder, like I said. And yeah, so I came on board there, and they really needed help with this study called the MT1 study. I believe now they're moving into MT2.

There's a lot of talk. Like, things aren't really known where that's set. But it's a therapist training study. And the protocol is available online, so I can talk about it. it but essentially it's for people that have gone through the MDMA assisted therapy training and like therapists and then they want to do the MDMA themselves which like of course is a great idea you know I'm a firm believer in therapists doing the work themselves and really understanding what the medicine is like

so so yeah so that was a protocol basically they fly down fill out some questionnaires. We paid for the flight in the Airbnb and overnight attendant, all this stuff. And they would come down, do an intake, they'd do the MDMA. The next day they'd do a full-day placebo session, which the full-day placebo is going away on MT2. Yeah, and then they'd pretty much do a close-out session, answer some questionnaires. And yeah, and that was it. So I was really only there for a few months. And I saw a couple of participants. And it was really cool.

You know, they were super grateful to be a part of the study. It's like every math therapist who goes through the training, I feel like here's about the study. And they're like, I want to be a part of that. Oh, my gosh. And of course, right, you get paid to go and do MDMA. It gets a full experience and patients you're better therapists. So it's like a very highly sought after thing for maps therapist.

Yeah, and I hope they can make it more accessible and that's in the works I hear. So anyway, so I did that for a few months. At the time, though, I was in my first semester of grad school. So I'm in a Masters of Addiction and Counseling Psychology program at Colorado State University. And I was taking like 12 credit hours and I was reading like 10, 12 hours a week. And I was also like trying to get my own publications. And then two days a week, I'm driving down to Boulder, and it's like an hour and a half drive each way and working a full day. And it was just really draining.

And I kind of got to this point where I was like, holy crap, I worked so hard to be here. I love this job, you know, and doing the work I want to do. But I was like so burnt out. And I was like, well, then why am I doing it? And, you know, I just realized I had enough money to get by. And I really like to get to where I wanted to go needed to start. getting my own publications doing my own work. So I actually left.

Marcella, she was super kind and sweet and accepting of my situation and still supportive, you know, wanted to continue to support me thereafter. And so yeah, so I left. And then I was just like hanging out in Fort Collins, trying to get my own projects going, you know, at CSU and running my own statistics and writing up another paper. And then I got reached out

by Bree Ben Dixon. She was a study coordinator at the Fort Collins site for years. She's really sweet also. She's actually putting on the Emergence Festival this next weekend, a week from tomorrow, October 1st in Denver, which is a psychedelic education festival. So very exciting. She's really cool.

She's a ketamine therapist now, and she's been working as an Indyamate therapist as well. She reached out to me on behalf of Derek May and Scott Shannon and said, hey, we need an extra study coordinator here like the full-time study coordinator, Enrique, he's now my roommate actually, a super sweet guy, we're good friends. He was just overburdened with all of the enrollment that was happening as the map two main clinical trial was wrapping up its enrollment. We've since closed enrollment.

So yeah, so he was just really overwhelmed. The screening process is super intense. You know, there's so many, like, medical and psychiatric procedures that need to occur to enroll somebody. So, yeah, so he was just overburdened, and I'm, like, a very detail-oriented person. I'm very good with, like, the data and, like, making sure everything gets organized.

So I came in and helped out with data entry and sort of cordial. sort of coordination work and was just helping him out. And yeah, so that was only supposed to last about the spring semester. So pretty much throughout the spring semester of this past year, I was doing that. And then the summer came and I was like, okay, well, it looks like things are closing down. Like I said, they shut enrollment. So that like took out a lot of the work. And then we got audited by the FDA. So. Whoa. Yeah, it was a total surprise.

We got, like, it was like a Thursday, and we get a call. Scott got a call, Scott Shannon, got a call from an FDA inspector down in Denver, and she said, I'm going to be there on Monday. Like I said, this is on, like Thursday. She's like, I'll be there on Monday. We're going to audit your site. And Maps at this point had not gone through. an audit. So they had one that they had heard about through Health Canada that was occurring.

And then, yeah, they haven't had like any site level audits. And then they found out, oh, the FDA is coming to Fort Collins, Colorado. So it was very intense. Shortly thereafter, another site, I believe, North Carolina got the notification they were being audited as well. they had like a two-day audit. We had a five-day audit. And then a couple of other sites, New York, and I can't remember the other one, got audited as well. So it was like a big thing.

And then MAPS as a sponsor also got audited. So all these different sites, and then the sponsor got audited, Health Canada's auditing the MAPS Canada. It was like a whole crazy thing. But yeah, so we just all scrambled. Maps flew down, like, four people, including like their highest up people.

So like Charlotte Harrison, she's now the director of pivotal programs, meaning she basically oversees like all of the phase three and like big clinical trials. She's like, I'm on a plane, guys. I'm coming. And yeah, so she flew down a bunch of other people, like the head of quality affairs and all their like quality assurance team was there. And basically, Henrique and I worked like a 12-hour day, that first day we found out and then basically didn't stop working, including

on the weekend for like eight days straight. And it was like, it was just insanity. I mean, I took a day off and Enrique didn't, but it was just like no time to work out, no time to prep food. Like, you're getting fast food delivered. Like, it's just all hands on tech. So, yeah, that happened. It was a super exciting moment. I think a big part of the maps history. Yeah, and then after that, you know, like I said, I was the backup. Like that happened.

It was crazy. And there was some follow-up stuff. And then things kind of tapered down. And then I was kind of like, oh, well, I don't really know if, like, maps continues to need me to work as a backup study coordinator. because, you know, really they're in the phase now finishing everything up and getting ready to submit to the FDA. So I was like, gosh, what am I going to do? And then lo and behold, mind med steps in and says,

hey, want to do an LSD for anxiety clinical trial at your site? And I wanted to work with LSD. And so I got named study coordinator for that. And I was like, well, MAPS, I feel like I've served my time here. and yeah I'm going to step out and I'm going to step into new things and be the mind-med coordinator. So, yeah. It sounds awesome. It sounds, you know, when you're in the thick of it and these things are happening and there seems to be chaos and there seems to be clarity, it's almost like a trip in itself, the whole experience of it.

But it seems like total growth, though. It's amazing to me to envision some. something and then to see it happen and then to see the next step happen like you you come there you get involved in these things and it just seems by some magic or some some some miracle or maybe it's some force greater than we can imagine that's kind of guiding it like now you're with mind and now you're doing this new study from this new this new perspective there and then so you've mentioned that you were also involved in some ketamine therapy like what is it's seems like that's all over the news right now. I listen to people that are beginning these therapies

or they're talking about them or they're excited about them. And as someone who's been trained in that therapy, can you run it, can you run me through what it would be like if I or somebody had anxiety and they wanted to get involved in that and go through that process? Can you take us through that process? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would love to talk about ketamine. It's super exciting. You know, ketamine is a schedule three. which means it's just a lot easier to use in regular clinical practice. And I'm doing some research on it now. Like I said, working on it clinically.

I've been trained in it. So, you know, there's a lot of different indications it's used for, and there's also a lot of different ways it's used. And kind of going back to the original point about all the different factors are very important in the experience. Well, you know, I don't want to like, you know, tell anybody that I know the exact right way to do it because the jury's still out, but a lot of places will basically just leave you alone in a room,

set up on an IV, and it's like bring your own music, leave when you want, ring a bell if you need to. But like, it's not very intentional. Also, there are a lot of companies, but you can do an online telepsych intake and then do it in your own home. And I think that there's use cases for that, but I think that at home ketamine is more reserved for the person that's gone through a lot of psychedelic work, a lot of ketamine work, and doesn't necessarily need to go into the clinic anymore. But the way that I've been trained and the way that we do it in a wellness center, we use a model called ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. And it's a pretty popular model. there's a lot of big names in that. Raquel Bennett's been very much involved with the design of that, I believe, and Phil Wolfson.

Yeah, so essentially, if you come to us at Homeland Center and you want to do ketamine, we would have you do a psychiatric evaluation. So with one of our psychiatric nurse practitioners or our psychiatrists, you know, you do a full one-hour evaluation, and then if they deem it safe, And you have the right diagnosis and they'll prescribe the diagnosis and then they'll figure out what route of administration to do as well as the dose. And that's sort of done with a lot of different factors in mind, like the person's sensitivity to drugs, certainly their weight and other things. So we do that. And then either the nurse practitioner or the psychiatrist or another therapist ends up working directly with that person. So in the ketamine-assisted psychotherapy model,

we sit with a person while they're on ketamine throughout the whole experience. And they might not, like, need any support. They might just be lying there for an hour to an hour and a half. And like, that's fine. But we've also seen, you know, a lot of people, they want to get up or dance or move around or they need a person or they need their handouts of hang out their hand. And we talk about that beforehand and they'll hold their hand for a couple minutes. Give them that support. They know that they're there. They know that they're safe. They know that somebody's sitting over and watching them and keeping their body safe because a lot of times they might leave their body. So we sat there with them through the process.

And then, like I said, if they need us, we're there. If not, you know, they just sit there. And then after about an hour to an hour and a half, depending on the route of administration we used, we will sort of arouse them, bring them back into the room, or some therapists just like to let people sort of wake up on their own. this whole time they've got on an eye mask and they're laying down in a comfortable position. They've got headphones on.

And then we have very specifically curated music. There's a lot of good ketamine playlist. You can find them on Spotify from like Prati and also Roots to Thrive makes really good ketamine playlist. So, yeah, so there's good ketamine playlist available online. And they change depending on the route of administration because the onset of the ketamine changes depending on the route of administration. The bioavailability is different. It may come on faster or slower. So play this or kind of design with that in mind.

But anyway, so once they're off the ketamine or they're not really off the ketamine, they're just not like completely dissociated. They can like kind of come back into the room and look around and talk. but in my experience doing it, I'm like still like sort of sedated and like, whoa, what's going on? So they come back into the room and then depending on the therapist, there might be another half hour to hour and a half of just sort of unstructured time to process and just kind of talk and see what came up for you. Did you see any colors? What was the music like? And then we, yeah, we do some psychotherapy around that and kind of talk through what happened. And then it changes after that from therapist to therapists.

And like I said, there's a lot of just different ways to do it in general. But in the ketamine-assisted psychotherapy model, we call it CAP-KAP. We have a follow-up integration session. So a lot of people like therapists, they'll have the psychiatric e-p. out and then the therapist might have three or four sessions of like getting to know them and building rapport and they'll do one of these ketamine sessions and then they'll have an integration session and then you just kind of repeat that you know the usual number is around six medicine sessions and then potentially continual follow-up integrations but it varies depending on what a person needs

So yeah, so they go through that whole process and then usually after about six, most people got what they needed and then they can terminate or they can move on to individual counseling or just kind of continue to work through integration. But yeah, so that's sort of the broad picture of how it works. It's interesting to me. And this is maybe this question is more of a subjective question, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on. Okay. So, so like let's say, I guess I'm trying to figure out how to quantify the result. Like if somebody comes in for, you know, a trauma, say an abuse of some kind, and then they, you know, and this is the subjective part about it, maybe one person does gestalt therapy and they do it for 10 years or six years or four years and someone chooses a different kind of therapy. Is there a way to maybe see how the results of ketamine stack up against these. other therapies, or is that just kind of like a subjective mumbo-jumbo area that I'm talking about?

I'm glad you asked. Because, yeah, well, I am actually in the early, very, very early phases. Like, I kind of just got the idea of designing a study using individual ketamine therapy and kind of trying to figure that out. I mean, you know, you can look at it broadly and consider effect sizes, right? Like how effective is this for one particular indication? And like we've been running ketamine-assisted therapy groups for frontline healthcare workers and first responders.

And we have good pre-post data on anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms. And we're seeing huge effect sizes in all of these domains. I've also seen in a couple of participants that had alcohol problems, like a pretty much 70% reduction in drinking in their alcohol behaviors. So yeah, there's a lot of different indications. There's a lot of different models. There's a lot of different ways people do the therapy. And it's kind of hard to have a standardized thing or compare it to another therapy or look at one specific condition. But, yeah, definitely I'm at this point where we are seeing a lot of,

of ketamine clients in our practice at a Holiness Center and we have some data but we don't have like a very structured way of like saying okay you go through a six-week ketamine protocol and the therapist is doing the same sort of therapy and you're coming in for this issue like we don't really have it captured that way because as you're alluding to there's a lot of variability in the ways that people practice and what they're coming in for. So I'm sort of at this point. I'm trying to work with somebody on track of research. I'll give them a shout out.

Chad Walkin, super great guy. Very inspiring story. Kind of been talking to him about maybe designing a research protocol for individual ketamine therapy. And so, you know, it's like very, very early stages as in it happened like a day or two ago that we had the conversation, but this thing has kind of been boiling in my head of like, how do we capture this? Like how do we figure out, you know, like you're saying, like how do we compare this to other

treatments in the literature? How do we validate it? How do we kind of put enough of a box around it to show that it works for one particular condition? And, you know, there is some other good literature out there. So there's a study published just this past year in the British Journal of Psychiatry, which is a pretty darn good journal. And it was a systematic review of 83 different ketamine studies for various mental health conditions

and substance use disorders. And they have a lot of great work. And they really go through and kind of describe, okay, depression, what does it look like? Suicidality, what does it look like? Substance use disorder. anxiety. And they walk through all these things and they reference some of the studies and they synthesize their results. But, you know, there's definitely a lot of room for more studies. So there's like a good groundwork. But we're trying to look at, okay, what indication do we want to look at

and how do we maybe want to design this thing? And then what's come to my attention is also how do we fund it? So if anybody out there has some money, you want to fund it, that'd be. great, which is, I mean, that's a whole other conversation, too. It's, you know, if you're trying to do this in a traditional academic context, you're not going to get federal grants. I mean, if you design it in the right way, if you use their right language, I don't want to say that it's impossible. Matt Johnson got a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. I believe it was for nicotine addiction, but it's been a while since I read about it. But, you know, it's just very hard to get a federal grant to study psychedelics, and that's how a lot of mainstream academia functions. But if you look at the funding model

for these other academic companies, they take a different approach. So MAPS, for example, has just been an absolute pioneer in private fundraising. And it's just been astounding to see, you know, what Rick Doblin can do. with fundraising and just getting interested people on board. MindMed is a for-profit company, so they have shareholders and, you know, they want to get out data, and that's a different model of doing the work. But, you know, yeah, I think that more of this work needs to be done where there needs to be systematic studies that are conducted, that are well-designed to validate the academy treatments to a broader world to standardize the way that it's done and to show

its effectiveness within like somewhat of a container so yeah so hopefully i can do that i still need to pitch up to my employers you know and see what they think and see if we can get this going and so yeah a lot of a lot of exciting stuff happening there yeah that is super exciting and You know, I think that what you spoke about is something that the common person like me or someone that's just kind of watching from the outside doesn't understand is how expensive it is to begin a study or to pitch a study or to keep a study going or to get to the next level. Like that's a whole other, a whole another gear in there. And then you can understand how the people that put forth the money may have some other ideas. of what should be in the study, and then you have the study coordinator.

It's interesting to think about. Another interesting study I was thinking about the other day. I was super fortunate, man. I got to talk to Rick Strauss me yesterday. That guy's just a, what an amazing individual, a pioneer in, it's one of those conversations where you just go, man, I'm talking to a guy who's just, I hope I don't sound too silly because he's a million times smarter than me.

But anyways, long story longer, he had mentioned, I have asked him a question like, do you think therapists that have actually tried and been through psychedelic experiences? I've had ketamine experiments or psilocybin or LSC experiences? Do you think that their level of applying the medicine and therapy to individuals is more effective than those who have never gone through that therapy? And he said, he's not aware of any studies that have ever happened like that, but it seems almost obvious to him that it would. would be that way. And it just, I think you alluded to this earlier. You're a big fan of someone having the experience so they can thoroughly understand what the person's going through. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Like, I really agree with you. I think it's an important part,

but I'd like to hear a little bit more if you can talk about that. Yeah, I would love to. Yeah. And Rick Strassman, big fan. I've been reading DMT, the spirit molecule. Yeah. He gave a talk recently to a student organization at Neuropa, and I got to kind of pick his brain a little bit and super cool. I love, he's got this chapter called Labyrinth and it's basically just all the different people he had to talk to, all the different agencies, all the different approvals he had to get. And gosh, it's just such a freaking process. And it's such a testament to like how difficult it is to like navigate through all the regulatory pathways to do this work. But he really laid their groundwork. And I don't know.

agree with everything he has to say a lot of the time as far as how this all works and the language we're using but i'll put that to the side for now but um yeah no as far as having the actual experience i mean i think the thing is that we don't really understand the psychedelic experience and like i said it could vary so much from person to person and i've been fortunate to have several of my own and try several different medicines, you know, and I'm at a point where I'm willing to, like, talk about that publicly. I just decided that for myself, but, you know, it's just like, it's so hard to read about it, and we form these conceptions based on the world we live in, the paradigm we exist in, and just our level of knowledge, and we read all these fascinating, cool stories about different things that are

happening and we project our normal like waking consciousness onto what we think is going to occur. And I mean, even having done so many psychedelic experiences myself, every single time, it's just something that I never could have imagined. And it's just so hard to like put myself in that like, it's going to be like this space. And it's said, I'm somebody who has done these things enough times. Like if I've done LSD 10 times, I think it's going to be like this the next time. And then it happens. It's totally different. You know, so it's just like it's hard to put any of these medicines in a box because they're so subjective.

You know, and a lot of the early work in psychology and psychiatry was employing a totally different framework. Like if you look at Youngian psychodynamic work, like, it's a, you know, it. It just functions differently. Like the way that he talks about dreams is that if you want to unpack a person's dream, you have to consider all the factors of that person's individual life. You can't just have like a taxonomy of different symbols, which is what Freud wanted to do. So it doesn't really work to say this thing means this.

And this thing in the dream means this. it's so, so deeply subjective that you have to understand all the things that are going on in that person's life at the time to then say, okay, well, this meaningful dream occurred. Well, what is it about that dream? Like, what do you think the symbols in the dream mean relative to what's going on in your life? And so I think psychedelics are a lot like that. they're so deeply subjective and interpersonal that each person is going to have such a different experience depending on so many factors, not to mention that just people are so different and we think so differently. So, I mean, it's just hard to understand what is the nature and the content.

And if you try to like do that like Freud and just write like this and the psychedelic experience means this, it's just not going to work. So, you know, it's really hard applying our sort of Western paradigm to thinking about psychedelics. And that's a broader conversation that opens a lot of weird doors to thinking about culture and society that we do things and, you know, how that doesn't quite work for us. But yeah, it's just so hard to put them in a box. But then there's also just something about going there and being like, oh, like, You take the medicine and you're like, oh my gosh, like my client is going to be having a crazy experience. Like they could be going through all these different things.

And like further, I mean, when I did my ketamine training, you get to do two experiential sessions. So you get to do an intramuscular, which is like often very dissociative, very psychedelic. And you also get to do an oral. And the oral session, the way that I was trained on, it can sometimes be psycholitic. So it's more like maybe you could get up and talk if you wanted to or maybe you don't completely dissociate, but you're experiencing some things. So when I did the ketamine training, I decided for myself, I want to do my oral session at a little bit lower dose because I want to put myself in the mindset.

of the person who's not having a full-blown psychedelic experience, but somebody that actually gets up and walks around or is kind of like, oh, what's happening? Like, I don't really feel like much is going on here. Like, I'm laying here. I'm thinking things. But, yeah, so I did a 200, I believe it's 200 milligram oral dose. And then after like 30 minutes, I got up and went to the bathroom.

and after 45, which normally is like, you know, the peak of the experience, I like told my sitter Jorge, I said, hey, man, like, I want to get up and I want to sit outside and talk. And so we just got up and we talked. But like my I am session, I was blasted. I mean, just out there in space. There was, it was just an experience. It was unfolding in front of me. And I was like deep in my like little pad that I had set up. and it was just like deeply immersive, deeply psychedelic. And it was like, there's no way I would have been able to get up. And so, you know, people can have such a range of different experiences on different medicines and on different doses.

And just the only way that you can even try to understand what they might be going through is to have the medicine yourself. And, you know, I wouldn't suggest anybody go and do underground experiences that I don't want to, like, put off. that, you know, I don't want to sound like that's what I'm suggesting. I'm not saying that that's a way to do it, but I am saying that like having the experiences is very helpful also to show the client or to just to be with the client, you know, just to be present and to maybe sort to sort of start to understand what it is that they might be going through. Yeah, it seems to me obvious. Like if, if you're, if you're, going to be a firefighter.

You train with a firefighter, like the captain is the guy who's been through the most fires or the chief of the police. He's been through all these things. And it just seems to me that you would, if you are going in for an experience, then you would want to be with someone who's had that experience and that can help you deal with the experience. And I think some of the early LSD studies, you know, in the beginning, I think that there was some people that looked at it like, okay, I'm going to take this.

so that I can thoroughly understand what it's like to be in a different reality. And the idea was I would like to be in the mind of someone who is not crazy, but in the mind that has a mental deficiency. And in some levels, yeah, in some levels, I've had some interesting, interesting out there trips on psilocybin where I totally thought the world around me was completely different than the one I was in. You know, and I, it was, it was like just night and day. And then when I kind of came back to it, I was like, wow, this must be how some people feel that we're totally disassociated with the world.

And then all of a sudden there was an empathy there. Like, oh, I get it. Like, I get how you could really believe this thing that's not happening is happening. And it kind of, it can create a bridge there for two people to talk about. And it's so therapeutic to have somebody in the room with you that not only understands, but believes. in you. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, absolutely. I actually wrote a poem. I write poetry. Beautiful. I know of the other things I do. Sort of to capture this and to ease anxiety around our participants

and our ketamine groups. And I had the realization I was down in Marble Falls, Texas, kind of random, but I went on a cave tour. Oh, nice. And you have, you know, on a guided cave tour, you have a guide, right? And this is a person that's into caves. They like caves enough. They want to work with caves. They've decided to make their life and their work like caves.

And in me, caves are like the earth's kind of subconscious, you know, you're navigating the subconscious of the earth. So I was walking through. this cave with like it was just, I was by myself and there was like a family with like two little kids and like a daughter and probably a grandma and their cave guide. I was like, okay, we're a small little group. We don't know this cave, but we're all exploring it. And the cave guide is just here to walk us through this journey and to keep us safe to say, hey, keep your head low here. Like if somebody freaks out they can, they're holding the light. But like, where are,

all there having our own experience of like exploring the cave right and i just realized this is just like our psychedelic groups like we are like this cave guy we're psychedelics people we dedicate our time to understanding these things not everybody does i mean a lot of people don't and they're not going to know they're not going to know all the nuances what's safe what's not how to do this so they rely on us to be their guide. And we guide these groups through their own subconscious exploration on these psychedelics. So anyway, I was just inspired by that and I wrote the poem to basically calm participants' nerves if they were about to go into their canning session. And just so let them know, like, hey, we've done this too, you know, and we know what it's like and we'll be here and you're going to come out the other side,

okay. So I shared that online, the Big Ten ketamine group, and my partner has used it in her individual ketamine sessions, and we used it in one of our groups. And yeah, people have definitely given good feedback, and it kind of eases them just to know, you know, we've gone through this experience too, and we know the medicine, and we can kind of, you know, be there for you throughout this. It's been my experience that people that write things and are proud of them can often remember at least a little bit of them. Would you be so kind just to maybe share a little bit of the poem with us? Yeah, I can read it for you right now. Yeah, absolutely.

I would love that, man. Thank you. I was wondering if you would ask. Let me see. Yeah, of course. All right, I found it. Okay, yeah, and it's relatively short. Okay, it's called I'll be your guide.

here we enter into the depths of dark caverns inside we find the unfolding of old patterns a soul's journey into the unconscious mind who knows what we may find inside letting go easing into the process removing all the gripping of conscious we guide you now into places unknown no fears are needed where you will go we too have been down there explorers are of the psychedelic fair. Come back we did, back into life. Read of the trappings of our minds. Nice. I like it, man. I'm gonna, did you post it? Have you posted it somewhere?

So people that might want to have it and read it? Can they get a copy of that? Maybe you can post it on LinkedIn or somewhere. I could post it in the show notes or something. Yeah, yeah. I think I probably posted it on LinkedIn at one point in time. I think Fluence or maybe. Maybe it was Polaris.

I think it was Polaris. They were requesting people to submit ketamine poems. And I think I submitted that one. But yeah, I can either send it to you or post it on LinkedIn again and just let people know, hey, if you want to use it, you can. I think it's a good sort of settling in poem because I had a lot of anxiety before my first intramuscular ketamine session. I was like, oh, God, I thought I would be good.

I thought I'd be comfortable. I've done a lot of psychedelics. I'm fine. It's just ketamine. And then I was like, holy crap, I'm nervous. And so funny, I went out for a walk by and home the center. We have like a great little creek and natural area. And I was feeling all these nerves. And then I looked down and I saw like a newborn baby deer. And it was just like adorable and had all those spots on it. And I was just laying there like this in the grass and let me walk right up to it like five feet away. And I took a picture and it was just so amazing. And it just calmed me down and sort of centered me in.

But I was like, gosh, I think our participants need something a little grounding and reassuring, you know, to make them feel comfortable as they go into the experience. So, yeah. So that was kind of the inspiration along with the. cave thing, you know? It's like, oh, like this all makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, it's almost, that brings me to another point. That's, that's beautiful. And I, I often think that nature is a language that we try and decipher without using words. There's the same way that something beautiful comes in our life and we can't really describe it. Like language fails, not only does language fail there, but it seems like language

fails at high-dose psychedelic trips. Like there's just no words. You could describe it, but you can't really explain it. You could say stuff like, you know, it's, there's no colors or there's no words, but you can't, it's very difficult to thoroughly

explain something like that. And I often, I often wonder if that is if that is because we're processing it in a different part of the brain and that gets me back to your poetry like maybe the language the maybe the language for explaining things that are beautiful

should be written in poetry maybe maybe poetry is a true form of communication because when you think about poetry you think of like sometimes you're getting goosebumps or someone getting flush in their face but you can see the reaction in the body with the words that you use. And I think that those things are tied. What do you think about that? Is that possible? Yeah, no.

So much to say there, too. You're asking all the great questions. Yeah, I mean, as far as nature, you're totally right. I mean, my philosophy on nature in general and psychedelic usage is that psychedelic should be done in nature. You know, I have a lot of thoughts about that and potential career aspirations around you know, facilitating that in nature and I hike all the time, you know, living in Colorado, and nature is very close to my heart. And there is just like a subtlety and an art and a beauty to all of what nature provides,

you know, and that's how we live for so long. I'm reading a book right now called Black Elks Beaks. Oh, a great book. Oh, man. So I don't want to diverge too far from the point here, but the psychiatrist I, work with. She does a lot of the work on the LSD study with me as well. Kylie House. She's really sweet. Her uncle is Wesley Black Elk, one of the grandchildren of Black Elk. And so I got to do a sweat lodge with this guy. No way. Yeah. Yeah, it was a beautiful ceremony and he's a true

medicine man. And as I'm reading Blackout speaks, it's just like so powerful, you know, the way that they lived and interacted with nature and then the white man mentality. And it's so funny. Like I was reading this morning and they said they call the white man Wachishishu's. And they said the white man came into the land and like after they'd already formed this tree that the white man would stay away because of the yellow metal in the hills. And I'm like, wait, yellow metal, they mean gold. So to them they were like, we have this yellow. metal and it's useless and then to the white man it's like oh it's gold so we're going to come in

and kill everybody and take the gold but to the native americans it's like oh well whatever it's just some useless yellow metal um so just very interesting you know the way that they lived and interacted in nature and this sort of raw way um and yeah as far as poetry goes i find that it captures something so much deeper and powerful. Like I wrote a really awesome poem after that intramuscular session where I saw the deer and it just captured all these, I think, subtle elements and the way I write poetry a lot of the times, I just sort of space out, I guess, and just write whatever comes to me. I kind of let it flow and it's often got this, you know, just natural emergent quality. And the way that the words come together makes it so that it's deeper than just if I'm just like writing something down

in general, you know, it's capturing something deeper. And I sort of sometimes it's like, I don't know, people are trying to be so deep with poetry and that's when it's not good. But But so I don't know, I think just like stepping away and just letting it unfold, it's like you just kind of let this thing emerge and you try to use the words that you have to capture the essence of like whatever it is. But, you know, sometimes it's just beyond what we can communicate. So, yeah. Yeah, it's sometimes I think back to the classics, like, you know, the Iliad or the Odyssey. or, you know, all these works were poetic in nature, and they were all recited, like not written down.

And I have so many awesome books that I love. But sometimes I wonder if just the act of writing stuff down has muddied the waters so much because, you know, translation means interpretation. And all of a sudden, this thing that was written down so long ago, it can have a totally different meaning, then was originally meant for. It's wild to think about.

Yeah, right. You mean, like, as it's passed down through language, it sort of has its own life, and as we try to write it down and translate, like the essence of it kind of gets lost. Yeah, like, it seems to me that there's a lot of traditions where people would have to memorize, like, the Koran, or they would have to memorize the great works.

And part of finishing your education was you being able to recite this work of art. And what happens to when you can, when you can memorize a thousand pages and recite this beautiful poetic work, what else is going on in your brain? What else have you developed inside your mind when you've developed the ability to do that? Haven't you also developed some sort of ability to see the world differently? When you can do that, there's probably other things that go along with that. And it seems to me that writing stuff down has caused sort of an atrophy. And the reason I bring it up is I think that psychedelics taps back into that.

It taps back into this world that we've gotten away from. Yeah. Well, I think as we like knowing something at an expert level, like I've seen this with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and I've seen it with yoga. It's like you can do it at like a very amateur level or you can somebody can tell you what to do. and you can kind of do it and you're not going to do it great. But the level of knowledge that it takes, like a resilient jiu-jitsu black belt,

it's minimum 10 years, or like a very advanced yoga teacher, like they embody so much of the knowledge that they know how to do it at this sort of crystalline level. And they know all the little nuances of every little thing. And they can explain that in full detail. But as I'm sure you're aware, you just like sometimes like knowing how to do something

and knowing how to explain it in detail is totally different. So I think that you reach a depth of knowledge with the memorization where you have to understand like what it means, not just the words, you know, but really what does it mean? Because maybe when you retell the story, if it's memorized, it's not just like you're not just reciting the words, you're understanding the deep meaning of these things to be able to retell it. And the words are going to change a lot.

little bit, but that's not what matters as much as the meaning behind what you're trying to say. And so the meaning of the thing is preserved throughout retelling, you know, the story you're having it memorized in a way that like, if you just write something down, it can easily get like just handed off or I can reference whatever my Quran or Bible or whatever that happens to be. And yeah, and you don't understand it at that full level of depth. See, that that takes us back to the full circle back to the individual therapist who has experience in what it is their teaching, whether it's the feeling of ketamine or the feeling of psilocybin. And on that note, if we look at psychedelic therapy as a discipline, do you see ketamine therapy being wholly different from psilocybin therapy?

Well, I think this is one of the things that I've sort of learned from my mentor and boss, Scott Shannon. Awesome guy. He's the CEO of the Board of Psychedelic Medicines and Therapies. And he's trying to establish this gold standard board certification model for how we can get insurance to reimburse these things. And also how we keep the training at a level of quality and that we're really doing it. the right way. And his stance is that there's a therapeutic container that is sort of generalizable, but that the medicines are different, but that there's a general sort of therapeutic container that needs to be there and that you need to hold as a therapist or a facilitator, and that you can kind of put the medicines into that. And I think that's kind of like, you know, again, understanding the

subtleties and when you have a deep level of knowledge, you understand the subtle differences between these different medicines or how they're going to work. Like ketamine is very dissociative and MDMA is very empathic and sort of embodied and it doesn't put you in this weird headspace. It really calms you down and makes you active and say, okay, well, I'm here and these people care about me, hopefully. And so there's differences. You know, there's differences in the medicines in a way that they're.

work and the way that they feel, you know, there's kind of a spirit to each of the medicines. But the generalized component, I think, is the therapeutic container, which has those elements of what is your past history, what's your relationship with the person that you're sitting with, what's the context that you're doing it in? Are you locked in a cage or are you in nature? You know, so I think the container is a thing that, you know, we can sort of generalize and needs to occur and but the medicines differ but most of them can be put in the general psychedelic container as a start yeah it's as someone like yourself who has has an amazing background in in being part of the new things that are happening in a background in psychology

and a very awesome person that has a lot of empathy i i don't thoroughly yeah you're awesome I'm enjoying the conversation, so thank you. It's very kind, yeah, likewise. Yeah. I wonder, like, you know, you can look at the DSM-5 and you see all these different kinds of conditions. And I think that someone who is a psychologist may be able to look at different conditions and understand different medicines for those conditions. And I'm wondering if in the future that, like, you've kind of answered this, but I'm wondering

if in the future the different therapies will be paired with different types of illnesses. Well, yeah, it's hard to say, you know, it's hard to say. I mean, yeah, I mean, just to kind of get into the meta-conversation about diagnosis, I mean, it's hard because there are these different symptoms that you do see manifest in these different disorders. you know and I mean this is the reason why you need you know high level degrees to be able to make diagnoses because there are subtleties right and so you can't just obviously put everybody in a box and say oh right you've just got this disorder whatever and like you just need this

there's so much individual nuance and complexity to each person but you know at the same time like if you're seeing the same manifestation of symptoms, like the anhadonia in depression, or like craving and withdrawal in addiction, you know, you can start to come up with like, okay, this is a thing that we can kind of put a label on, but then it's hard to say, okay, well, this medicine for this condition, because that hasn't really worked either, right? and I think just at a broader level, so much of clinical sort of issues are also a result of our culture. And so it's really hard by the time you see your psychiatrist or your psychologist or your therapist and you just say, okay, I'm manifesting these symptoms. And then you get a prescription for a medicine or a certain type of evidence-based therapy or whatever.

well, maybe it's the culture and the person's life history and all of the interactions in their day-to-day life that are all sort of coalescing to impact that manifestation of symptoms. And so by the time they get to the office, it's like they've already lived a whole life of all of these things that maybe are causing the condition. so it's hard to kind of have the Band-Aid approach and say, okay, well, I know this medicine checks off this symptom, but then what else is going on? Like, what is a deeper issue here?

Like, I don't have depression at all, but I've had a, like, diagnosable depressive episode before, and I talked to my boss, who is a psychologist, about it, and she said, well, maybe you should get on an antidepressant. But the thing was, the reason I was depressed was because of her and my work situation. So I was depressed because I was being mistreated at work. And then I wasn't being taken care of and people were putting me down.

So like the solution was I needed to get out of that job. Not like I needed a prescription to fix this. And I did get out of that job. now I'm doing a lot better. But it's like, you know what I mean? There's so much that like plays into like by the time you get there and you're manifesting the symptoms that it's so baked in the way that we do things as a culture, which I think is why there's so much widespread mental and physical illness.

You know, so there's all those things going on. So it's just hard to like, I don't know, look at a problem of a manifestation of a mental illness and fix it with a culture that is, you know, problematic in general. Yeah, this brings us back to the ideas of antidepressants and psilocybin. I think what you said about sometimes it seems like antidepressants just allow you to stay in a situation that's depressing and makes you, you know what I mean, like whether it's just releasing neurotransmitters to make you feel better, even though you haven't removed yourself from the situation.

where on on like a good psychedelic trip you can come to the realization that hey I don't want to do this anymore like what am I doing I got to get out of here this is what's making me sad whereas the antidepressant is like you wake up you're like okay let me just where's my where's my pill okay I feel better now I can go do this thing that deep down I don't want to do and it's manifesting horrible things in my life

like and maybe maybe that is what we've saw happen at ICPR 2022 is we saw that in a, now we have an infographic that proves that, you know, it's, and getting back to culture, it's fascinating to me to see the way in which psychedelics are showing us the problems of our culture.

You know, when we talk about an awakening, it's us coming to the idea that what we're doing kind of sucks in a lot of ways. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting, you know,

as I mentioned with the Lakota tribe and being a part of the sweat lodge and reading about all that and the psychedelic, you know, it's just like you really see how are these people living and they were in close harmony with nature or like a video I posted on LinkedIn the other day. It was like this Australian tribe and they were like, we were all healthy and like we would just like hunt and eat seeds and like everything was good and we'd run around naked. and then the white man came in, and then they started giving us cakes, and they started giving us sugar and tea and all these different things. And they're like, and then suddenly everybody got sick,

and like a bunch of people died, like old people died. And then they built a hospital. And then it's like, okay, well, now they're feeding them this thing, and now they've got this hospital, and then that's just this cycle, and they didn't need them there in the first place. And then the lady who was talking, she was like, well, my blood sugar was through the roof. I was super sick. And then I realized, I was probably eating too much, like, cakes and sweets.

And so I started going back to the way that I was eating. And then it dropped again. And then I was healthy. But, yeah, and in the Native American culture, it's just like, well, they were all doing fine. They didn't want to fight. They were living in harmony with nature. And then there's this wasichu's that really. in and there's gold and they want to take everything, they want to take the land, they want to

take the money, you know, and even in my own family's history, you know, like six generations up the line, my family was a part of the signing of the Treaty of New Dakota, which was to forcibly remove the Cherokee people down the Trail of Tears to present-day Talaqua, Oklahoma, and that's because there was gold in Georgia. And so a small subset of these people that were acting on behalf of the Cherokee tribes signed this treaty saying, okay, well, the people that didn't want to go down the trail of tears, now you can force us to go. And then I had family members that were murdered by Cherokees under blood law because they said, oh, well, that's not cool. You acted against the behalf of the majority, now we're allowed to kill you. But it's just a lot of.

It's just like, you know, it's just like a very sad history of this mentality of like we need the gold, we need more, we need to keep growing. And then we never question what's the direction we're growing in? Because we grow in this direction of business and finance and like partying and I don't know, just like living in suburban homes. It's just like the way that our culture has ingrained enough. this mentality of like, this is what your life should look like. And we never think that, well, maybe the way that we should grow isn't towards just getting

richer in like finance, but getting richer and experience and relationships and sort of growing this way of being more interconnected with nature and the people around us and communities. And I don't know, I just think that our culture has sort of overran itself with technology and that we still need to grow, but we need to grow in more conscious connection with other people. And that's what the psychedelics have really shown me, and that's really my intention with them and to use them is to show people conscious connection with others in nature

and to see the sickness that has manifest in our culture now and see how we can start to change that and grow in a better direction. Yeah, I like that. That's really well said. It's interesting. to think about, you know, when I think about mushrooms, I think about mycelium and the way it grows underneath the ground and it connects the root structures and moves the nutrients and heals things. And it literally grows and brings things together.

And it seems to me that psychedelics, specifically psilocybin, seem to do the same thing for people. Like, you know, you can really get together with somebody like the conversation we're having now. It's like, oh, yeah, I get it. I like what this guy's saying. And it seems to me that the mushrooms have the same thing. same type of properties they do for the trees and the plants as they do for people. And it just reinforces the idea that you didn't come into this world. You kind of came out of it.

And you're part of it. And you're part of this ecosystem. And that brings me to the idea of, you know, I'm not sure if this was in Black Elk Speaks or I read it somewhere else. But there was a passage I read. And it was this in American Indian. And he had said something to the effect of when the white man came to us and said he wanted to buy the land, we laughed at him because we said no one can buy the land. The land belongs to everybody.

And I was speaking with a gentleman named Dan Hawk, who's a Native American. And I asked him, I said, doesn't it kind of sound like the same thing? Like right now they want to come to us and say, we're going to buy the carbon. We're going to buy the air you breathe. And I think you can't buy the air. The air belongs to everybody. But if you look at what's happening, like the idea of them charging you to breathe is really no different than them buying the land in a weird sort of way. When you monetize this idea, like it's just this, it's so crazy to me to think that they could, but why would it be?

They bought the land. They took the land from everybody. Why not take the air from everybody? It's crazy. Yeah. Everything becomes monetized. We're trying to pull out the value of everything, and then greedy people take all of it, and they send it to the top, and they leave a wake of destruction and death.

You know, and this was one of the things on my recent LSD experience. It was just like, we just leave a wake of destruction and our paths and our ignorance, you know, and we just don't realize, but we've also just been fed this narrative and this value structure and that's based around financial wealth and not recognizing that what wealth really means, at least to me, is like wealth of relationships and happiness in your life that comes from living and right relationship with the people around you

and with nature and in harmony with the world and communities. And, you know, I just think it's so sad, you know, the way that advertising and the media is like sort of just ingrained all these ideas in us about like this is what we should be striving towards this is what this should look like and then we see this widespread sickness you know this widespread overuse of alcohol and other you know harmful things and just these all these mental health symptoms all these physical symptoms you know diabetes heart conditions obesity it's just like we're not like living in right relationship with ourselves and the world around us.

And it's like, I don't want to like blame anybody, but it's just like a cultural thing that needs to change, you know? Yeah. You know, it brings up this idea of Aldous Huxley to me. Like, you know, first off, like, thank you for everybody who hasn't read the island. You should take Cole Buggers advice and read the island. That's my favorite book. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. Isn't it weird how like he wrote Brave New World and then he wrote The Island? Like do you think that the island, like are those two ways people could live? I mean, like they're pretty distinct, you know? Yeah, Island's my favorite book. I've read it twice. All the Huxley favorite author, amazing. I've read several of his works, including Brave New World.

It's interesting, you know, to put him in context because he wrote Brave New World in the 1930. and, you know, it was focused on Soma and this sort of control and the differentiation between the savage mentality and the civilized mentality. And you come to see the benefits and the negatives of both. Like the savage mentality, as he lays it out in the book, it's not some ideal thing. But he wrote Island like 30 years later in the early 1960s

right before he died. Like it was either his last book, or like one of his last books. But what he describes in theirs, it's like, let's take all the best elements from Western culture and Eastern culture. And that goes into how this island was designed. It's like there was two people that came together, like this Eastern guru that needed this medical condition fixed from this Western doctor.

And they met and formed this relationship. And then they came to grow this culture. And I don't even want to use the word, utopia because that sounds like something's wrong and it's just like some unrealistic idealized world but that they figured out you know how to have a good society and I love in the novel how the quest for the oil underneath the island is sort of undercutting the greatness that they've achieved it's like they finally got to this you know area of like having a well-structured civilization where people are living in community and are healthy and all these things.

And then there's still this desire to drill out all the oil from underneath the island and turn it into this military industrial thing. So very fascinating. You know, yeah, I think Huxley was on to something there for sure. Yeah, I like how he had like, you know, you think of the idea of Soma and then you think of like the Bhagavad Gita or like the myths that come from that side and they talk about Soma. And then you talk and then in the island he's talking about mushrooms and ceremonies. And then even even in Brave New World, the guys at the end, the people that have dangerous

ideas, they end up going to an island. You know, I wish he was alive. I would love to see, like I see so many, I see, I know, I see so many strands that kind of connect everything together there. and Cole Butler, I'm having an absolute blast. Are you doing okay on time where you got some stuff coming up? Yeah, my partner's coming over at some point. I've got a call in an hour.

Okay, okay. And then later I'm going to Red Rocks to see Big Gigantic. One of the benefits of living here in Colorado is having Red Rocks amphitheater an hour and a half away. So just get ready and leave, pick up a friend, and we can go see that later. But, yeah, I should probably wrap it up and take care of a few other things around here. This is really, really fun. And I really appreciate you taking time to do it. And I'm hopeful we can do it again.

But before we go, what do you have coming up? Where can people find you? And what are you excited about? Absolutely. What do I have coming up for the LSD study? If you're in Colorado, you have anxiety, please feel free to reach out. Yeah, I mean, the thing is that, you know, you can't have done a psychedelic in the past two years or more than 10 lifetime uses. So it's kind of funny that, you know, the people that are going to be most excited probably aren't going to be eligible.

But, you know, that's the main thing in the sort of early talks about a retreat center. Hopefully that can come about. I want to give a shout out to Proposition 122, the natural. Medicine Health Act in Colorado, if you're Colorado resident, Colorado voter, please vote on the upcoming ballot in November. That would allow safe, regulated access to psilocybin and also to grow it in your own home, to do it in your own home, to give it freely to consenting, well consenting adults. If you're an adult, you can do it.

And eventually DMT, Ibo Gain, and Mesculin, if everything goes well with psilocybin. So, you know, I won't say too much more on that because it's only sort of a dream right now, but I'd say the pieces are coming together, hopefully, for a retreat center to happen. We'll see. We'll see if that's kind of dependent on the Natural Medicine's Health Act, polling at 60% right now. Those are kind of some of the forward-looking things. Hopefully we can get a ketamine research study going, applied to a grant to get ketamine assisted therapy groups funded, looking for some private funding for that, feeling promising.

I submitted that grant like Monday, I think. So hopefully we can get all that going. People can find me on LinkedIn. I would like to sort of, you know, spread my platforms. I jumped off of a lot of the traditional social media and thinking about maybe doing the YouTube channel, maybe a podcast. I don't know yet. I've got to see where my time's at. I like to post more. I found LinkedIn is a really good platform for some of the ideas that I have and, you know, connecting with people like here, you know, like this happens. So that's been really powerful. So right now, just finding me on LinkedIn, Cole Butler. Otherwise, yeah, what am I excited about just life? Yeah. Life's been really awesome. I've been very blessed.

been really well taken care of and received by this psychedelic community. Yeah, a lot of exciting projects in the works. Hopefully we can give people psychedelics legally and safely in nature and change the world a little bit. Man, that's really awesome. And I want to say thank you for all the hard work you're doing. And I'm glad people like you were out there on the forefront pioneering new things. and I really hope that people reach out to you and can become inspired by you or hopefully maybe they can help you in some ways. And that's my hope.

Yeah, yeah. It's been cool. You know, people reach out to me on LinkedIn. Sometimes I feel like I don't know anything, you know. I'm still pretty young and pretty new to the space. But people reach out and ask for advice and then don't wonder about regulations or things. And I'll be like, oh, I actually do know this. So there have been a lot of.

like informal sort of conversations, been able to help some people out. And, you know, at first I was kind of like, ah, this is a lot of time and my time is sort of precious right now. So it's hard to like dedicate that to people, but it's also very rewarding, you know, like knowing that I can help somebody out and not ask for money or anything like that. I don't want money. So yeah, it's super exciting. Thank you so much, George, for having me on.

I'm honored that you would even think of it. with me or find me worthy of talking to. And that's been a super interesting conversation. And I can tell you, we have a lot of similar interest. And so, yeah, I just appreciate the opportunity. Pleasure's all my end, my friend. And so hang on one second. I'm going to end the broadcast, but I wanted to talk to you for one more moment.

Okay. Aloha, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for spending time with me and Cole. Thank you. Okay.