E45. Microdosing For Depression & the Limits of What Science Can Know

Can psilocybin microdosing actually treat depression – or are expectation and the placebo effect doing far more of the work than we realise?

Dr. Rotem Petranker is a psychologist, researcher and therapist who has spent years studying psychedelic microdosing. In one of the most rigorous clinical trials of microdosing for depression to date, his team gave people diagnosed with major depressive disorder either 2mg of psilocybin or placebo and tracked what happened.

The surprising result?

People in both groups got dramatically better – but on most measures of depression, there was almost no difference between microdosing and placebo.

In this conversation, Paige and Rotem explore what that finding actually means, why psychedelic research may be far less certain than popular headlines suggest, and how expectation, media hype and scientific bias can shape what we think psychedelics are capable of.

We explore:

💕 What counts as a microdose – and why the ideal dose and frequency are still unclear
💕 What Rotem’s clinical trial revealed about microdosing, depression and placebo
💕 How expectation may be shaping psychedelic research
💕 Whether microdosing actually improves focus and connectedness
💕 Why some psychedelic research may be less reliable than it appears
💕 How media hype can get ahead of the evidence
💕 What the science actually tells us about psychedelic-assisted therapy
💕 The meaning crisis, our need for certainty and the discomfort of not knowing
💕 Consciousness, panpsychism and whether psychedelic entities are “real”

(00:00) Dr. Rotem Petranker, welcome to the show. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Um, we are going to be talking a lot about micro doing in this conversation. So, I think that we should get some definitions on the table before we do that. What is a micro dose? >> About 10% of a recreational dose. But, um, as I’m sure we’ll talk about later, the findings from my clinical trial, I have another opinion about what a micro dose is.

(00:26) So I think for now it’s sufficient to say it’s a really tiny dose that uh people take frequently. >> So you said 10% of a recreational dose that when I think about what a recreational dose is I also that’s also a question that varies person to person too. Like when you say um the frequency of a micro dose like what what are kind of the the barometers for that or the guard rails for what frequency a micro dose might take place? Again, great question.

(00:57) We don’t there’s science doesn’t have an answer for what is the correct frequency. Um there the two most common um I guess ways of doing it. The quote unquote protocols, one is the Fatamin protocol which is one day on two days off. That’s named after Jim Fatiman who was um a pioneer of micro doing research in the first wave of psychedelic research.

(01:19) And then the other most common protocol uh I think is the steammits uh stack named after Paul Steammits uh and that’s five days on two days off [snorts] we know that after being exposed to serotonin agonists the receptors downregulate or in other words if you take uh a gram of mushrooms today you feel something.

(01:43) If you take a gram of mushrooms today and again tomorrow you really won’t feel anything tomorrow. you would want to have a break between doses. So to me, the fatamin protocol makes more sense. Uh but again, we don’t know and I assume that there’s also a lot of variance between individuals and how they metabolize these substances.

(02:01) >> What are those those other protocols? What are they um based on like Paul Stammits and then the fatamin one? Are they based on those people’s personal experiences? So I think uh Jim Fatiman’s protocol is based on whatever um pharmarmacological evidence existed at the time. Honestly, it hasn’t proved since.

(02:22) So it’s based on what the way it would make sense based on kind of the rationale that I just explained. Uh I’m not sure how Paul Stemit um developed his protocol. I know that the idea of having two days off is kind of like you have the weekend off. So, I can see that it makes sense from that kind of lifestyle perspective, but um yeah, I don’t know why he picked five days on, two days off.

(02:45) >> Why would it be the case that if somebody was going to use a micro dose of mushrooms um they would use it differently to a pharmacological intervention like an SSRI? Is that to do with the serotonin receptors and kind of like what’s happening in the brain? >> It’s it’s interesting. I actually I don’t know how many people know this.

(03:04) We discovered the existence of serotonin following the discovery of LSD because we noticed that LSD was binding to something and we really didn’t understand neurotransmitters so well at the time. What turns out is that LSD and also psilocybin, DMT and measculine all kind of mimic the way serotonin works in the brain.

(03:25) Um the way SSRIs work is more like uh they interfere with the uptake of um serotonin once it’s already acted on your brain cells. So instead of adding more serotonin, it kind of it makes the serotonin that’s already there work over time. So why did you guys choose depression as the um particular condition that you wanted to see whether or not psychedelics or psilocybin would have an effect on and actually why did you choose psilocybin? >> We started doing this research in 2016.

(03:56) We designed this trial in 2018 2019. At the time there was still way more stigma against LSD uh following a very successful PR campaign of decades. Um, one reason we chose psilocybin over LSD is because we thought there would be less stigma for psilocybin. And the other is more logistical. Um, the halflife for psilocybin is about half of what it is for LSD and we knew we’d have to keep people in the lab for the whole time.

(04:24) So, we thought it’d be easier for everyone if we used the shorter acting agent. In terms of why we picked major depressive disorder, we actually initially when we submitted this uh trial application to Health Canada, which is kind of it’s our version of the FDA. I’m not sure what the Australian equivalent is. Um we um really wanted to see if uh if it’s effective for healthy people.

(04:47) So to justify the risk benefit analysis, this has to be on people that are suffering from some kind of disorder. Otherwise, why would we be risking perfectly healthy people? >> Can you share what the um study was and what the design was? This clinical trial was the product of multiple uh online surveys that we ran where we asked people really what their use patterns uh were like and what they were getting out of micro doing.

(05:13) And we really wanted to create a bottom up approach rather than you know just like sitting in a room and deciding for people how they should micro dose. We asked how do people micro dose in the wild and then we tried to replicate this in the lab. People who do this research mo more often than not really believe that it works.

(05:28) Now, if we assume that this intervention works, I think it kind of behooves us to include as many people as we can in these studies and ideally people who would normally not have access. The other reason is that because these are actually substances that we don’t understand super well and we don’t have a lot of access to what adverse events they might cause or how they’re metabolized by different people.

(05:50) I think it’s really important that the question we ask in these studies is does psilocybin work for humans and not just does it work for white guys. I think it would be fair to criticize this design for being oh only once a week. I can say a we have empirical evidence that a lot of people do use uh psilocybin that way they micro dose once a week and I think diversity is super important to make this scientifically strong.

(06:13) >> Interesting that you said before about um people who do the research into psychedelics are very passionate about psychedelics. I was I was um having this conversation with myself over the last week as I was researching to prepare for this interview and I’m actually interviewing one of your colleagues um Balaz Sigetti in a couple of days as well.

(06:34) Um, and so I was just trying to get like, you know, my my my [ __ ] together. And I realized like in in the research I was really looking for something that serviced my own beliefs about psychedelics because I also I’m passionate about them and they’ve been a really big part of my own mental health journey.

(06:53) But listening to you talking in other interviews and reading some more research, it seems that it’s much more nuanced than the psychedelic advocates would have you um believe. And like I always as a joke refer to Reddit as like the place where people go for psychedelic um insight and information kind of as a joke but also because like the subreddits um massive about psychedelics.

(07:15) Your your study design like your hypothesis were pre-registered and and you did your best to navigate that. But just as a general observation of science like how how can scientists get around that and like what kind of happens when they don’t check their own biases? like a hypo this is an empirical question and you can the answer to your question is what we have right now this is what you get there’s a paper that I wrote with a a couple of my colleagues and it was published in 2020 which turns out that was six years ago um and in this paper we say hey we need to be

(07:47) really careful because we’re we’re we’re building the foundation for a new science and if we cut corners at this point the whole thing is going to be so rickety um and it will be impossible to you We’re supposed to be standing on the shoulders of giants and they need to be stable.

(08:02) So I think this is what we’re seeing now where kind of different scientists uh are not working together. They’re not collaborating. Uh they are competing. So they measure things differently. They design their studies in different ways because everyone wants to be first. Um you also see a lot of people that are yeah that are kind of that report their findings in a biased way.

(08:27) you know, people need to publish uh to advance their careers. And so this incentive structure creates a situation where, you know, we’re we’re encouraged to publish whatever appeals to the public. In the end, what you find is that a lot of the research that gets published is low quality. And in psychedelics especially, so I, you know, my background is in psychology research, especially if if you compare um psychedelics as a sub field to where psychology is.

(08:54) Um, psychology is way more rigorous and way more way more cautious. And I think in psychedelics, people kind of go big or go home. >> Yeah, the media kind of does pick up on the sort of headlines of I mean, that’s its job. It creates headlines um of psychedelic research and kind of, you know, people’s attention span is so low at the moment that you can imagine them scrolling through the news and just reading the headline of an article that’s supposed to clickbait them around what psychedelics might or might not do.

(09:20) And I guess I was just curious to hear um if you have like come across any anything like that recently in all of this news that’s coming out in light of psychedelic assisted therapy becoming popular like that really just based on your experience as a scientist feels like uh no the public need to know that that’s actually not not what the science that that’s not what the science reflects.

(09:44) My colleagues and I recently uh wrote a paper about the way psychedelics are reflected in the media and I think the most striking finding was that um I forget what it was it was something like 65% of um media pieces that we looked at included um you know they say psilocybin has been hailed as a new mental health cure and it might be effective with a variety of conditions including PTSD.

(10:12) Now the thing is there’s as far as I know zero studies on psilocybin for PTSD. This doesn’t mean that psilocybin is not effective for PTSD. It just means that there’s no research yet and I think the media has been hyping that a lot. >> Is that a conflation between um MDMA and uh and psilocybin? Like there have actually been studies on MDMA for PTSD and >> I assume so.

(10:39) Yeah, I assume that that’s the case but I I don’t know. I you know I I don’t know what’s going on in people’s heads, but I that’s it’s a plausible explanation. >> Um all right, cool. Well, let’s let’s get back to your trial. So, how many people um what was the study design? Yeah, just pick up where you left off previously. >> People were randomized into either uh first placebo or first psilocybin.

(11:00) And I’ll explain why I say first in a minute. Uh and then they came into the lab once a week for four weeks and they received either two milligrams of psilocybin which um is a little bit less than 10% of the amount of psilocy psilocybin that people are administers administered in most clinical trials um or an active placebo just sugar.

(11:22) And so they come in once a week. Uh they answer a bunch of questionnaires. Um we also interview them at baseline and then after these four weeks um and then after that they get four more weeks of psilocybin and everyone knows that they’re getting psilocybin. So at the end of the eight weeks it’s either people received four weeks of placebo and then four weeks of psilocybin or four weeks of placebo and then or sorry four weeks of psilocybin and four more weeks of psilocybin.

(11:51) So eight weeks of psilocybin altogether and we did that for kind of a variety of reasons. This is the kind of statistically the most clever way to maximize the uh power we would have to detect an effect if there is an effect >> and it was double blind right so nobody knew what they were getting you guys didn’t know what they were getting >> for the first four weeks it was double well I guess triple or even quadruple blind because kind of no one knew but then the last four weeks everyone knew and part of what we were trying to

(12:17) assess is you know if you were in the psilocybin condition and you were blinded initially and you were not improving improving, but then once you cross over to the open label psilocybin, then you start improving. That tells us that it’s all expectancy and it’s not really the drug effect. >> Yeah. And that’s interesting.

(12:36) That would be an interesting finding. Anyway, >> but the idea here was essentially for each person to be their own baseline and then Yeah. and then we can compare both within and between groups and that would give us kind of a lot of statistical power. >> So, what was your hypothesis before going into this? Um we predicted that uh after four weeks of once a week psilocybin uh 2 milligrams psilocybin the people in that group would improve in their depression symptoms uh more than the people in the placebo group.

(13:10) >> And where are you doing this? Is everybody coming into what is the set and setting vibe for where people are going to have their doses administered? >> Excellent question. And yeah, I think set and setting are so important. And actually I wrote a paper with my colleague uh Ido Hardigen a few years ago about how important set and setting are specifically in the context of micro doing.

(13:36) Um so what we did we actually had two different settings. Um, one setting was a pediatric clinic, which I mean it was a nice clinic, but it’s still very much a clinic where participants were in um, you know, an exam room with an exam bed. And it’s kind of it’s it’s a very clinical setting. And the other setting, >> but there were toys, toys everywhere.

(13:56) >> No, no toys, but kind of, you know, uh, animals on the walls. >> Yeah. Cute. >> Yeah. Uh and the other setting was um a proper psychedelic clinic with you know like living walls and dim lights and crystals and it was very kind of chill and mellow. And so we thought this would be a great opportunity to also compare between these two settings to see if people had different outcomes and they did not.

(14:23) Now this doesn’t mean that people don’t have different outcomes in different settings. We weren’t powered to detect this kind of effect but we were like oh what an interesting potential we have here but yeah we didn’t find any difference. >> Okay so um what is that like what are the implications of that in terms of your scientific view on set setting.

(14:43) I think about this a lot about how we do science. And when your data is really messy and it’s just one study, I kind of like it doesn’t affect my credence, you know, how how much I value uh the data or kind of what my confidence is. Um my my response like this didn’t change my mind at all about the importance of set and setting with micro doing.

(15:09) I’m like, “Oh, maybe in the future when we run a larger trial, um, we should test it again.” >> Yeah. I mean, maybe that’s like a a different an entirely different study design. I also don’t have a PhD and have not never done this kind of research, so I’m just fumbling my way through these questions to try and get to what the actual >> You’re doing great.

(15:28) You’re making a lot of sense. >> Okay, great. Um, yeah, to get to like the actual crux of um of what you found. Um and so but it does seem like you had the potential in this design to test a lot of variables like placebo effect. Um a set and setting effect to some degree. Uh people like expectation. Um and then also like were people was everyone just getting their doses and then were they just kind of sitting in their rooms whether they were in the pediatric or the psychedelic setting and then just sitting there and kind of contemplating

(16:00) their existence? Were they were they interacting with each other? Were you as clinicians interacting with them? what was happening there. >> Yeah, you’re asking all the right questions. Um, great. So, this is it’s not trivial. It’s not obvious what the right uh thing to do here as an experimentter because so you have to keep people in the lab for like six hours.

(16:20) Um, so one thing you can do is just tell them just sit there, do nothing. Uh, because I want everyone to be doing equally nothing so that it’s all controlled. >> Yeah. >> Uh, but that would be extremely boring and unpleasant for them and that might interfere with any effect that we might observe. Um the other thing you can do is tell them you do you and then everyone does something different and then the data is messy and then again we can’t interpret it that it shouldn’t affect what we think.

(16:45) Um where we went with this is we were like this is such a huge lift for us. It’s so difficult. Um, might as well have people complete some questionnaires, as many as is reasonable, uh, without them going nuts. And then we get to test a bunch of hypotheses because, yeah, people were in our surveys were reporting improved mood, but they were reporting a bunch of other things.

(17:08) So, we were like, let’s test all of this and see if what we come up with. Um, and that way people don’t get too bored and people are still doing more or less the same thing. So, we can we know that it’s consistent. Um, in retrospect, I’m like, this wasn’t ideal. And so, uh, new designs that I’m working on have a people taking home the drugs because this has been now done in New Zealand.

(17:35) But yeah, this is another potential drawback and like micro doing filling out questionnaires all day. That wouldn’t necessarily be great for my mood. >> Yeah, I was just thinking that. Um, I was going to ask like did it ever occur to you that maybe that’s like also not what Yeah, I don’t know. Like h how do you h how do you even know that what people are filling out in the questionnaire is something you can trust if you’ve also just given them a psychedelic drug subperceptual or um sub hallucinogenic as you say but like how do you then take that and be like oh

(18:09) okay this is useful? >> Yeah. So I think the idea is as long as everyone’s doing the same thing and everyone’s taken the same dose and we kind of control for all the other factors, yeah, you assume that this is what’s going on like they’re reporting honestly. The thing is though, I’m thinking even if they’re reporting honestly, maybe people are having different experiences uh based on, you know, someone might have ADHD and then it’s really hard for them to sit down and do this thing or yeah, you know, just like

(18:39) different people are different. Again, this is something that would ideally or I guess uh in theory would be resolved by having a large enough sample and then this kind of variance just shakes out. Uh and I don’t know that we hit the large enough sample. I guess I don’t want to like get into the nuts and bolts of this too much, but I do think this is an interesting thing about psych research is a lot of it relies on self-report and self-report in and of itself is like so varying because people have different levels of self-awareness

(19:05) and like people have different, you know, reasons for which they might self-report in a way that makes them sheds them in a a certain light. And like I’m wondering when you were setting the surveys out, was any of that a consideration of of wondering, you know, we’ve given people these drugs and then also like self-report can be a bit of a uh like a challenging way to do science in this like yeah to do psych psych science.

(19:33) >> Not really because I think like so I’m I come from psychology research so this is kind of this stuff is my bread and butter just like people self-report almost everything. That being said, um I come from behavioral science, so I was like, okay, let’s let’s give people some behavioral tasks to see if there’s a difference on that.

(19:56) So, we do have some really interesting data. We had two sustained attention tasks. Uh we had several creativity tasks where it’s not just, you know, oh yeah, I feel more creative. It’s like, let’s see. Um [laughter] we did some uh sobriety tests, which is I think we’re the only ones to have done that. Um, >> what? Like you made him walk in a straight line or >> Yeah.

(20:17) >> Oh, exactly that. >> Nose the whole thing. >> Really? Did people pass that? >> Wow. Are we Is this when we start talking about results? >> I know. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve got to get there eventually. Um, yes. Let’s talk about the results. Um, we’ll circle back on sobriety, whether or not people pass the sobriety test. I’m interested.

(20:36) Out of 39 people 8 weeks, who’s how many people’s depression got better? pretty much everyone by a lot. >> Wow. What What was the measure? >> We had several measures because I wanted to, you know, compare our results to the results of um University College London. They you they use the quids, so we used the quids.

(20:58) I wanted to compare to uh other colleagues, John’s Hopkins team, they used the PHQ, so we used the PHQ. We used uh I want to say five different measures of uh depression. A couple of them were just to uh replicate our previous findings from surveys and the others were to uh compare to other research groups. >> What does that look like if we translate the the science or like the quantitative version of a lot? What does that look like in terms of people’s behavior or their their lived experience? Like did you have um participants who were so

(21:31) depressed they weren’t leaving the house before they came into your trial and then after the trial aside from leaving the house once a week to take psilocybin with you? So yeah, there was for sure I’m thinking of one person who could not get out of bed before the trial and then um yeah, and then I feel like the trial completely turned them around.

(21:51) So for one of one of the measures of depression we used was the skid which is the structured clinical interview for DSM5. It basically has it reviews all the symptoms of in our case depression. uh you just kind of go through the with through it through the particip with a participant through it, sorry. Um and you assess them and people need at least five out of nine symptoms to uh qualify as having depression.

(22:22) And so, you know, everyone had at least five when they started. Um and on average people went down by five symptoms and by the end of the trial. Yeah. So people who started super severe were just below threshold on average and people who started just above threshold were completely like zero symptoms by the end on average. >> How many of these people were already getting some kind of treatment outside of SSRIs? I’m guess I’m guessing that the people that were on SSRIs had to stop them for the trial.

(22:56) >> In our case, we told people, hey, you want to participate, you can’t be on SSRIs and you can’t start SSRIs. You can’t be in therapy and you can’t start therapy. If you’re exercising, you have to continue exercising as much as you are. If you’re meditating, you got to continue meditating as much as you are.

(23:10) You can’t start any of these things. And we wanted to keep everything super consistent because I don’t know what the effect of micro doing is if at all, but it’s probably tiny. Whereas exercising, you’re gonna get a large effect from that. Therapy, you’re going to get a large effect. So, we were very very serious about people kind of sticking to their routines and not changing anything.

(23:34) >> At the end when everyone’s measures, sorry, but everyone’s measures of depression went down as in their depression got better, but you had also tried your best to make sure that all the participants didn’t change anything else in their life. what are the findings that you can confidently speak to about what psychedelics do and like what other part of the design might have also contributed.

(23:58) >> So, it’s hard to say. I I I feel like I I wasn’t explicit about this and I don’t want anyone to be misled by what I said uh up until now. So, everyone got way better. everyone meaning regardless of whether they were in the micro doing group like both groups got way better and there was almost no difference between the two groups.

(24:18) It was kind of like the placebo response was incredibly large. I trained we trained the staff to be um professional and pleasant but kind of without crossing into being friendly and of course not being um unpleasant. Uh so we tried to control for other variables but I think that um just participating in a clinical trial often has a significant placebo response and in this case the I think the most important thing we learned is wow people are very hopeful about micro doing like extremely hopeful >> but where do you think that comes from

(24:52) >> the first paper from this uh study is currently under review with nature and there I refer to what my colleague desani called the pollen effect where just like it it feels like so >> as in micropolen >> yeah like I don’t want the the first word that came uh to my mind was contamination but that’s feels too harsh or like the negative there’s a negative subtext to that I don’t I don’t mean it negatively it’s just like this is now part of our culture everyone’s talking about it everyone’s so hopeful about it

(25:25) and it has created a situation where people come into these studies and their placebo responses are charge because they’ve read about it, they’ve heard about it, and they know that this is it. This is going to change their lives. >> Yeah. I mean, that comes back to what we were saying before about the media, the media’s reflection on um psychedelics is really changing the the cultural attitude and also potentially changing the results of science.

(25:50) Um but also% >> Yeah. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Um uh before I just say congratulations on having the paper in review for Nature. That’s huge. It’s like um you know like a top tier journal journal and so that’s yeah that’s incredible. Um okay reflections. So how many uh how many years now have you been analyzing the data for? >> We collected data between July and December 2023 and then ran out of funds and then raised funds for six more months and then ran it again July to December 2024. So you know Another

(26:29) another circumstantial thing that I was worried about was oh what if people have seasonal depress seasonal effect of depression. So >> yeah or co related >> but yeah I was glad that at least we got to run people in the same time of the year. So at least that’s another uh I guess confound that we didn’t have to worry about.

(26:49) >> So but overall we ran the trial for two years now. I feel like I did you and probably everyone else who’s who will listen or view this a disservice by not adequately describing the results. Can I quickly just describe them >> please? Yeah. Yeah. >> So, we didn’t find any difference between um people in the micro doing group and the non-micro doing group on any of the depression scales.

(27:12) everyone improved by a ton um except for one scale called the dysfunctional attitude scale which measures um kind of cognitive tendencies towards depression. So, it has things like uh if I fail partly, it’s as bad as failing completely, which if you or anyone else believes that, it’s not true. Uh don’t believe that. >> But if you do believe it, you’re more likely to be depressed.

(27:36) And we found that people in the uh micro doing first group by the end of the study, they were significantly lower on that. Now, that might be a spirious finding. It might just be by happen stance, a statistical artifact, but it might be for real. Um, and the reason that I have a little bit of confidence about it is because we already had the exact same finding in a previous survey that we ran.

(28:01) So, it might be that um, micro doing only helps kind of, you know, the mental flexibility about certain attitudes, but it doesn’t help any of the other symptoms of depression. We also tested a bunch of other things. Uh, I think the only thing that that’s worth mentioning and I think will not be surprising is we also measured um the feeling of connectedness that people felt.

(28:22) um to themselves, to their uh families, partners, whatever society and people in the micro doing group were also higher on that which makes sense because kind of this is part of the discourse about psychedelics increasing a sense of connectedness. So originally when we decided to include the sustained attention tasks, it was because people who micro do described uh that their focus is better.

(28:48) And initially when we designed the study, we thought that we’d we’d see uh that people’s performance on these tasks was better when they were micro doing. But then I was like no way no way. I think we should our hypothesis should be that they just won’t do any worse. Um and that is what we found. There is no difference in performance between uh people in the microsing and the non-micro doing group.

(29:10) So that suggests and that is also related to sobriety where everyone was sober basically everyone. uh three people failed sobriety tests or sorry there were three failures in sobriety tests. One of them was in the placebo group. So [laughter] >> yeah. So my takeaway is this dose at least this dose um is safe.

(29:33) Uh it is probably uh not intoxicating in the sense that people are they can focus on something super boring for 20 minutes and um they are at least they would be cons considered legally sober like good to drive. >> Cool. So any sort of reflections um now that it’s been a few years like what are your kind of major reflections after having done that that clinical trial? >> Wow, great question.

(29:59) Um, I think the most important one is never do it again. Never. I I advise anyone who’s listening, if you are a graduate student and you’re telling yourself, I’m smart. I’m competent. I I’ve been reasonably successful in other things so far, and if I just apply myself, I can run my own clinical trial. Don’t do it. >> Oh, really? >> Yeah.

(30:19) Yeah. This has shaved years off my life, and it was extremely stressful. And I mean I learned a ton and I think that uh like I am I am in a good place now and I’m like you know I’m giving interviews to excellent podcasts so I’m happy about that. Uh but uh but it was an unbelievable lift and um I wouldn’t do it again. >> So let’s talk about your work as a therapist.

(30:46) What are the things that you are seeing in your clinic? like what are some of the patterns? >> I’m encountering myself every day and >> and it’s been amazing. I feel like this is this is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made to become a therapist. I’ve learned so much about what it’s like to be human, what it’s like to be me.

(31:05) Um, and I get so much out of working with people directly and yeah, just helping them be. >> What do you think is going on there? Because it does feel like there is a sort of like explosion of ADHD. And that’s not to say that it wasn’t a thing beforehand um and that now it’s just we have better diagnostic tools or maybe because we have so much um our lifestyles are so dopamineergic that’s also an there’s an effect there.

(31:29) What do you think in your clinical um opinion is going on with people’s attention? >> Yeah, I think that for sure a big part of it is the culture. Uh I think our brains are not have not evolved to manage this kind of flow of information uh like quantity or quality. Um and there are just so many distractions all the time. I have two hats.

(31:52) Well, at least two hats. The scientist hat I can like it’s it’s I can talk about things one way. Therapist hat is like I don’t know like I have feelings. I have intuitions. It’s a craft. Uh, and so I feel like this kind of question I would feel way more comfortable answering if I had research to back it up.

(32:12) But based on, you know, the I don’t even know how many however many clients I’ve seen, I’m like, I don’t know, this is a very small sample and it’s a sample of convenience and I would be cautious about inferring too confidently from this sample. >> Well, now that you’ve laid down that disclaimer, I’m just interested in your opinion and your reflection as a human working with other humans.

(32:32) Like what do you think is going on at the moment? And it feels like a lot of people are struggling and not just with attention but also um like struggling with with um connection, struggling with meaning, struggling with so much. >> Sure. That’s something that I’m way more comfortable talking about because I wrote a couple of academic papers about that.

(32:50) >> Okay. All right. >> Well, let’s do that then. >> Yeah. Uh I mean, no, I’m I’m I’m super happy to talk about other stuff, too. just like the I think the depth of um responses you’ll get from me is different depending on whether I’m drawing on the academic pool of knowledge or my feelings. >> Okay.

(33:06) Well, I mean both are welcome here. Academic knowledge and feelings. So, whatever comes whatever whatever comes I mean it it is interesting doing this podcast like I talk to a lot of scientists just as like a bit of context for why the podcast is the way it is. Um I talk to a lot of scientists. I pref prefer people with um some kind of uh like an opinion or a belief system that is grounded in some sort of evidence.

(33:29) They don’t necessarily have to be a PhD holder, but they can also be they can be someone with a body of work. There’s so so many opinions out there and there’s so like everybody has their their reflections on why life works the way it works. And I had found like in interviewing people on the podcast um about what do you think? What do you what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? I was getting a lot of like opinions that weren’t grounded in any um evidence and were just super super subjective and super emotional.

(33:55) And so that’s why I switched it up and started interviewing scientists. But then when I found um when I when I got into this sort of line of of attracting guests, I found that like scientists were often really apprehensive to give me their emotional and subjective opinions because they were like, “But that’s not what the data says.

(34:13) “ and like you know um there’s been times when I’ve pre-ined scientists and then they’ve been like hey I don’t think I can come on your show because you’re asking too many personal questions. So it’s like it’s this hard balance of being like you know you’re I want to hear about your research but I also want to hear about your mearch as well.

(34:31) >> Nice came you brought that right back around. I love it. >> Full circle. Um yeah. So anyway, but back to I mean I guess this is probably a good segue then really into your personal story. Um you mentioned before we turned the mics on that it was underwhelming and and that your personal story like might not be that exciting but I don’t believe that.

(34:53) So tell me how did you get into psychology and why psychedelics? How did we get here? >> Actually I just want to say I have many opinions about the meaning crisis. Uh so we can also talk about that. >> Yeah. Yeah. We can circle back to that with more context for your your personal life. >> Sure.

(35:12) Um, so I started so I had my first exposure to mindfulness meditation was when I was uh 19. It it changed my life completely. That was kind of I think the way a lot of people that use psychedelics talk about psychedelics. That’s what it was for me. I it gave me perspective. I I realized how much I don’t know and how much you know good there is in the world.

(35:33) Um, so that absolutely shook me. And then I I was I’m Israeli. I was in Israel. Shortly after that, I was drafted to the Israeli military and served for three years. And that was a very bad fit. Um, it was very upsetting. Yeah. So I think um I think that was really really bad for me. I was very depressed as a soldier.

(35:55) Um and then uh yeah and then I I had the good fortune to be able to leave Israel and move to Canada. And then I ever since my experience with mindfulness I kind of so you have I had the subjective experience of really feeling kind of the vibrations in my body and really feeling how it’s made out of particles.

(36:13) Um but also this is kind of what’s described in the poly canon in the Buddhist writings. And I was like yeah I want to study physics and I want to further explore kind of the nature of reality and see what what’s really there. And boy did I bomb. I sucked at physics. I was so bad. >> It’s really hard.

(36:32) It’s a hard discipline of science. >> It’s not for everyone. Um, so yeah. >> Was it the the math? Was it the math aspect? Because I’ve also tried to learn physics and I’ve tried to learn it without math and it just it doesn’t work. >> So it was the math. So actually the physics course that I was taking, the first year physics course was okay.

(36:49) Uh like I was, you know, barely passing which is decent. Um, but the math course I had to take the like the mathemat math for mathematicians and I was just sitting there being like I don’t understand why we’re proving stuff about the circle and I would get you know like 10 or 20% on my assignments. Um, [laughter] so it very quickly became evident that I am not going to make it.

(37:12) And then kind of people around me, my friends and family were like you’re good with people, maybe you should study psychology. And I kind of shrugged and did that. Um, and psychology is super easy. I just kind of kept it up and I was really into science. As of my second year of undergrad, I started doing research initially about um facial expressions because that’s kind of what was available.

(37:34) Um it was interesting enough. That was around the time that I heard about the replication crisis. Do you know about the replication crisis? >> No. Is this to do with science? >> Yes. Oh, I’m so happy. This is so important. This is I if if listeners get to this part, this part is the most important part of the podcast. >> Um so I’m super stoked.

(37:55) Um so the idea is that you know science um discovers fundamental rules of reality. So if I drop a ball from a meter above the ground, it takes it’ll take it a certain amount of time. If you drop the same ball a meter above the ground, it’ll take your ball the same amount of time to hit the ground as my ball, right? Because that’s just gravity.

(38:15) >> That’s physics. >> Exactly. And so we assume that uh life sciences and psychology are also sciences because you test things and you have all these numbers and then you should be able to replicate other people’s findings, right? >> In fact, it should be kind of part of the work should be that you by definition run replications.

(38:39) Otherwise, how do you know if someone just found something because it was a fluke? in psychology for decades just no one replicated because there was no incentive to replicate because your paper would only get published if it was novel. Um and so no one was replicating and then in 2011 um a few very influential psychologists published a paper where they uh tried to replicate a hundred of the most canonical psychology studies and they were able to rep fully replicate only 30 something.

(39:06) So the vast majority didn’t replicate. A lot of the stuff that we thought we knew about psychology was probably nonsense. Probably a fluke. >> Just just just so I can orient myself. Are we talking about the replication crisis in um in psychology or across all disciplines of science? >> So it’s primarily an issue it was well still is primarily an issue in psychology and life sciences.

(39:30) It is a little bit of an issue in harder sciences but less so. >> Okay. Right. Because I I know that physics is also going through a massive rebrand at the moment. They think spacetime doesn’t exist and like that that there’s you know way more to the the way the universe works than Newtonian physics. But um yeah interesting that this is also a thing in the realm of well not interesting it makes sense that this is a thing in the realm of of people’s minds and behavior.

(39:58) If if science is working then there will be paradigm shifts where everything we thought we knew we don’t know and it’s like everything is different. This is not it. This is me doing [ __ ] work and you testing it and finding that I did [ __ ] work. >> Oh okay. So it’s not even to do with the fact that our knowledge is being updated.

(40:15) It’s to do with the fact that like scientists were lazy. >> Yes. They were cutting corners because the incentive was not to do good work. It was to do work that gets published. >> I love this cuz now we’re gossiping a little bit. So tell me more. >> Sure. So, so yeah, so these guys um published this paper. Uh it absolutely breaks everything we thought we knew about how we’re supposed to do things.

(40:40) And so I hear about it a couple years later when I start graduate school. And by that point, uh these folks, um this this effort was led by led by I think Brian Yosk and some other people, some very influential psychologists. They uh suggested that one way to solve this at least moving forward is a we need to replicate each other’s work.

(41:02) That should be part of what people do. And B, we need to pre-register our hypothesis, which seems trivial. Like you need to decide what you’re going to do before you do it, right? It’s like if you if you’re going to build a house, first you draw up the plans and then you know which materials you need and those are the materials you buy.

(41:20) Because if you do it the other way around, you’re just going to end up with either too much or too little. You’re going to be missing pieces. I start grad school and I say to my supervisor, “Hey, I’m happy to do the work that we discussed. We have to pre-register it because that’s how science moves forward.” And she was old guard and she didn’t know what it was about.

(41:40) And she was like, “No, people are going to if I pre-register it, people are going to steal my ideas and I don’t want to do this.” And I was like, “Look, I don’t think I can work with you.” Uh, >> damn, good for you. >> Thank you. Yeah, I was pretty proud of that. It was very risky. Um, and then I found another supervisor and yeah, and that’s when I started working more specifically on mindfulness and mind wandering.

(42:04) Now, I just want to uh before I continue on that thread, I just want to say I would you agree now that I’ve explained uh pre-registration, would you agree that it is important to do? >> Yeah, I mean from from my perspective, it feels like you’re it’s like an honesty thing. It’s like this is what we this is what we think might happen.

(42:20) This is what we’re trying to prove. And so if you end up proving that or disproving that, the person that’s reading your research can um sort of see the the chain of events rather than you being >> we but I do just want to interject with a thing here because this is something that I’ve heard before and thought, huh, that’s an interesting concept.

(42:40) Um that with doing science like some scientists will are passionate about the fact that science should be done without a hypothesis and that um science you know people should be given money. Good scientists, people with rigorous um uh first principles thinking should say this is an area that I want to research and funding should be given to do research in that area and then they should just be like and this is what we’ve discovered without kind of giving too many guard rails or like creating too much of a container around the

(43:15) exploration because that’s where more novel ideas might come from. This is something that I have heard other scientists be proponents for. So, I’m wondering like what are what your um thoughts are on that and like what the difference between what you’re saying about pre-register pre-registration is and then kind of like what I’m talking about.

(43:31) >> No one ever approaches anything without some preconceived notion, some hypothesis. You don’t start walking without assuming that your next leg is going to catch you. Um so I don’t believe anyone who says, “Oh, you know, we should study psychedelics just to see what happens.” But like no, what do you think is going to happen? What question are you going to ask? So that that’s one way to think about it.

(43:53) Now that being said, I agree that there’s room for exploratory research uh for stuff where you’re like, let’s just see uh or you know, let me ask some open questions and see what people say. Absolutely. I in fact I advocate for that especially in psychedelics because so much of what people experience and what what might be happening is stuff that we can’t capture in quantitative methods.

(44:18) So we should be asking open questions 100%. Um, and I’m not saying we should even pre-register everything before we do it. And that’s that shouldn’t be our prison. All I’m saying is I have a particular plan and I need to follow that plan. That means that I need to report those analyses after the fact and I need to be honest. Here’s what I planned. Here’s what happened.

(44:38) I can still do exploratory stuff, but I need to be explicit. I didn’t really plan on doing this, so you should believe this a little bit less or you shouldn’t be too confident about this because this is something that I came up with after the fact. >> We you asked me before, would I agree if um that the pre-registration is important? And I answered and I said yes.

(44:59) Uh I think that it’s good for the people that are consuming the research to know what your intentions were and then what you found and to kind of like infer based on the difference or no difference there. Um, >> yes. Transparency and accountability. >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where were you going with that question? Where were you going to take this? >> Okay.

(45:16) So, you tell me what what do you think? How common is this in psychedelics? >> Man, I just like because a part of me wants to be like that’s this is what everyone does because people that are are um are passionate about psychedelic research are um passionate about like the truth. They’re in search of the truth.

(45:32) I mean, because that’s also why people take psychedelics. Um so, I’m going to say 60 to 80%. at least in micro doing um it’s me and one other team. Uh in the bigger psychedelic literature I’m going to say probably less than 10%. Um and I think the new guard like I many of the new graduate students are doing it and I love them for it.

(45:57) Um but I think yeah I think most of the people who have published about psychedelics research in the last 20 years the vast majority did not do this and I think that that’s part of the reason why their research is unreliable >> and so is this because of the competition like what your initial supervisor um had said pe people are worried that other people steal their ideas >> there’s no incentive to do it why add another step I mean I in my opinion and in my experience pre-registering actually makes your life way easier because it forces you to think things

(46:26) through before you have all your data and then you can work out some of the kinks and you can prepare for what’s going to happen. It’s different to say, you know, here’s what I planned for here. Here are my pre-register hypothesis and all this other stuff. It’s exploratory and I don’t know about that. it.

(46:45) What people normally do is they just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and then they report that as if they hypothesize that this would happen anyway. >> Okay. So, what does that mean for the layman’s, for the non-PhD holders, for the people that just like to know that science is out there? What does that mean? There’s a great uh story about um how you know you you you’re somewhere rural in on whatever continent you are and you walk by a barn and on the side of the barn there are a bunch of bullet holes and around each and each bullet is

(47:17) at the dead center of a bullseye. You see the farmer sitting right next to the barn and you say, “Wow, you’re an amazing shot. How how do you do it?” And the farmer tells you, “Well, I shoot first and then I draw the bullseye around it. Yeah. Okay. So, even less like all right, just just to take this one step further, even less of a metaphorical answer to that question, like what does this what does this actually mean? Like what are the implications for what we think we know about the nature of the universe? >> Like I don’t want to, you know,

(47:48) denigrate everyone and say don’t believe any of what anyone does. I think science is a game of confidence. And so, [clears throat] you know, we’re like we’re trying to look into, sorry, this is another metaphor, but here we are. Uh, we’re trying to look into a dark room through a keyhole and different people have slightly different perspectives.

(48:08) They’re running different studies. So, we get a little bit of um of kind of different perspectives and different people reporting the same finding, increasingly over time, we can be confident about what’s in this dark room. But if people are not pre-registering, then I don’t know, like maybe they they’re looking through the keyhole through a mirror or like a funhouse mirror or I don’t know what they’re doing and they didn’t plan on even being there and they didn’t take notes properly.

(48:39) So I think the I and unfortunately I don’t have like a super simple way to describe this except for our confidence should be lower about all these converging findings than what it could be if the science were rigorous. >> How does that translate to what we think we know about psychedelics as they potentially move into more of a wide adoption in like the treatment of mental health disorders? So, if I were a regulator, I would say I don’t believe any of this because you guys were doing sloppy work.

(49:14) Um, so, so if I were a regulator, I would require more rigorous evidence, >> I guess. Well, I guess what I was like going where I was going with that was like, you know, everyone’s so excited about psychedelic assisted therapy. I know we’re talking about psyched psychological sciences here in terms of the replication crisis, but just because your um research background is in psychedelics, I’m trying to connect the dots.

(49:34) like what does does this mean that we should be um apprehensively optimistic about what um things like psychedelics can do for as as a replacement or another option for treating dis mental health conditions? >> Yes, the short answer is yes. A more quantitative way to think about this is so I let me give you my own example. So when I started studying micro doing I was like 70% confident that micro doing helps depression.

(50:06) As I uncover more data in surveys I was like oh this seems very consistent. Everyone’s reporting this people in the micro doing group are they have less depression. I’m going to bump it up to maybe 80%. And then I run my clinical trial and the results are mixed and it seems like maybe there’s actually no effect at all on depression, but maybe there’s that dysfunctional attitudes finding.

(50:27) So I’m like maybe maybe like 55 or 60%. So I’m I’m it’s not high. But this is all because all of my research was pre-registered. If this research were not pre-registered, I would drop it at all of it by a factor of maybe 20%, maybe 30%. Mhm. That’s a big that that seems like a lot. >> If it drops between 50%, it doesn’t mean that I am confident that it doesn’t work.

(50:52) It means that I am really not confident that it does work. >> I know that you’re going to answer pre-register your hypothesis to this, but like outside of that that one sort of um step in science that is super important, like how how are we like ever supposed to know anything? Or is the whole point that we’re actually just not supposed to know? The way to know things is to be rigorous, to be consistent, transparent, um to be collaborative, I think.

(51:18) So, like if I were if if I could give advice to your listeners, the the first thing you need to be looking at if you’re reading original research, check to see if they pre-registered. That should be the first dead giveaway. And then check to see if people are willing to work with other people, if they’re willing to share their data.

(51:34) I also see the downside of that which is that the the the need for certainty can drive the downstream effect is it drives things like this you know like a bad science and like these ideas around like how things should be and like again I’m just kind of like thinking out loud because this is something I’ve been working on in my own life of like why what you know why what is the importance of being certain about things and And how do I not live as if I need to be so certain about all things? And if I don’t live like that, what can that open up?

(52:11) Are you kind of picking up what I’m putting down? I guess as a psychologist as well, maybe this is something that you deal with with your your clients, like the fear of uncertainty and like how that manifests behaviorally and then what that looks like when when we’re all doing that as a as a population. >> Yeah, I think it’s a really human kind of need.

(52:30) uh it it makes sense and I think people pursue uh certainty with varying degrees of rigor. I I should like to hope that with age uh we become a little bit softer about it. Um at least it has been my experience. I don’t know if it’s using psychedelics. I think a big part of it for me has been becoming a therapist and realizing that I don’t know [ __ ] uh and I like the best I can do is be with someone and try to understand them and and work with them on them understanding their own thing.

(53:06) Um so I think this uh this epistemic humility has served me super super well and I remember being a young scientist and being like we’re going to figure this out. We will solve this problem and now I’m like that is hilarious. there’s no way we’re like and we it’s not necessary. Um we don’t need to solve problems.

(53:26) We just need to know enough. So yes, I think there’s a lot to always there’s always more to learn, but there’s always a requirement that we continue to move despite not knowing everything we need to know. Um so yeah, so I think there’s uh specifically in psychology there’s this is referred to as the need for closure. There’s a specific scale that you can measure people’s need for closure.

(53:47) uh how much they need to know. Uh but I think that and I think you kind of you were alluding to something that um that I think is really happening that we want to know what’s going on and that used to be provided by you know God or our tribe or our family or you know some other external structure and we have jettisoned all of that kind of and maybe we threw out the baby with a bath water.

(54:14) And so what a lot of people are doing now is kind of finding new alternative solutions or more commonly returning to the old solutions even though they don’t fit anymore. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. there’s a big resurgence of people um adopting uh Abrahamic religions particularly in my age group and um it’s been an interesting one to observe such a fragile balance between wanting to yeah evolve and know more and then also dealing with the inevitable uncertainty that is like our cross to bear as sentient beings. I’m interested to know

(54:49) if you have a spiritual practice. I have seen you in other interviews on YouTube uh holding rosary beads and I can hear that you’ve been doing >> Yeah. >> Sorry, I didn’t realize. [laughter] Sorry about that. [gasps] >> I was going to say something about it, but then I also thought we’ll get to a question um around that.

(55:04) You’ve mentioned mindfulness before, so I’m interested. What is your spiritual practice? >> I have none. I am an atheist. >> Okay. What is your spiritual belief? >> I What does that mean? >> I don’t know. I guess you could define it however you wanted to answer the question. >> I am open to whatever. Um I also know that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

(55:30) So I don’t think that anything that I would see would convince me that there is a god in the sense of like an Abrahamic God. I believe that there could be multi-dimensional beings out there. I believe that there are aliens that are they probably more advanced than we could ever imagine. Um, but the God God, nothing would ever convince me.

(55:53) >> And I mean, we’ve been edging towards this. This is a big part of what the podcast covers is your beliefs around consciousness. This idea that we have um an awareness of our existence and uh subjective experience that that like potentially no other animals or plants have. What what are your views as a scientist, as a therapist around consciousness? >> Um, it’s funny.

(56:18) You asked me before we started recording if I feel comfortable talking about this. I was like, “Yeah, of course.” And now I’m like, “Oh, no.” But I know nothing. [laughter] Uh, I I was I I had the good fortune I was just at a conference in the Netherlands, ICPR, and I had the absolute delight to see a debate between a few people that I absolutely admire that know way more than I do about this. Uh, Anil Seth.

(56:41) >> Oh, yeah. >> Kristoff [ __ ] and um, Bernardo Cash. >> Wow, that would have been incredible. Was that recording? >> It was so good. Yeah, I think so. It was so good. They were so good together. >> Oh my god. And Neil and Castra would be like they just could not disagree more on their theories of consciousness.

(57:02) That would have been so interesting. >> And Kristoff was also he was um remote so there was a slight delay and he was so funny. They were all so funny. It was so great. I got so much out of it. So yes, you know, so there’s these giants uh that I just saw speak to this and I’m a little bit hesitant because I I know that I’m just like I’m just a guy that ran a trial on micro doing.

(57:27) So with that I can I can say a little bit but I’m just so I am I think mostly a physicalist. So I think maybe an one way to think about this is um one of the questions to this panel was um should we believe that the entities that are encountered under the influence of psychedelics are real? >> It’s a good question. >> Yeah.

(57:52) And surprisingly I think the consensus between all three was no. And I’m like yeah of course not. This is just your brain firing. And so I don’t mean this in the sense that I know for a fact that these are not real things. I mean this in the sense that I don’t see it being useful to pursue that avenue. Um there there’s you know we only have so much time alive and there’s only so many resources and I think it would be it would serve us way better to see if if we want like how psychedelic can help people live better lives or you know change legislation change our culture so

(58:25) that people have all the things that they need so that they don’t even need to use psychedelics. I connected with what Anil Seth was saying. He’s like he’s a a pragmatist physicalist is like maybe there’s other stuff going on, but for the purposes of this life that I have right now and knowing what I know now, I want to pursue the stuff that is more most likely to yield results that are kind of that would help people.

(58:45) I’m not sure if anyone on the panel would say this, but like that those entities actually have really uh important messages for us, whether or not that’s because they are from the depths of our own psyche or whether they are independent of our perception. Um, but that they might have messages for how how we can like live better and and make these changes so that humanity moves forward before it obliterates itself.

(59:08) >> Sure, I’d be open to that. But then I would say, okay, so if there is a truth there, then you can share the truth. If but if you need resources to further study this then yeah come up with a research proposal and let’s talk about this but I I’ve not heard anyone like and it’s not it doesn’t mean that those people don’t exist.

(59:27) I just have not heard anyone say there is veracity to these subjective experiences and we need to do X and Y uh to study it further. >> Yeah. I mean I’ve had Yeah. Yeah. I I see what see you’re saying. I had a guy on the podcast recently. It hasn’t been published yet, but it may have already been published by the time your episode comes out.

(59:48) His name was Alexander Biner, and he was part of the um clinical trials for DMTX um back like a few years ago now. So, he they in injected him with um with DMT for 40 minutes straight, so continuous administration. And then he went into this this realm and like experienced these entities, came back from it and wrote an entire book that very much was about the meaning crisis and like all these conflating issues that are creating a really um instable kind of like like a instable kind of like psychological environment for humans to thrive thrive in. Um, and he

(1:00:24) also talks a lot about like the internet and how that’s really like changed the way we think. And um, yeah, I thought that was interesting. I mean, he was just one guy and it wasn’t like all six of the people involved in the trial did the DMT experience with the intention like the pre pre-registered intention of we’re all going to come back from this, write books, and then use them to advise governments on policy.

(1:00:50) But I guess like that’s just one way that maybe studying these entities could be beneficial. >> I’m open to that. My but my uh instinct is like we already know what we need to do, right? We can’t have trillionaires. We need everyone to have a place to live and food and uh something that they like to do that makes them feel like they’re contributing to society.

(1:01:16) and they need to have education and kind of like pretty basic stuff. I I don’t need to meet a DMT entity to know this stuff. >> That’s true. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I hear what you’re saying. So, do you agree more with like what anal Seth’s approach to consciousness is that it is derived from brain activity? >> I think he he said something about meat brains, right? Only meat can think.

(1:01:37) I’m like, I don’t know about that. I think I’m I’m more sympathetic to well yeah to Kristoff Caul as like his um information theory thing. I think that it doesn’t make sense that we are the only conscious beings and I don’t exactly know what consciousness is, but like I have two dogs. Uh I have a cat and I’m fairly confident that they have consciousness.

(1:02:03) it it’s different from ours. And um and so I think it is it’s kind of weird to think that we are special. Like we have a couple of uh adaptations that have made us completely take over this planet in a potentially cancerous way. Um but I I don’t believe that we are the only ones with internal worlds and motivations and desires.

(1:02:29) Um, and I think in fact I think that this kind of uh human exceptionalism is potentially dangerous because we are not special. We’re just naked apes running around pretending to be special. >> Hairless apes, I guess. >> What do you think about that? >> Um, I don’t know. Um, yeah. I I don’t know.

(1:02:52) You’re the first podcast guest to actually ask me what I think of consciousness. Um, and the I I just I think that there is uh something else going on. Like I I think that humans have at least like the human that we know now in this in this bracket of time. It its potential is like completely squandered by the c culture that we live in.

(1:03:23) And I guess my um like very basic opinion of that is that it gets more and more squandered the more and more we rely on technology. And I guess like again downstream from that I think that human beings have I I think we all have psychic potentials and we we all have psychic potential but the level of um of of constant stimulation and like constant um information overload that is our modern lives is getting in the way of us being able to experience that.

(1:04:00) And if more of us experienced that um and we were able to tap into those capacities and that what I mean by that is that like yeah like that that that our brains are receivers in some way of a of a greater stream of of consciousness. And if we were able to tap more into that then we would have a better idea of what consciousness might be.

(1:04:25) But because a lot of the people that are studying consciousness at least in the scientific realms are not from traditions where you were trying to um further embody and cultivate your psychic abilities. We have lots of ideas like Anil says around um you know materialism and and physicalism. And I think that yeah I I I don’t think that you’re you are entirely responsible for your own subjective experience in that way.

(1:04:56) I think that kind of I more agree with Bernard Bernardo Castrop’s idea that there is a stream of water and then there’s tiny um what does he say whirlpools and like you are the whirlpool. Consciousness is the water. So, you are of consciousness or you I guess I don’t know if you are of consciousness or if you are um a receiving a receiver for consciousness.

(1:05:22) Um and this is not to say that I don’t think the brain is freaking incredible at what it does. Whether that is like the likes of Anil Seth say the the primary produ producer of consciousness or whether it is the thing that um interprets whatever else is out there and then gives us our subject subjective experience.

(1:05:45) Either way like that’s an incredible feat along with our nervous system and our and our fascial system and all the other bits and pieces. So, that was a very long- winded way of me saying that I am like more of a pans psychist, but I’m just not sure exactly what kind of pansychist I am. >> Yeah, I think that was a very coherent and clear explanation of that.

(1:06:10) I guess I am curious if if I might just ask one quick follow-up question. Uh so where so I guess in this cosmology in this metaphysical theory um do so are humans special or unique in that sense or are there other werepools that are maybe smaller or different shapes for other species? >> I mean I think I don’t think humans are special. I think they’re specific.

(1:06:36) Kind of like what you were saying about um you know, you definitely think that your cat and your two dogs have subjective experience. I think that I don’t necessarily think that a rock has subjective experience. And also I guess the other thing that we should we should define here is that when we talk about experience um even for those who believe that a rock has subjective experience.

(1:07:01) I’m they’re not say this philosophers are not saying that the rock has the range of emotions that you have as a human. The rock experiences depression. The rock experiences anxiety. The rock experiences decision paralysis. It’s not that. It’s like that the rock has awareness. And I think this is what really goes wrong when we try to or or what makes conversations about consciousness really challenging is that the definitions are so loose and so dependent on what discipline of science you come from. And so therefore, and

(1:07:30) even if you’re a consumer and not a scientist like I am of research about this stuff, it it’s really hard to separate the idea of awareness from the idea of um or the idea of awareness and subjective experience from the idea of having emotions. And so it’s much harder to to think of um it’s much harder to to to think of the fact that consciousness might be outside of the body rather than an internal production of of the body’s uh complex mechanisms when you’re trying to conceive of the fact that your dog might

(1:08:06) wake up in the morning and think hm what am I going to do with myself today and then that’s your barometer for what consciousness is. I don’t I I I have to because I’m also an extremely emotional person. Like my entire experience is is emotion. Um and so I really have to work hard to separate those things to try and conceive of of my idea of what conscious consciousness is.

(1:08:29) Um but yeah, I guess to get back to your question, I think that humans are specific, but I don’t think that they are special. And I think that plants have um I think plants and I think animals um have a consciousness that is that is different from us and it doesn’t exist on a spectrum that is like low to high.

(1:08:49) It’s just a spectrum of difference. >> Yeah. And I I’m with you. I also don’t know and I’m okay with that. I’m like I think it’s great that we have differing opinions and different approaches to this. Um, yeah. And I don’t think that we’ll reach any kind of resolution, and that’s okay, too. I think for me, it’s more like this is I don’t mean to um to downplay the importance of this conversation, but I’m like, as long as people end up being cool um and good to each other, it it matters less to me what they think metaphysically.

(1:09:23) >> I agree. I I I think that these kinds of philosophical thought experiments can help with that though, which is why I I’m interested in in this because I think it takes you outside of your own um narcissistic experience and and maybe helps you like think more broadly about the nature of things and then therefore you become more kind and cool.

(1:09:46) >> I love it. I think this is this you could have said the exact same thing about psychedelics, right? And I think just psychedelics are the kind of thing and similarly these conversations can either act to deflate our egos and do exactly what you just said or they can inflate our egos and make us be like no I’m special. I’m different.

(1:10:04) You don’t I like in the case of psychology threat it’s like oh I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. >> You could never. >> Yeah. And it Yeah. Exactly. I’ve taken so much DMT. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think >> I had a guy on the podcast uh uh recently and he was like this whole competitive ego deathing thing is like Yeah, it’s got to stop.

(1:10:26) Well, he didn’t I’m I say that, but he he’s he had thought about it enough to give it a name. That whole like I’ve done all this DMT in there and therefore I am like more knowledgeable in the nature of existence. And he called it competitive ego deathing, which I love. Anyway, you did it. We did like this has been a incredibly long conversation that you said to me before we switched the mics on you weren’t sure if you were going to last for and we’ve we’ve made it so >> you made it so easy. You made it fun.

(1:10:51) Thank you. >> Oh, thank you. My pleasure. Thank you so much for your time and wisdom and contribution to science. Uh before we wrap up, last two things. Any final reflections? Is there anything you want to say that we haven’t covered that you think is important for the discussion? And then where can people find you? Uh nothing more to add.

(1:11:11) I’m so glad that we got to talk about open science with a bit of uh detail. Normally [clears throat] this is something that I tack on at the end of interviews and I don’t know that anyone lasts until the end. So it’s great that you gave me this opportunity. So thank you for that. I think yeah that is just the most important thing at least to me.

(1:11:26) Like I’m just a guy who did a little bit of research. But if we can learn more about h what how to appreciate and how to assess research that’s amazing. Um, I am not super public. I guess I like I’m not really on social media. Uh, people can find me at uh I guess patranker.com. >> Okay, cool.

(1:11:47) I’ll include links to um your website in the show notes. And when is your article being published in nature? It’s under review at the moment. >> Yeah, I don’t know. Uh hopefully within weeks, but more likely within months. >> Okay. Well, if uh yeah, by the time hopefully by the time this episode is out, it’s been published and I’ll include a link to that.

(1:12:05) If not, you can send me any other links um to your work that are relevant. >> Sounds good. >> Thank you again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much.