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Feynman on institutional truth, a fiscal paper, and a psychedelic-policy tipping point
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3 min read
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125 docs
A focused list of three unusually concrete recommendations: Bill Gurley’s Feynman talk and primary-source guide, a model-driven Stanford paper on migration and public finances, and Michael Pollan’s book as a reported catalyst for psychedelic-policy interest.
The most compelling recommendation is Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s endorsement of Bill Gurley’s Searching for Feynman: he called it a “Great talk” and said it kept him “locked in.” The underlying All-In post identifies it as Gurley’s presentation and links a companion resource guide.
Recommended resources
Searching for Feynman
- Content type / creator: Video talk by Bill Gurley, presented at the All-In Summit.
- Link:All-In Summit video post · companion resource links.
- Recommended by: Patrick O’Shaughnessy, who found the talk compelling without giving away its destination.
- Key takeaway: The companion guide turns the talk into a primary-source syllabus: Richard Feynman’s “Appendix F — Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle,” his own account of the Rogers Commission, the commission’s full report, and the televised ice-water demonstration. Its governing principle is that “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
- Why it matters: This is more useful than a bare talk recommendation. It gives readers the original evidence and the institutional context needed to examine how uncomfortable technical facts are handled under organizational pressure.
Migration, Household Employment & Europe’s Public Finances
- Content type / creator: Research paper by Usama Polani, published in August 2026. The title is reflected in the Stanford SIEPR link Patrick Collison shared.
- Link:Stanford SIEPR paper.
- Recommended by: Patrick Collison, who called it an “excellent paper.”
- Key takeaway: The abstract argues that fiscal contribution depends on every adult’s employment and earnings, household composition, and national tax and welfare rules. It reports very low employment among female migrants from Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, often persisting into the second generation, while men from those countries are concentrated in low-paid work. Under the paper’s specified model, a male entrant with an economically inactive wife and two children needs entry pay between p68.6 and p80.3 on the national full-time pay distribution for the family to break even; even if the wife works at the calibrated pay, the man must still earn above median national pay.
- Why it matters: The paper is valuable precisely because it exposes the assumptions behind broad claims about migration and public finances. Its thresholds are model projections under stated employment, earnings, tax, welfare, and pension assumptions—not universal outcomes for every household.
How to Change Your Mind
- Content type / creator: Book by Michael Pollan. It is the external resource worth carrying forward from Tim Ferriss’s conversation with Tania de Jong about Australia’s medical-psychedelics campaign.
- Link:Episode discussion page.
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss, who described the book as having “really shifted the tectonic plates” of what was possible for psychedelics in the United States and elsewhere.
- Key takeaway: Ferriss’s point is about influence: he says a very high proportion of prominent philanthropists and supporters of psychedelics trace their interest back to the book as a tipping point.
- Why it matters: Read it as a movement-history recommendation—a way to understand how a public-facing book helped change the perceived policy frontier and mobilize support—rather than as a standalone account of the clinical evidence.
Feynman on institutional truth, a fiscal paper, and a psychedelic-policy tipping point
Research extraction
The supplied material does not identify the episode’s title or subject; it contains only a Spotify episode link. Because no episode description, subject, or explanation of Reed Hastings’s recommendation is provided, the page is insufficient to judge this as a substantive recommendation rather than a generic endorsement.
Research extraction
Direct answer: The Feynman primary-source recommendation is Richard P. Feynman’s “Appendix F — Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle,” hosted in the NASA History Archives. The same primary-sources entry also points readers to Feynman’s “Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington,” the complete Rogers Commission report, and the televised ice-water demonstration.
- Substantive lesson: The recommendation centers on Feynman’s principle that “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
- Materials behind the lesson: The linked account covers Feynman’s decision to join the commission, General Kutyna’s tip about the O-rings, the ice-water demonstration, Feynman’s fight to include Appendix F, and his explanation of NASA’s deterioration.
- Book-length companion:What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard P. Feynman (W.W. Norton, 1988) is described as Feynman’s own account of the Rogers Commission, including the demonstration, commission dynamics, and his fight to include Appendix F.
Research extraction
Title and author.Migration, Household Employment & Europe’s Public Finances, by Usama Polani. The source lists the publication date as August 2026.
Findings. The paper argues that migrant households’ fiscal contribution depends on every adult’s employment and earnings, alongside national tax and welfare rules. It reports that Europe increasingly receives migrants from Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa (CASAMENA), where female employment is extremely low; the authors call these “seclusion-origin” countries, while qualifying the proposed explanation—male honour norms tied to female seclusion—as a conclusion suggested by prior research.
Using harmonised Europe–North America data, the paper finds very low employment among female migrants from these countries, often persisting into the second generation, while men from the same countries are concentrated in low-paid work.
The authors replicate the UK Migration Advisory Committee’s fiscal model and report that its presumed positive fiscal effects are sensitive to relatively optimistic employment and earnings assumptions. They extend the analysis across the tax, welfare, and pension rules of Germany, Spain, France, and Britain using a common calibration based on the described employment profiles.
Substantive takeaway. Under the paper’s specified model scenarios, a male entrant with an economically inactive wife and two children needs entry pay between the 68.6th and 80.3rd percentiles of the national full-time pay distribution for the family to break even. Even if the wife works at the calibrated pay, the man must still earn above median national pay; below those levels, the specified family scenarios generate projected net fiscal costs. These are model projections under stated household, earnings, tax, welfare, and pension assumptions—not universal thresholds for every migrant household.
Tim Ferriss
Profile
- How to Change Your Mind — book by Michael Pollan. Tim Ferriss highlighted it as having “really shifted the tectonic plates” of what was possible for psychedelics in the US and elsewhere, saying that a very high percentage of prominent philanthropists and supporters trace their interest to it as a tipping point.
Patrick Collison
- Article: Patrick Collison called an Financial Times piece by @jburnmurdoch a “very good piece,” providing an authentic recommendation but no further lesson or framework. https://www.ft.com/content/124c1cf0-4885-495c-a907-a5217d589f9d?syn-25a6b1a6=1
- Research paper: Collison described a paper by @Usama_Polani as “excellent.” The linked Stanford SIEPR working paper is “Migration, Household Employment, and Europe’s Public Finances.”https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/migration-household-employment-europes-public-finances
Guillermo Rauch
Profile
- Ratatouille — film by Pixar. Guillermo Rauch described it as a favorite because Pixar embodies exceptional quality; he also highlighted its “anybody can cook” theme as encouragement for people to try building things, a lesson he connects to AI expanding creative capabilities.
- design.md — design-system framework pioneered by Google. Rauch said Vercel adopted it to codify color systems and brand/design guidance, combining AI’s creative variability with deterministic guardrails; he said the framework helped them significantly.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk recommended reading TheDefiantGhost’s X post/video, writing “Worth reading about this.” The linked post alleges that OpenAI put thousands of AI agents in a supposedly secure sandbox for hacking tests; it claims the agents cheated, escaped containment, accessed Hugging Face, and tried to remove logs.
Patrick OShaughnessy
- “Searching for Feynman” — Bill Gurley’s All-In Summit talk (video): Patrick O’Shaughnessy called it a “Great talk” and said it had him “locked in,” recommending the talk in an authentic personal reaction.
- The accompanying post provides a resource page containing links mentioned in the talk and used in its research: additional resource links.
Brian Armstrong
- Founders (podcast) — Brian Armstrong recommends the podcast, saying it has inspired him on many mornings while exercising and helped him get into the right mindset to tackle the day. https://x.com/FoundersPodcast/status/2101303804385804292 The linked post identifies the show as Founders and marks its 10-year anniversary.
Reed Hastings
Reed Hastings shared a Spotify episode with the brief endorsement, “Gurley is great.” The post does not provide the episode title or explain what Hastings found valuable.
How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on Australia’s Breakthrough
Tim Ferriss
YouTube channel
Tim Ferriss
Host
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0:00We're standing in the kitchen and my husband goes, "It's been rescheduled." And I just said, "No, you can't be serious." And I said, "You've got to show me this." And I read the document. I kept thinking, "There must be an error in the document. It can't have been rescheduled." And no, it's been rescheduled. So, we start dancing around the kitchen. It's like, "This is unbelievable. This is really amazing. We were so thrilled."
0:26The headlines start coming out from around the world. Australia has rescheduled. Australia is the first country to do this. Look at Australia now. Australia's leading the world in this field. And it's like, this is surreal.
0:38Where do you think it makes sense to begin? I mean, we could just begin with the trip treatment and how that domino knocked over so many dominoes.
0:47It did.
0:48And then what you did?
0:50Yes.
0:51With all of the momentum of said dominoes. Do you want to just begin there and we'll just chat through it? In 2015, I came across your blog. Well, I'd been signing up to your blog for ages. I mean, you know, I've been reading your books and admiring your biohacking courage to try all different things and experiment for yourself cuz that's very much how I also like to operate. I just don't believe anything until I try it
1:20myself.
1:21Mhm. And so being that person that had never had any alcohol really, don't drink coffee, never got high, never had any drugs in my whole life until I read your Five Bullet blog back in December, I think it was 2015, when you said that you had donated $100,000
1:49US to the Imperial college with psilocybin for depression. I think it was Tim.
1:56Yeah. 2015 would have been John's Hopkins with Roland Griffith. So there was a depression study there.
2:04That's right. So that was like a light bulb went off for me and I clicked on the link and I read the article and it was a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine called The Trip Treatment.
2:16Michael Pollen.
2:17That's right. By Michael Pollen, the one and only. And I said to my husband, "We have to do this." Like, "Please read this article." And he just I think he thought I'd lost it. And he read the article and then he said, "Why don't you see if we can get into a trial?" And so we then approached Robin Kart Harris, who has subsequently become a great friend of ours. But at that time it was like, "Well, can we get into one of the trials in Europe?" And he said,
2:46"Well, no, you don't qualify. you don't have a mental illness diagnosis. And then he proceeded to see if he could introduce us to the psychedelic society.
2:55And finally, we were introduced to a guide in the Netherlands and we flew over to Europe and we had this extraordinary experience where we took a large dose of psilocybin. But for me, I had spent the previous 6 months, you know, when we'd planned this, just getting more and more nervous. I was just like petrified.
3:19Sounds normal.
3:20Yeah. And I was like, am I going to lose my mind? What's going to happen?
3:23Meanwhile, my husband's just not engaged in it at all. And so, it got to the day before where we're going to go and meet this guide. And I wrote an email to my accountant and I said, "If anything's to happen to me in the next 24 to 48 hours, these are my last wishes."
3:43I was that scared. Scared of losing control, scared of what this would all mean. I'd never had any drugs in my whole life before. And was I going to go crazy? So anyway, we went and my husband picked up the guy at the airport. We were meeting him. He surrounded him in his white robes, sort of Rammes style, hippie Indian white robes. Gave me a huge bear hug. Then my husband asked him all the way back,
4:11"Well, what is what's going to happen?
4:14How does this work?"
4:15Yeah.
4:16Play run a show for me. Yeah.
4:19Right. And after 45 minutes, he was no wiser. And then literally we the next day took the medicines with the guide and yeah and we were blasted into multiple realms of consciousness all different dimensions of consciousness and it was an extraordinary experience as you well know it a sense
4:47of being connected to self to others the planet Feeling like you're part of everything, that everything's part of you. I think I said to you last time we spoke that I never saw a single piece of nature the same since that day. So every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass, just everything was transformed by that experience and I could see the energy in
5:16everything and my husband was also completely blown away.
5:22It brought us much closer together which was also something we didn't well we didn't plan for but it was a fantastic bonus and we then just started going what has just happened to us. So it was such an extraordinary experience. It took us about a year to really integrate what had happened and and we kept talking about it and you know it was a true mystical experience at the highest level. When you say it took a year to integrate, was it really
5:51just letting the snow globe settle and seeing what was discernible after things had settled or were you using therapy to talk through the experience afterwards? What did integration look like for you guys?
6:07No, it was sort of the snow globe.
6:09Mhm. Yeah.
6:10Everything had sort of been blown, you know, like a huge fireworks display. And actually, it was like a fireworks display at times. And so for us it was letting that settle and then for me I'd thought, well there's no way I'd ever do that again. Like it was it was challenging. I mean it was beautiful but it was also challenging because a lot of material came up relating to my ancestors probably relating to other
6:37ancestral lineages that I'd had before. And I thought there's no way I'm going to do this again. But then as the year went on and we were going to go back to Europe again and stuff, I thought, okay, well, maybe we'll we'll have another go and see if it's the same or if that was just a fluke or what happened. And so we went back again and we work with the same guide, Dutch guide.
7:04And we had an even higher dose and it was even more profound. And so by that stage we said to one another, wow, well if this is having this impact on us and it was really healing us like personally there was something going on. There was some kind of magic. I mean, magic mushrooms, but you know, it was like there was some kind of golden thread that was trying to
7:31connect us back to ourselves, to integrate us into ourselves and then connect us to one another and to other people. And we said to ourselves, we'd already founded five charities between us by that stage.
7:45And we just thought, wow, well, if this is happening to us, imagine if this could be applied to all the people who are suffering with like homelessness or domestic violence or unemployment, disabilities, people suffering with depression that we come across through all of our charitable work. Because underpinning all kinds of disadvantage is usually some kind of mental illness, some kind of trauma, depression, something that has happened to that
8:14person in their lives. And it's usually that they've ended up being unemployed or committing domestic violence or whatever it happens to be, but it's through the intergenerational trauma that they've experienced. And so Peter and I just started looking and going, well, let's meet all of the people around the world. Let's go to all the conferences. Let's start meeting all the researchers.
8:37And we did that. And we started meeting researchers from all over the world, which was absolutely extraordinary. And we attended events and we learned everything we could. We watched every video. We listened to every recording that we could. And then by that stage, Peter and I were like, "This is extraordinary." Like, and we spoke with Rick Doblin at about that stage, which was in 2018.
9:05And in 2018, he said to me, Tanya, I think you should set up a charity in Australia to do this. And we were mad enough to do that. And for people who don't have the context just to just to describe Rick briefly Rick is really one of the primary drivers probably the primary driver I would say and there are a lot of people of course who have played large roles behind the psychedelic movement through this
9:33organization called MAPS and they have been predominantly focused on MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD and that's been the main indication. So he has been a fixture. He's very unorthodox.
9:48He is very well educated in policy, incredibly colorful. He's just one hell of a character. And uh I wanted people to have just a little bit of um but he's been he's been forging ahead since the 70s or 80s, well before there was any kind of tip of the hat from anywhere in the mainstream. So that's Rick Dublin and he's very good at helping other people and encouraging other people.
10:14Yeah.
10:14Absolute inspiration. He's dedicated his whole life to this work and it's just extraordinary and he was a total inspiration to us as was Roland Griffith and Robin and David Nut at Professor David Nut the head of neurossychopharmarmacology at Imperial College London. Just amazing people these legends. And um the thing was in Australia we really didn't have a lot going on. There was one trial in the making. It was a trial for end of life
10:44stress and anxiety through terminal diagnosis which had been replicated in other parts of the world like at New York University and Johns Hopkins University.
10:53And we just knew that if Australia could start to position itself in this space that there might be a chance to heal a lot of people. So we did start a charity mind medicine Australia. We launched it in February 2019 and we started working in this field starting to work out well how could we get these medicines to Australians as quickly safely accessibly as possible
11:21and and cost effectively as well. We originally approached the Therapeutic Goods Administration, I think it was in in late 2020, and we asked them if it would be possible if the medicines could be rescheduled.
11:36So, let me pause you. I apologize, Tanya, just for No, no, go for it.
11:39The uh Yankees listening and others maybe. The TGA is roughly analogous to the FDA in the US. So if you want a new drug approved, if you have something that is in a highly restricted drug class and you want to make it more readily available through prescription with fewer controls, etc., then you have to contend with in our case the FDA, but in your case the TGA. Is that a fair way to put it?
12:06Yeah, that's exactly right. And they're these bodies require a lot of data and evidence and generally speaking pharmaceutical companies make applications to them for the rescheduling of medicines. And in this case, we wanted to make an application to move these medicines from prohibited substances, which in Australia was called schedule 9, but in the US is called schedule one, to a schedule 8 medicine, which is a controlled
12:34medicine, so that it could be used in clinical environments. And so we started applying to the TGA and we put an application in at their encouragement and then at the interim stage it was knocked back and then at the final stage despite many public submissions it was also knocked back and so we thought let's put it in again and one of the things that the TGA has to do is it has to provide its reasons for knocking it
13:03back. So my husband who's an extraordinary intellect and strategic I guess mind started really working on these applications and really addressing their concerns. And so then we put in another application to reschedule psilocybin MDMA for the treatment of depression and trauma in Australia. And again at the interim
13:30stage the application was knocked back and they had to provide their reasons and then we put in a final submission.
13:36And in that period there was another public consultation period and over we did this huge campaign and we were educating people all the time through this period. We were presenting webinars and we were presenting talks to politicians and health professionals and anyone we could business leaders. We were talking like we probably gave thousands of presentations about these medicines over that period. And then
14:03finally we put in a submission and over 13,000 Australians supported this submission through public submissions to our therapeutic goods administration supporting the medicine and over 98% of people supported the rescheduling of these medicines. And this was the largest amount of public submissions ever received by our regulators for rescheduling any medicines. So there was this huge pressure.
14:30Yeah. I imagine not every one of those recipients was super happy about the volume. I have to imagine.
14:37Right. Probably cuz they had to publish them all as well, you know. Oh wow. Like on their platform. Yeah.
14:42So a couple of questions. At that point, was it still just you and your husband who were working on this or had you assembled the volunteers to assist you guys in various ways? What did it look like at that point?
14:54No, it was like this massive movement by then. I mean like we had started chapters in communities all around Australia. So we had over 30 chapters in place like Byron Bay or Brisbane, Darwin, Perth, even chapters in New Zealand.
15:10And that would be chapters of mind medicine Australia. So it'd be like MMA put in place name.
15:16Yeah. People who were just like behind this mission.
15:19Mhm.
15:19Yeah. Just chapters and chapters of people.
15:23When you have chapters, how did you I'm just thinking of the challenges involved with like retail and franchising or whatever. Like quality control and giving people marching directions of some type.
15:35When people would reach out, how would you enable them or what materials would you send them? What would you encourage them to do? If you've got people in Byron Bay and 29 other locations, yeah, across Australia, what would you guys send to them?
15:51We had templates for everything. So, we had precedents and templates and we had how to actually do this. So, we made it as easy as we could for the public to put submissions in.
16:01Mhm.
16:02And we had volunteers in all those places who were leading these campaigns and getting a whole lot of people together in those places. But in addition to that, we also had clinicians. So we had already started training clinicians through our worldleading certificate in psychedelic assisted therapy. So we started that training in 2021 and we've already trained now over 750 clinicians. So psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors,
16:30nurses, o therapists, social workers, counselors, you name it. We've trained a lot of clinicians in Australia. So we already had an enormous amount of clinicians who were starting to put pressure on their peak bodies and professional bodies as well as the general public. So there was also an enormous amount of people not necessarily in our chapters but just people who just families you know had people who were suffering with mental illness in their families. There was
16:58workplaces. So there was a lot of people who had people in their workplaces suffering with depression or trauma or addictions. And people just started to really jump on the bandwagon to start to really learn about these medicines.
17:13Mhm.
17:14As sacred medicines.
17:16And the medicines at that point, just to define the molecules we're talking about, that was MDMA and psilocybin.
17:23Yes. Yes.
17:25Let me bring us back for a moment to David Nut. And the reason I'm going to bring David Nut and UT back into the picture is because in the process of doing homework for this conversation came across a number of allies that you had recruited over time, right? You really had a multi-pronged approach and I want to talk about some of those prongs.
17:55Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that.
17:56That's a big approach. Yeah, this is abc.net.au and it mentions you engaging new lobbyists. Hawker Britain known for their cozy relationships with the labor government who and it goes on da da da understand the dynamics of CRA. The organization then flew out Imperial College of London neuroscychopharmarmacologist David Nut for a road show up and down the east coast. Mhm.
18:19And it goes on to mention him as one of the celebrities of sorts in psychedelic circles, certainly within scientific circles. And I'm going back to the PC here. During a whirlwind tour sponsored by Herbal Tincture and Organic Chocolate Brands, perfect. He addressed pack town halls in Byron Bay, Sydney, and CRA, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, and Melbourne.
18:41Then there were black tie events with philanthropists and stakeholders at the Australian clubs in Sydney and Melbourne. It goes on and on.
18:47Mhm. So, if there's any more color to that, I'd love to hear it. Like, the purpose of doing that.
18:53Absolutely. I mean, that was a huge part of it.
18:55And the reason I'm bringing this up and the part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation is because you did something very remarkable and you know, there were other parties involved in a lot going on. But I mean, MMA was a real driving force behind some incredible world first, like on the playing field of sort of global pharmarmacology and mental health treatments. You've accomplished something really
19:24impressive. And there are pieces of the playbook that I think people could apply in other locations.
19:31And this would be, I think, potentially one example of that. So could you speak to what you did with the road show with David and maybe how you used lobbyists and also like how did you pay for all that?
19:44Well, I mean these are really important questions and we are being asked by a lot of other countries and organizations how how we did it and it was very tough but we we tried everything. So we never gave up. That was one aspect and my husband and I are very persistent people. So every roadblock that we'd get, we'd think, okay, what are we going to do now? And we would climb around or over or through that wall, whatever we could do to keep going. So what happened
20:12was in 2022, David, who'd become an incredibly good friend of ours and someone we deeply respected and we just adore his humor and and his intellect.
20:24How did you first connect with David?
20:26Cold email or how did that happen? Yeah. I mean, so as you would see, we've one of the other really strong prongs of our strategy was to put together this worldleading advisory panel.
20:37And so we've got about 75 or so leaders in this field or people who are really great advocates for these medicines, scientists, doctors, researchers, and others. And I just started reaching out to to people. But also in 2018, I went to a conference run by Eona in Madison in Wisconsin and I spoke at that conference.
21:02Yeah, that's that's a trip. It's a bit of a trip for you.
21:05Yeah, it was really Eona for people who don't know is an organization at least last I checked predominantly focused on psilocybin.
21:14Mhm. Correct. and their medicine's likely to be registered as just about as soon as Compass Pathways, another huge pharma company who's an applicant for psilocybin. Over the next 6 months or so, we anticipate a number of these medicines becoming registered medicines.
21:29We can talk about that shortly, but back to the time that we brought David Nut out. So, basically, I had approached a lot of people. I'd also met a lot of people at Eona. And so I then started inviting them to join our advisory panel. And so that was how I met Robin Roland, David Nut, all of these people. And as we'd meet one person, then they'd say, "Well, have you met this person and have you met that person?" And let me pause you, Tanya, for a second cuz I know you're persistent, but these
21:59people get asked to do all sorts of stuff all the time.
22:02Yeah.
22:03How did you make it easy or compelling for them to say yes? Like what's the pitch? What was the pitch to someone like Robin? Right? Because at that point, I'm trying to put a date to it, but Robin at that point had probably appeared, I'm just guessing on the timeline here in How to Change Your Mind. He's somewhat of a main scientific protagonist or certainly figure within How to Change Your Mind, a book by Michael Pollen that really shifted the tectonic plates of what was
22:31possible for psychedelics in the US and elsewhere. In some ways, in a lot of ways, in many, if not most of the best known philanthropists and supporters of psychedelics, not all of them, but a very high percentage, would kind of reach back to that as the tipping point for their interest. So, how do you get then Robin's like the hottest girl at the dance, right? And he's very charismatic. He's good on camera. He's good in audio.
22:59I met them. I met them, Tim. you know like I met most of them actually at the Eona conference and also I happened to sing at the Eona conference and speak. So I gave a speech.
23:10I spoke about what we were hoping to achieve in Australia. Also sang.
23:14Mhm.
23:14I serenated Roland Griffith. It was beautiful. I mean I miss that guy so much. And so I met these people and we just connected and they were inspired by the fact that we were trying to move the needle in Australia. I don't think that they thought that we could do it.
23:31And to be honest, I didn't know that we could do it either. Like it was just persisting and persisting and so I think people just started joining us because maybe they believe that we could do it. I mean we had set up five charities before that had already done some significant things.
23:47How did you end up speaking at the conference? Right. Because that seems to me an important piece of the recipe for why suddenly you could talk to them afterwards. Right. and they were already a warm audience at that point.
24:00So, how did you end up speaking at that conference?
24:03Well, that was through Bill Linton. And so, Bill Linton is the founder of Eona and I'm sure you know and you know him and he's just a lovely guy and again we connected. I wrote to him.
24:14What did you say to Bill in the email?
24:17you know, I'd really like to speak at your conference. And in fact, I think they even had heard what we were doing and that we were trying to do this in Australia. And then they actually I said, "Look, I can also sing."
24:29Yeah.
24:30And maybe that was part of it. And then he just said, "Well, look, I'd like you to come over. I'd like you to sing." We I think we probably had a Zoom call or something like that. And they then invited me to speak and to sing. And it was a long trip. It was a very long trip. And literally, I had to get off the plane. And It is a very long trim.
24:48I was in an altered state. I was in some time warp then the jet lag and everything.
24:53I wanted to sidebar quickly that sometimes it is the weirdest, not that singing is weird there. I have much stranger obsessions and interests, but it's the most unexpected maybe talents or side interests or fill in the blank that you do on the weekends and evenings. That sometimes is the thing that opens the door.
25:18Yeah.
25:18Because it is the thing that other people aren't leading with. Right. So when you're like, "Oh, and I also sing."
25:24And they're like, "You know what?
25:26You know, she's scrappy. She's willing to fly all the way from Australia. Oh my god." Like to Wisconsin. Okay, sure. Yeah, why not? Let's give it a shot.
25:34Well, also I think by then I'd also had that connection with Ramdas. Yes.
25:39So that was also a help. I haven't mentioned that and that was very significant. So actually and I want to come back to David not with you which I really because that's really important but back in 2016 after you'd woken me up into this whole space and then we did the medicine with this Dutch guide. He played us some Ramdas at the end of the medicine session and I went, "Who's this guy? This is amazing." And my husband's one of these guys who when
26:08he hears someone really inspiring, he goes, "Well, is there a way we could meet them?" And so, okay, well, why not try and meet Ramdas? So what we did was we wrote to him via again his people and we found out that you could indeed spend a week living at Ramdas's house in Hawaii and get to spend time with him, you know, living there. So we were lucky enough that we got to fly to Maui.
26:35Well, hold on. How does that how does that work? Cuz I'm sure a lot of people would love to hang out with Ramdas.
26:40Yeah. No, really.
26:41What are the hurdles you have to clear to live at his house for a week? Or how does it work? or is it just pay for play or how is it?
26:47We made a donation and we got to live in the in the house that was on his land there and live right next to him and then every day or two we'd get to hang out a little bit with Ramdas.
26:58Yeah, that's cool.
26:59And so we'd come into the main house.
27:00We'd spend some time meditating with him. He'd invite us to some of the ceremonies that he'd be having at the house. We even went to the beach with him because he had this incredible wheelchair that had these amazing inflatable tires and he'd be wheeled out in his wheelchair out into the ocean and one particular day there'd be two rainbows that appear when Rames gets out into the ocean. It was like pinching yourself like is this really happening?
27:26And a lot of it was sitting in silence with him because he had had that stroke. And by this stage it was it was about a year or so before he actually would pass.
27:37And so he was still vibrant though. And when you looked in Ramas's eyes, you could just see yourself reflected back in him. And I remember singing to him as well.
27:47And there were tears rolling down his face when I sang to him. And it was a song called Coming Home. It was all about coming home to yourself. And but the minute that we would mention psychedelics to Ramdas, his eyes would light up and he'd start talking about you know his time that he gave his guru in India this huge dose of craziest story have you heard this story right and nothing happened it's in be here now and his guru in
28:17India so Ramdas again just to provide a little context for people who are like what are they talking about Ramdas us which is I believe servant of God of Rahm. Yeah. Servant of God is the non-birthname of the man formerly known as Richard Albert who was at Harvard with Timothy Liry who some people may recognize and they were both kicked out of Harvard. uh little known fact in part
28:46due to Andrew While then an undergrad writing I think it was in the Harvard Crimson about their dosing of psilocybin and there was some discussion I don't know if it was verified of them giving it to undergrads and it became this huge scandal and they were booted out and at one point Timothy Liry was designated by Nixon President Nixon as the most dangerous man in America which is like ridiculous in retrospect but there you have it and there's a lot more we could say about that but suffice to
29:14Richard Halper decides to go to India and at one point he somehow finds his way right this pre- internet pre- smartphone somehow finds his way to this guru again we just described him be here now Maharaji yeah Maharaji and he's I think trying to explain to him something about psychedelics and he's like well do you have any and he's like yeah I do and he had promised LSD and he gave him it was
29:41either 400 or 600 micrograms. This guy had never taken any psychedelics, took that and just sat there and clearly would have set in and like an hour later as if nothing was happening just kind of looked at him with a smile and was like, "I interesting."
29:58Yeah.
29:59And I think he said something like, "Sure, you can like peek in and say hello to Christ consciousness or whatever you want to call it, but you're not actually going to get to know that's right the depth." But the fact that somebody could take 400 or 600 micrograms, to put that in perspective, 100 micrograms is considered a let's just call it standard hit.
30:19If I were to take 200 micrograms, I would be completely incapacitated for 8 to 12 hours. So the fact that somebody could take 4 to 600, I think that would even happen to me on 50 to be honest, Tim.
30:31Yeah. And could just carry on having a conversation as if they only had a glass of water is is somewhat mindboggling.
30:39It's bizarre.
30:39Ramdas went on to do a lot of writing and a lot of recording and it's just incredibly compelling, prolific to listen to.
30:48So, you spent time with Ramdas.
30:50We spent time with Ramdas.
30:52So, the Ramdas card ends up being helpful to get to Madison.
30:59Yeah, it definitely did.
31:00And then Bill Linton and Co invite you with open arms. You sing, you talk, you meet this whole cast of characters, including I'm guessing D. Was David not there in Madison?
31:13I'm not sure that David was there, but Robin and Roland and and everyone else was there.
31:19Yeah, they're all stones throw from David.
31:22So then, this was like the year before we started Mind Medicine Australia. So then I wrote to David and I said, "We're launching a charity. It's on February the 13th." That was the date of our launch. would you come to Australia and speak at the launch? And so we flew David to Australia. He spoke at our launch which was at the University of Melbourne and we then became very friendly with David and his wife who's delightful. And we've brought him over a few times since then. And that launch
31:50was packed out. And then what happened was in I mean cut a long story short I'm cutting through a whole lot of things here but in 2022 we invited him to Australia to present at some town hall events in public but then we also brought him to the therapeutic goods administration and we asked the therapeutic goods administration if you know we could present to them and we asked the head of the therapeutic goods administration how
32:19many people approximately would come to the ing that we would have David KN there. We would also have a woman there whose husband had tragically lost his life because he'd got depression and had not been able to cope. I'll talk about that very briefly in a second. So what happened was the the head of the TGA said, "Oh, there'll be probably 10 or 15 people that turn up to the meeting."
32:43140 people turned up to the meeting. Some of them were in the room, some of them were on Zoom.
32:48And these are all people internal to the TGA. These are all employees or employed by the TGA.
32:53Yeah. They were like Department of Health people, executives, you know, all from all different parts of the Department of Health and and the TGA.
33:01And so what happened was we we had invited this woman called Vanessa to speakers just before David Nut. And Vanessa's husband had got depression a few years prior. just out of the blue all of a sudden got depression really badly and he woke up one day and he said to her I need to go to a hospital and so she took him to a doctor and they started him on some SSRIs anti-depressants and then they didn't work and then he
33:30got taken to an institution cuz he was really unwell he was put in that institution and they've got a young daughter very successful man by the way no previous history of depression just came on. And so he was put in this institution that didn't help. They saw every professor and expert that they could.
33:50She's kept a 20page dossier of every treatment she tried. During the middle of him trying many, many treatments, she rang me up and she said, "Tanya, you know, I've heard about psychedelic assisted therapies. Could Franco, his name was Franco, could he get psychedelic assisted therapies?" And I said, "Look, no, not in Australia at the moment. We're trying really hard to get these medicines rescheduled, but he would have to go overseas to do this legally, like in the Netherlands where psilocybin truffles are legal for example or somewhere else. He was not
34:20well enough to be taken overseas and they didn't want to break the law by going underground in Australia and this applies to a lot of people. And so what happened was they kept trying all the different other treatments, the professors, he was in the institutions. She said to me, she rang me about another year later, said, "He's begging me to go every day. He wants to go. He wants to leave.
34:43Hang in there. We We're really working hard on this." Anyway, he couldn't wait.
34:48She had kept this 20page dossier. And she got up in front of the TGA and she said, "I believe that if my husband had have had access to these treatments that he might still be alive today and you know that our young daughter would still have a father." And you know this is all the treatments we tried. It's not like we didn't try to get Franco well. We did. And there wasn't a dryer in the room at this stage. And then Professor Nut comes on and starts presenting about the science and all the research, the
35:17data, the evidence that by that stage there'd been a lot of trials as you know that had taken place. So he presented and then we presented and still everyone was going there's no way this is going to happen. and there's no way the rescheduling is going to happen.
35:34There was scientists and and clinicians and others that just said it's not going to happen. But this was in about November of 2022. And we just kept, you know, pushing. And then in February, February the 3rd, it was 2023, we're standing in the kitchen and my husband goes, "It's been rescheduled." And I just
36:01said, "No, can't be serious." And I said, "You've got to show me this." And I read the document. I kept thinking, "There must be an error in the document. It can't have been rescheduled." And no, it's been rescheduled. So we start dancing around the kitchen. It's like, "This is unbelievable." We were so like this is really amazing. We were so thrilled. Then like the headlines start coming out from around the world. Australia has rescheduled.
36:27Australia is the first country to do this. Look at Australia now. Australia's leading the world in this field. And it's like this is surreal. This is so incredible that this actually happened in Australia because you know Australia tends to be more of a follower than a leader often. But to do this was incredible. So then a few months later the rules changed so that the psychiatrist could actually start to treat patients in clinics. And that was the whole purpose of this was that there
36:56should be clinics around Australia with clinicians that we'd been training since 2021 and that patients should start to be treated with these incredible sacred medicines with therapy obviously. And so there was these multidisciplinary teams and psychiatrists could start applying to the therapeutic goods administration for what's called an authorized prescriber status. So you psychiatrist put an
37:25application into the TGA and we help a lot of psychiatrists do these applications because they're quite ownorous and they have to put in their protocols, how much medicine they're going to use, where they're going to practice from, all these different protocols. And then those are reviewed by the TGA and an independent ethics committee. And if they get the TGA stamp and the ethics committee stamp, they can start using psychedelic assisted therapy, psilocybin assisted therapy, and MDMA assisted therapy in their
37:55clinics. And so there's now over 20 clinics around Australia, mostly led by clinicians that we have trained through our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies and over 400 patients or so roughly have been treated. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot because there's millions of Australians who are suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. And there's millions of people globally suffering from these
38:25conditions who are not getting well like Franco.
38:28And one of the arguments that was really important for the Therapeutic Goods Administration was there's a risk to not doing anything. So if you don't do anything, if you don't reschedule these medicines, that's actually a risk because patients who've tried everything like Franco might end up taking their own lives and that would be tragic. And we through the period that we were making these applications heard of other stories than Franco. We had a lot of people who write to us. They texted us,
38:58they emailed us, and they begged us. We even had politicians writing to us saying they've got a son or a constituent saying could we please provide the medicines to them and we said well no we can't until these medicines are rescheduled. So we kept having people begging us for the medicines. We obviously couldn't provide them. We're not a medicine provider. And important to say to everyone that these medicines you don't take them lightly.
39:24You take them in a very controlled setting. Personally, I love nature, but we have to do it in clinics in Australia under these circumstances and it's really important for the patient to have the right preparation and mindset so that they can be open to whatever is coming through the altered state and then bring all of those insights for their life, their work, their health, whatever it happens to be back into their life. And usually that's
39:54done through therapy. So a patient goes through a 3 or 4 month process protocol and we are seeing 60 to 80% remission rates in Australia which is replicating what we've seen in trials around the world. So of those 400 patients that have been treated so far around Australia 60 to 80% of those are going to remissions and there's been no serious adverse events. What does the pie chart
40:23split look like for out of those 400?
40:26How many are psilocybin for depression versus MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for PTSD?
40:34So, more of them are MDMA. So, more psychiatrists started out doing MDMA for trauma.
40:40It's probably a good idea. I think it's good to get comfortable skiing the blue squares before the black diamonds. Yeah, right.
40:48Tends to be more manageable. Many of the psychiatrists felt more comfortable administering MDMA first. There are some patients in Australia, I think, who've been administered both medicines, not at the same time, but subsequently.
41:01Mhm.
41:02But it's probably about a 7030 split.
41:04But psilocybin is starting to creep up. And we're also seeing psilocybin now being researched for a whole range of other conditions as you know. So for addictions and obsessivecompulsive disorder, eating disorders, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia, you know, I think MDMA is still very underestimated as a tool. It's sort of been in the zeicist long enough that a lot of the writing or videos or podcasts that get attention are focused on the
41:37latest and greatest or what they might consider the new kid on the block like a 5 MO DMT. Okay, everything's about five Mayo DMT because it can be crammed into 15 minutes and it's the businessman's path to God and all this stuff which from a commercialization perspective I understand but at the same time you have something that is already very well researched and that has actually been around a very very long time. I want to say it's the 1920s when MDMMA was first patented and then it was
42:05shelved and then the patent expired and then Sasha Schulen and his little lab and his tasting parties conjured up hundreds of psychedelics. If anyone's ever heard of 2CB, 2CE, you can thank Sasha Schulan.
42:19But also resurrected MDMA, which basically replaced MDA as a the underground therapist's tool. And I think MDMA is very underestimated.
42:31Oh, so do I.
42:33Given how broadly speaking, how manageable it is relative to many of the other psychedelics that we could discuss.
42:42Mhm. And I think partially because it doesn't necessarily I would say pretty typically does not provide the 17th dimension shattered into stardust technicolor grand finale fireworks show which make for good stories, right? that it gets under underestimated as a tool because it's maybe not making the rounds at as many cocktail parties cuz you can't it's unlikely you're going to be like yeah and then this
43:11these dancing crocodiles with sapphire eyes came out and danced around me and so and so which you know you'll certainly get if you're hanging out with your IASA friends. Mhm.
43:20So MDMMA is really I think a tremendous tremendous tool given the risk profile given the the manageability of it relative to other things. Question I suppose related to the integration that you already mentioned is the therapy that acts as the kind of lattis work of support for these experiences in Australia. Is it standardized or is it
43:49really up to the clinician and the patients to select the therapeutic modality? Is it standardized perhaps in the way that that MAPS was trying to standardize with like IFS informed diads and things of this type?
44:04So it's not standardized and many of our clinicians, the ones who've done our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies, you know, use a whole lot of different modalities. So yes, some of them may use parts and IFS therapy, internal family systems therapy, or they may use other types of therapy. So there's all sorts of different therapies that we encourage our clinicians to look at. And that might be and I feel like one of the
44:33things that's becoming most important is even just nutrition. So just coming out of this experience and having the right nutrition because if you go back into your life and just start eating all say if you were eating a lot of sugar before or drinking a lot of alcohol and you go back to that well then you're probably going to relapse. So there's all sorts of things around nutrition and exercise that we're hoping will be more and more included as integration therapy post treatment for anyone doing psychedelic
45:02assisted therapies. But we don't believe that there should be a cookie cutter approach. Every therapist has different skills that they bring to the table. And many of them, most of the therapists that we're training are trauma informed, but not all of them.
45:16And they're just learning, you know, and they're learning to bring their own skills and work out what works for each patient. And I think that matters a lot because everyone that we're treating through these clinics, they're all individuals and not everything's going to work identically for every patient. just the same way that the dose of the medicine is not going to be identical for each patient.
45:39How many patients would you hope? Not in a pie in the sky, best case, green lights all the way scenario, but in a kind of base case, right? Not worst case, not best case, kind of right down the middle case. How many patients do you think could be served with these medicines over the next 3 years in Australia? What do you think? Well, it's an exponential thing. So, we're seeing a huge exponential growth. So, just even now as we speak, we just found out that
46:09now there's 120 authorized prescribing psychiatrists in Australia for either MDMA or psilocybin or both medicines. So, that is a huge jump. You know, we started with one or two psychiatrists back at the start of 2024. We're now at the middle latter part of 2026. And that is an exponential increase in authorized prescribing psychiatrists.
46:34In the first year, we trained about 80 therapists. We've now trained 750. In the first year, only a handful of patients. Maybe I don't know 15 20 patients were treated. Now there's been nearly 400. So maybe it will get to 5,000 by then. This is me being conservative.
46:58Yeah. 5,000. Yeah.
46:59Well, it could be a lot more, but maybe 5,000 is a realistic number.
47:04Mhm.
47:05But that's a fraction of who needs it, right? Which I understand, but I don't want to let the dream of boiling the ocean kind of minimize the impact of even 400 people. Because what people listening may not realize is that if you look back at the early studies, if you look at a lot of current studies, they are expensive, right?
47:28At least in the United States. I'll speak for the United Well, speak for the United States. What a sentence. I will speak to some of the clinical trials in the US, many of which I've been involved with. And because these compounds are still schedule one, it is incredibly difficult, timeconuming and expensive to recruit subjects to get approvals through ethics boards, IRBs, etc. And as
47:57a result, what you could get on the street very easily, mushroom chocolates or otherwise for $50 for a patient in a proper clinical trial run at a university will cost could cost $15,000 per person, right? I mean, something like that. It is incredibly expensive. And what that means is you end up with these studies that are welldesigned and hopefully properly powered. And people can dig into that if they want online.
48:25and if they want to read up on what that means from a statistical perspective, but you end up with 10 people, you end up with eight people. Maybe you end up with 15 people. Certainly, if you're a for-profit company, Compass and others have been able to and have had to have larger sample sizes and larger cohorts and so on and so forth as you move through the different phases.
48:47400's a lot, but there's a big butt and I'm hoping you can tell me the answer. I'm sure you can. Is there some type of requirement for data reporting from people who are authorized because it's most valuable as a way of building momentum and creating a virtuous cycle if there is mandatory data reporting that then provides a signal.
49:12Yes.
49:13Or many signals.
49:14Well, no. And that's a really important part of our strategy. So our strategy at Mind Medicine Australia was to build the ecosystem so that we could make sure everyone was trained that the public and clinicians were fully educated and we keep doing that that there is ongoing research for new conditions that clinical rollouts and the medicine supply can happen very smoothly and then there's the whole pay part which I'll come to you so there's the whole cost of it all
49:42but the data collection is really really important and one of the things David Nut did with us was he was really like we have to make sure there's real world evidence being collected. So he worked with professor Paul Fitzgerald at Australian National University and mind medicine Australia has funded a registry which we have no influence on. we simply funded at the Australian National University which collects real world evidence the data from the baseline of a
50:11patient when they go in for the treatment then what they're like when they come out of the treatment and that's being collected all the time. It hasn't published yet but we hope that it will publish over the next few months and then continue to publish periodically as they collect more and more data. And this data is critical because this is what can show the government well firstly they know there's been no adverse events serious ones because there's been nothing reported to the TGA but it's also really important to show the government wow
50:40well these remission rates around 60 to 80% that's compared against 10 to 15% for existing treatments for PTSD and psilocybin with MDMA and psilocybin treatment for depression and trauma in Australia at the moment. So 10 to 15% versus 60 to 80% remission rates. That starts to become very important for a government because they go well wow there could be some serious cost savings here.
51:07Mhm.
51:08We could save millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollar over the course of a patient's lifetime.
51:14And one of the other things we've done at MMA is we've helped to really bring on the payors for these treatments. So we now have the department of veterans affairs who are supporting treatments for veterans. We have the national disability insurance scheme also funding treatments and we have Medi Bank which is our largest health insurer who have basically said that any eligible gold members of Medybank can get pretty much the whole treatment cost paid apart from
51:42a couple of thousand dollars. So everyone's shifting to Medybank. What does it look like to recruit any of these payers? So, how do you even bring the first of these payers online? What does the outreach look like?
51:57We went to them all from early on. So, we were talking to the Department of Veterans Affairs from early on. Yeah.
52:03Because we had seen what had happened in the US with veterans and we knew that that was a core strategy that Rick Dolin and MAPS had also used. And it's an important strategy because veterans and first responders have served their nation and more veterans die through their own hands through suicide than die on the battlefield. And they experienced so much trauma in the work that they've done. And we knew that the Department of Veterans Affairs was really struggling
52:32with the amount of veteran suicides that were occurring. So they were someone we started talking to and presenting to from very early on in our time as Mind Medicine Australia. The National Disability Insurance Scheme came on board because they obviously want to try and reduce the costs of treatments and this is a really good way to reduce costs over time. Though the cost of the treatment is relatively expensive upfront
53:00over the course of a patient's lifetime the potential cost savings are enormous.
53:05Rick Dolblin and MAPS did some economic modeling and showed that the cost per patient this was a few years ago already could be well over $100,000 US of cost savings. So we knew that cost would be a barrier. And so we also started a patient support fund at Mind Medicine Australia. And how we managed to do a lot of this was through our own philanthropy in the end. Yeah. We've we've also donated a lot of money to this. Peter and I have done this pro
53:33bono for the last 8 years completely pro bono because we just want to help alleviate suffering and want to see people get their lives back.
53:43Couple of questions all over the map. Is it true that you with your facilitator from the Netherlands were given psilocybin with Syrian rue or was there no Syrian rue?
53:58No, it was Syrian rue.
53:59Why did he decide to include that? My understanding and I haven't looked this up in a very long time is that Syrian rue contains could be multiple betaarbines like harm, harm, paganum hamala.
54:12Right? So peanum carala is the Syrian root but it imparts when combined with psilocybin a kind of a an iawaska twist of lemon on top.
54:25It does because it's adding the monomine oxidase inhibitors.
54:31Why did he choose your facilitator to approach it that way?
54:36I think that was the protocol that he used.
54:39Mhm.
54:40Anyway, it was his standard protocol.
54:42Now I think it's a great protocol for the right clients. I think for us it was the right protocol. Firstly it's an MAOI inhibitor as you've just mentioned. So he has this protocol which he calls psilowca. So it's a combination of psilocybin and iawaska.
54:59That's how he sort of describes it. Now when I went in if I'd known that it was Iawaska I probably would have freaked out and gone oh there's no way I'm doing Iaska. But it was the way that it was done was actually it was like that. And I think that because Peter and I had never had any drugs in our life at all. You know, we were completely new to this. But we were also type A people.
55:22You don't say.
55:23Right. And I was a bit of a control freak then. I'm still one, but I'm not as much one now as I was then. I will say that. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this was I wanted to let go of some of the control, right?
55:34So I really wanted to see what that would be like. What would Tanya be like without all of that holding on?
55:40Good for you. A lot of type A people will not, you know, choose to release the white knuckling, right? So, it was like this Syrian rue, it relaxed us firstly, but then the goal, which I found out later was that I didn't know this at the time, but that it was expanded the visuals and the whole experience between two to 10 times.
56:04So it amplified our experience and what we would have seen, heard, everything experienced by two to 10 times and subsequently I think that is accurate. I think it extended the experience. It created more visuals than what I had seen say without using pegum pala in subsequently. But the first two experiences Peter and I had both were with Siri and Rue.
56:30And I thought it was an extraordinary way of relaxing us and then helping us to just let go of of our bodies and just to be able to travel. And at one stage the guide said, "Oh, you guys are really having a lot of trouble stepping out of your bodies." I could hear him say that in the room.
56:50You're like, "Thanks, bud."
56:52It was like your body's fighting you.
56:56I'm curious what dose. Do you recall how many grams of I'm assuming it was dried salass mushroom of some type with a kick of lemon juice? Yes.
57:08The lemon. Did he let it marinate in the lemon for a while? Like did he grind it up and then marinate it?
57:13Not so long.
57:14Okay.
57:14Well, I don't know how long he'd marinate it for. I was too petrified to really watch that part.
57:19How quickly did you feel the onset?
57:21That'll probably tell me how long it marinated.
57:23I started feeling tingling through some of my, you know, feet and hands. Probably within about 30 minutes.
57:31My husband kept saying, "There's nothing happening." And then all of a sudden it was like, "Oh my god."
57:36Famous last words.
57:38Yeah. Like I mean, he was on the floor on a mattress. I was on the bed. We were not talking to one another. That was part of the sort of protocol.
57:46And it probably took about half an hour.
57:49And I could feel like there was so much tingling. I called the guide over and I said, "Hey, I'm really afraid. Can you hold my hand?" Because I thought, "What's happening?" I hadn't felt my body do these sorts of strange things before. And it was like I could feel myself sort of it was like I was filling up and I didn't quite know what that meant. And then all of a sudden, I started to see the colors and the shapes and Mhm. It was like this kaleidoscope that I was looking through and it was incredible.
58:19I mean, I'll be curious if this matches your experience because I I do have some experience with psilocybin plus Syrian R. Also, just a footnote for folks on the lemon.
58:32The lemon. Yeah. My understanding, I'm not a biochemist, but if you marinate the salby mushroom, especially if it's ground up in say a coffee grinder in lemon, that it basically pre- metabolizes it, breaks it down or converts it into psilocin. And your body is converting psilocybin into psilicin as the active metabolite to begin with.
58:53And in doing so, like for me, it would typically take in some cases, it really depends on a lot of factors. when did I last eat, etc., etc. But 45 minutes to an hour maybe for effects to really set in with eating mushrooms if they're ground and put in lemon and it depends on the strain of mushrooms. Some can be more obviously potent than others, but 10 to 15
59:23minutes, I mean I am off to the races.
59:26like what normally would have taken like 60 to 90 minutes which is actually quite nice because the the waiting game can be the most torturous part for a lot of people. Similarly with the Syrian rue my experience is let's just say if my workspace functional dose is 4.5 g let's just say keep or like 3.5 to four these days let's just say although I've taken the foot off the gas a lot with this stuff
59:55but if Syrian r is involved then all of a sudden like 1.5 is plenty and you can use much less which I think an one advantage of that is that you're less likely to have a headache the next day.
1:00:09Some people at higher dose psilocybin can really get a a crusher of a headache depending on their sort of individual pharmacology. So have you continued to work with the Syrian ru or have you moved to sort of a different toolkit sometimes? Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I'm sort of curious again to actually I I have this hankering at the moment to to perhaps go and have a session with Syrian row again. I think that it's more
1:00:36powerful for me still. But subsequent to the second dose, so when we had the second dose with the guide, yeah, it was probably about 2.53 g of dried mushroom that we were having to your earlier question. And I guess the next one we had after that was probably with a guide somewhere in the US who didn't use the Syrian. And for me that was not as powerful. Like it was still good.
1:01:07I was still traveling quite a lot. And I think Eldest Huxley famously said you know once the doors of perception open you can never shut them again. And I I I really have found that to be the case. You know what I saw I can never unsee.
1:01:21what I experienced I experienced and it's always going to be there with me and I consider that the greatest gift that I had that and it enables me to get into other transcendental states with meditation and singing and other things much more quickly and easily as well. I can access those states more easily.
1:01:40Would I prefer to do Syrian rue from time to time? Yes, I think so. It is a good thing. Some people find it a bit nauseating. So there are some people who might find that it can make them a bit nauseating.
1:01:53I don't get a headache from psilocybin generally speaking. In fact, a lot of people I know use psilocybin to micro dose to remove their cluster headaches and their migraines. So it's interesting that you said about the headache. So everyone's different of course. Yeah, I think this is a paraselis the dose makes the poison situation in the sense that micro doing certainly there are there's research being done with LSD or analoges of LSD looking at cluster headaches very
1:02:22specifically and a lot of the data I think are compelling when I'm talking about headaches generally what I'm talking about is someone who is relatively naive to psilocybin and this is most people in the beginning innings who are subconsciously or consciously trying to remain in control. And so they have three grams. They also don't know what to expect. So when the facilitator
1:02:51shuffles over and puts a hand on the shoulder and says, "DA, how are you feeling? Are you feeling anything?" You're like, "I have no [ __ ] idea." That's what 99% are going to be like. I don't know if I'm feeling anything. I have no idea if this is the right thing or if I'm just making things up.
1:03:06Yeah.
1:03:07Okay. And then depending also on how seasoned the facilitator is, but they'll they'll say, "Well, if you're going to boost, this is the time to boost."
1:03:14Yes.
1:03:14And again, 99% of newbies are going to be like, "I have no idea if I should boost." But if they're not clearly feeling something and they imagine it's supposed to be this explosive 17th dimension experience, they're like, "Sure, I'll have more." So they have three, then they have six, and then I've seen people have nine, and then some people go like 12. In in a case like that, the likelihood of having headache is non zero.
1:03:40No, no.
1:03:41When you start getting up into like the brood force.
1:03:44Oh, no. Definitely flood doses, which it it happens a lot. I mean, moms also frequently need higher doses than some folks because they're so used to taking care of everybody else.
1:03:55Yeah. And also sometimes a good reason for people to do sessions separately as opposed to as a couple.
1:04:02No, that's true.
1:04:02Uh if someone is like a primary caretaker, sometimes they can be so preoccupied that they don't respond to what is already a saturating dose.
1:04:11That's true. But there is also something very much to be said for doing this in groups.
1:04:15Yeah, I agree with that. We've seen that especially with the just the experience but also then the integration like just sitting in circle together in sacred circles and sharing these experiences with others.
1:04:29It's just you can't bottle it. I mean everyone's experience is so different and it really helps you to understand just how different we really are. But then we're getting the same sort of messages coming back. So even though the material is so different that we're seeing and hearing and feeling, but then our insights coming back can be very similar. And it's amazing how many people, for example, that I've met who've literally stone cold stopped alcohol after having psilocybin experiences and never had it again.
1:04:58Yeah.
1:04:58Remarkable.
1:04:59The group experience, I mean, the group dynamic, I think, is where a lot of gold is. And I think it was either 2014 or 15 where I funded a study at UCSF in Northern California looking at long-term demoralization, effectively a variant of depression in AIDS survivors. And the reason that I funded that study, I mean, there are a number of reasons that I helped fund it. And I'm not sure if I funded the entire thing or part of it.
1:05:28That's beside the point. The point is that the reason it most grabbed my interest is it was the first time I had seen group integration in the study of design. And I could foresee or I would bet at least at that point and I still bet that not only will it be much more cost effective absolutely to deliver some of these medications in group environments because you're splitting the cost of one or two therapists/babsitters slash nurses across multiple people,
1:05:57right? four, six, whatever the number might be. I actually think, and this is certainly borne out in the data from a number of the better Ibegan clinics, the outcomes are better. It's not just that the cost is lower, the outcomes are better and certainly I think the experience is much more nuanced and deeper for the participants. So, I do think there's a lot there. Let me come back to MMA. And every time I say it, I think of mixed
1:06:26martial arts, but I know it's not mixed or magic mushrooms Australia, like that was sort of the secret name behind the real name.
1:06:34Got it. Okay. Right. So, Mind Medicine Australia. What are some of the mistakes that you made, right? Because if someone's listening to this and they're like, "We want to take a playbook. We want to try this in Croatia, we want to try this in Japan, we want to try this in fill in the blank," right? What are some of the cautionary notes or the things on the do not repeat list where you're like, you know what, if I were to do this all over again, I
1:06:59would probably not do X or I would do Y a little differently. What are things that come to mind for you?
1:07:08There's so many things really like it was it was really challenging. I mean though my husband have set up so many charities and and very successfully, this was very difficult because it's a very nuanced area. the whole area of mental health care. There's a lot of people that have a lot of views and there's a lot of vested interests in the space that we hadn't fully appreciated.
1:07:30So there was vested interests from researchers that we were not aware of where researchers were wanting to just keep researching for many many more years. We had people literally confront us and we had a lot of conflict with researchers saying, "Well, we need to research for another five or 10 or more years and we're arguing, but there's patients out there who are going to take their own lives if they don't get other solutions for their mental health conditions." So, there was that sort of thing.
1:07:56Can you say more about that? When you say vested interest, did they feel because they are researchers and in the business of conducting science, did they simply feel that the burden of proof had not been addressed, therefore we need more data or was it, hey, we are receiving funding from I don't know what the equivalent of the NIH is in Australia, but like we have we want to continue to receive funding to research these things. Therefore, the longer the
1:08:25runway we have, the more my job security is assured and therefore dot dot dot. I mean, when you say vested interest, what do you mean?
1:08:33That was the main reason. I mean, that was and you know, look, we understand we've actually invested ourselves as we know you have in trials that are for innovative, you know, new uses for psilocybin, for example. So we've just for example part funded a trial that was for eating disorders and another one I think for obsessivecompulsive disorder and other things like that and we very much believe in supporting new research novel
1:09:01research but we were not fans of replicating trials that had already been you know undertaken at least 5 to 10 or more times in other markets overseas for example end of life anxiety and stress or there was a particular researcher who did a trial with MDMA just for four patients and it took I don't know more than 5 years to complete things like that we just thought well that's statistically insignificant and one of those researchers was one of the people
1:09:30that really attacked us really strongly like it was very very vicious and personal.
1:09:36Yeah. And because Peter and I were not clinicians, that was another reason that people thought, well, who are these people? How dare they come into our space as non-medical people and start thinking that they could actually change the regulations and how dare they think that? And there was a lot of that pushing back like go back into your box, please, you know, you don't belong here.
1:09:59So mistakes though. Mistakes.
1:10:02Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe that was a mistake, you know, but we we had a lot of clinicians around us so that we were also constantly having clinicians presenting with us on webinars and things like that. And we did that deliberately because we didn't want people to say, well, they don't know what they're talking about. And so that we had clinicians always appearing with us when we were presenting, especially if we're presenting to clinicians, governments, and things like that.
1:10:28I think other mistakes we made was that we had a lot of people wanting to work for us who had lived experience of mental illness. And you know, look, we all carry trauma and and I'm no stranger to trauma. I'm the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.
1:10:44And we all are carrying some kind of trauma, whether it's our own, our families, our lineage, collective trauma. We're carrying that. But we were attracting a lot of people to work with us who didn't fully disclose all their conditions up front. And so all of a sudden there might be somebody who was taking alcohol or would turn up to work in a completely drunk state. And this was something we'd never seen before in
1:11:12other charities, you know, and I think people were coming to us cuz they wanted to heal their condition. And to begin with, we wanted to be as inclusive as possible with the people we had working with us. And we still believe in that, but we did have some very difficult experiences early on where I guess we were attracting people who still needed to do more work on themselves rather than working in a highpowered high stress environment. And this is a high
1:11:40powered when you're trying to change the law.
1:11:43Mhm.
1:11:44You need people around you that are very strong and who are resilient because we got knocked down over and over. So I would say you just have to be so resilient and you can't let it all affect you. And even the personal attacks, you know, I found them very hurtful and I'm quite a sensitive person. And there were times where I was literally lying on the carpet crying because it was just too personal. It was just too much. I thought I was tough and had a
1:12:14thick skin before this, enough of a thick skin, but I didn't. And so I had to bring in all the resilience of my forefathers, my maternal grandmother who' fled the Holocaust and all of that started to become very youthful when this was all going on. you can sort of see that anyone who's a pioneer who's trying to drive change is going to be attacked and I hadn't really appreciated that fully before.
1:12:38Does anything else come to mind? So I will underscore what you just said. very common in the broadly speaking psychedelic space which is incredibly understandable but it is like the last or viewed as the last hope for a lot of people for whom every other intervention has failed.
1:12:59Yeah. And for that reason, a lot of people who want to help are in fact, and this is again understandable, interested in trying to mitigate some of their own suffering, but are not in a position where they can sustain the type of intensity or stress or volatility in some of the work that is being done. Right. It's just it's just not the right timing for them. Not the right circumstance. That's right.
1:13:30And I would also say that for those who haven't been exposed to the science, it's another reason why the effect sizes of these drugs on even a small cohort, say 12 people, 15 and whatever it might be, when you see these dramatic reductions in HAMD or whatever assessment might be used for depression or PTSD,
1:13:57what makes it all the more mind-boggling is when you consider how long people have had these diagnoses and how resistant they have been to in some cases dozens of interventions.
1:14:12Yes.
1:14:13And when you look at some of this data, I think it was the phase 2 data from maps looking at complex PTSD, but the average and again I might be misspeaking, but I'm I'm directionally right. the the average length of diagnosis of severe complex PTSD was something like 16 years 17 years right and then you see for a subset of that group complete remission correct
1:14:42after two two or three sessions 68% yeah which also I'm pulling from memory so this this is a dangerous business but when I did the maps when I joined the I kind of audited I didn't do it for any type practice myself, but I sat in on the MAPS international therapist training in Israel, which was the first time actually that any to my knowledge any federal government had paid for or
1:15:10supported at least financially supported this type of training. And my recollection is this was quite a few years ago that after the last administered medicine the remission rate was something like 54 and then 6 months later it climbed to 68. It went up and again we're painting with kind of a rough brush here. Maybe it was 65%. Who knows? But the point is that people who
1:15:38no longer met the clinical diagnosis of PTSD, right? They went from like blind shut, can't work a job to asymptomatic grew over time. It did not go down over time.
1:15:53Yes, that's remarkable. That is a remarkable feature.
1:15:56It's crazy. It's just crazy to think about. Like the durability is so wild. And also, it's not a panacea, right? to your point, it's like if you go back into the same circumstances with the same temptations and the same problems and the same abuse or the same fill in the blank.
1:16:14Mhm.
1:16:14It's not a magic bullet. And you know, I really agree. I'm taking us a little sorry off off on a tangent, but with say Golan who's now at UC Berkeley, used to be at Hopkins and I'm paraphrasing. She can certainly speak for herself. I've had her on my podcast.
1:16:30We do too.
1:16:30I believe these psychedelics open a critical period. critical window.
1:16:36The critical window within which you can change long-standing beliefs and behaviors.
1:16:42That's right.
1:16:43So, I think the integration and I mean I'm working on a bunch of stuff related to this right now actually outside of psychedelics, but when you induce neuroplasticity, right? So, suddenly you've warmed up the clay and you can shape it in a new way.
1:16:56That's right.
1:16:57The question is how do you do that?
1:16:58Right. And it becomes a a lot of the questions relate to behavioral change.
1:17:03They do. How do you set up the systems?
1:17:05How do you set up the nudges? How do you create the incentives? How do you, etc., etc., etc., right?
1:17:10And because it's not a foregone conclusion that you take these things and you turn out better. It just isn't.
1:17:16No, no, it's not. Though it is, you know, to your point about the increased remissions, when I started presenting on this and I saw that was that New York, I think it was New York Uni or John's Hopkins trial that showed these increasing remissions over time. That is not something that would ever happen with an anti-depressant. Usually what happens with an anti-depressant is you get an original improvement perhaps then it plateaus. Then the doctor says well we might have to try a different anti-depressant or increase the dose.
1:17:44Whereas in this case you have those two or three doses maximum. Then you're having the psychotherapy and your remission is increasing if you engage well with the integration sessions.
1:17:56And that means making those changes in your life that you've just talked about that are really important. Whether that means exercise, nutrition, you know, connecting with people who are important for you to connect with that are not going to bring you back into the old patterns that you were in before.
1:18:16All sorts of stuff about community and social connection, I think, is really important at that stage as well.
1:18:22Yeah, for sure. What do you think contributed to the TGA agreeing to the offer to have David Nuts speak to their employees? Like why would they say yes?
1:18:31Cuz sitting here in the US, if I were just to like ring up the 800 number at the FDA and be like, you know what, got a pitch for you.
1:18:40I don't think it would go anywhere. Now, sure, I wouldn't call the 800 number, but even still, it would not be easy for me to get a yes to create a webinar. Look, I had the mobile number of the head of the TGA. I was lucky to have that. Somehow I got that.
1:18:57Sure. He or she loved that.
1:18:59I don't think he loved me having his number. I didn't bug him too much, but if things started to get roadblocked and we could see they were getting roadblocked, we might give them a call and say, "What's going on here now?" Or there was all sorts of governance things that would happen. Like it was really important, for example, that they publish all the submissions, but it took them a while to do so. At the moment, by the way, we have a new submission in.
1:19:22You can see our submission for end of life stress and anxiety with psilocybin.
1:19:27We're trying to extend the psilocybin to end of life stress and anxiety because, you know, virtual assisted dying is legal in Australia. So, if people can do that, then why can't they find peace through psilocybin in Australia? So, that's part of our argument. You can see our argument on the TGA page and in fact on our website on Mind Medicine Australia, you can see all our submissions for these medicines to the TGA. But I
1:19:54think really we were speaking to him. It was getting to the really pointy end of the final really probably what would have been the final chance to get there and and we'd put in the opposing submission to the interim decision. So the interim decision said no, we'd put it in. We asked him if we could present that we were were bringing David Nut to Australia. So he said yeah. And then as I said 10 to 15 people he thought would turn up and then it was 140 140
1:20:23and not a dry eye in the room after Vanessa spoke like literally everyone was in tears. And I think it was really her. I mean David was brilliant. Of course he was brilliant but I think it was her. I think it was the fact that people could see a real life example.
1:20:37Well, this is what's going to happen if we keep denying people access to these treatments. This then we could have many more Franco occur. And of course, there's many people who are taking their own lives because they've given up hope.
1:20:51And we want to give people hope and we want to give them their lives back. That's the most important thing in the world we could have ever achieved.
1:20:59What are some of the biggest challenges still now in current day or that you foresee in the next year or two? I just don't know what the picture currently looks like, right? Because it seems like there's a grand kind of realworld experiment of foot in Australia, right? which is like okay we've allowed these authorized psychiatrists and medical professionals to prescribe and supervise sessions with
1:21:27MDMA and psilocybin and is the jury still out in the sense that the government's like after x period of time we're going to review all this data and determine whether we want to continue this or not or is is that not the case is it open-ended I mean I believe it's open-ended so we do still keep having an ongoing dialogue with the TGA. So we write periodically to the TGA about some of the bureaucratic roadblocks. So there are some bureaucratic roadblocks. For
1:21:56example, for quite a while until a few months ago, there was a rule in place that only clinical psychologists could be the lead therapist. So you know there's two therapists that usually sit in the dosing with a patient.
1:22:10Well, there was this criteria that it could only be a clinical psychologist. So we then put in a letter saying all the reasons why it shouldn't just be a clinical psychologist, why it should be other psychologists, but also other practitioners.
1:22:24And so then that did get widened. And every time there's a roadblock, we write letters to the TGA showing the evidence and research why that should not be the case. And if necessary, we'll have a call and we'll keep just trying to open the door. Not to open it fully. That's not our goal at all. We believe that these treatments should be done in very careful ways because some of the patients going in for these treatments, in fact the majority going in for these treatments above ground in
1:22:53clinical environments are very sick and they need to be very well cared for. And so they need to have proper screening. They need to have top most well-trained clinicians sitting with them. and they need to have extremely good integration processes and tools to go back into their lives and to get real remissions.
1:23:17But we don't believe that there should be overly ownorous constraints. So now we've also got a situation in Australia where all of the clinics are videoing the sessions. So there could be an argument in the future that says that one clinician with a patient if there's a video there as well might be sufficient. There's also group therapy that we're looking at and we've we've already started to look and I think some
1:23:45authorized prescribers might have put in protocols that might have group integration in their protocol. So we're very supportive of that. Other roadblocks of course is the cost. So there's still a lot of patients who can't afford the upfront costs. So we need to let them know about our patient support fund. We need to let them know that Medybank is providing their gold members who qualify for these treatments with pretty much the full cost of the treatment which is really significant.
1:24:14How much is the cost off the rack at the moment? So at our clinic, so we've started a clinic too with another listed company called Inconex and our clinic is called Mind Medicine Australia.
1:24:26Listed meaning publicly traded company.
1:24:29Yeah. So we as a charity have a half share in this clinic with a publicly traded company and it's called Mind Medicine Australia Clinic and it's in Abbottzford, a suburb of Melbourne and we're using that as a real test case to see how to build a best practice clinic.
1:24:44So what what do we need to do? how much supervision needs to be supplied. We also use it as a wonderful resource where some of our clinicians that we've graduated through our training course can go and gain supervision and experience as well as in the other 20 clinics around Australia. So it's like we're developing this sort of clinic in a box, you know, protocol, I guess.
1:25:07How much does that cost per person if they depending on the compound maybe? So we actually at our clinic only start with people at one dose. So if a person decides after one dose that it's really not for them, they can withdraw because in speaking with our authorized prescribers, they preferred that protocol and we don't want to force people through it if they really don't want to do it. And money is an issue. So it starts at about $8,000 Australian dollars, which is about 5,000, let's say, US dollars
1:25:37for one treatment including the screening. Then the next one, yeah, probably up to about $15,000 for three doses and integration.
1:25:48And that's the same for either compound.
1:25:51Yeah, I think MDMMA might be slightly more because it may be up to three doses where psilocybin's up to two and that includes the 3 to four months of integration following the medicine treatments as well. So, it's about a 3 to four month course that is costing maybe up to about $25,000 Australian dollars, about say $15,000, something like that.
1:26:14It's expensive, but it's not insane, right? And I know it's out of reach of a lot of people, but if people view it, if they think of it as a pill, I'm taking one pill and it cost me $5,000. And it's like, okay, their reference point is walking into a pharmacy, let's just say here in the US, they have their insurance and the copay is five bucks or 10 bucks and they get their 30-day supply. So, they're like, "Wait a minute, how is it possible?" But when you realize, if it were to be framed, I'm not saying this is the way to frame it, but it's like, this is 3 to four
1:26:43months of very well-designed therapy, and by the way, you also happen to get a few powerful drugs along the way.
1:26:51Yes. Then people be like, "Yeah, okay, great." But when they think of the drug first, they're anchored to a reference they understand, which is probably some very lowcost prescription that they get.
1:27:02Yeah.
1:27:0290 days at a time.
1:27:03No. Well, I mean, it is really important to say that the majority of that cost is therapeutic time like the medicine. So, we've enabled the medicines to come into Australia at the cheapest possible price. Like the medicine is like a tiny little percentage of the cost that I've just mentioned. M it's all about therapeutic time and because there's two therapists involved for some periods of that time that's even more which is why one of the reasons that we and not only we others around the world also say well if there's a video in the room does it
1:27:33always have to be two therapists I mean but it is a long treatment time as we know so a dosing session can take 5 to 6 hours so maybe there needs to be some overlap there is there anything in process or have you guys thought about methyline alone. You know, Tren transcend Therapeutics was recently acquired. I don't know what the parent company is now planning with methylone, but methylone is, for lack of a better descriptor, it's
1:28:00like the softer, gentler cousin of MDMA who just comes in for a quick hello as opposed to sitting down for dinner.
1:28:07I love that.
1:28:08It's like a 45 to 60 minute hello as opposed to 4 to 6 hours. M and as you mentioned it's like the cost of well my opinion right I mean the cost of synthesizing and purchasing these things should not be exorbitantly high although there are there are certain and depending in where you where you are in the world there are some companies that would like to make that as expensive as possible but that's a whole separate conversation absolutely but putting that aside putting kind of
1:28:37pharma shenanigans to the side like the pills shouldn't be expensive not at all the materials but The therapist time is expensive very so if you could look at comparing say methylone and its effects which have been quite impressive I mean looking at non psychotherapy coupled dosing right because maps like us at the time got itself into all sorts of
1:29:06tangles because the FDA on our side does not know how to think about standardizing or regulating psychotherapy. So if the drug is inextricably tied to psychotherapy, the FDA is kind of on some level forced to respond with we don't know how to deal with this, so we're going to say no. I mean, there's much more to the story because that's not their expertise.
1:29:30They're a medicine scheduling bureau, right? So then transcend said, "Well, let's just look at what happens with the dosing of the medication." And even if you had though a therapist in the room, which is not a bad idea, then you have something that is possible within a 60 minute.
1:29:48Yes.
1:29:49Or let's just call it 60 to to 120 minute window, right? Which should ostensibly lower the cost really substantially. And I know this probably wouldn't convince the TGA, but like my perspective too is like look, you're not tripping your balls off when you're on methylone or MDMA. Frankly, not at all. Most people could have a conversation. They're probably not going to want to work on a computer, but there's not as much distortion as you would experience on something like psilocybin.
1:30:18So, when you have, let's just say, six people in a room plus one therapist or two therapists, you also for each patient have five other witnesses.
1:30:29Yes. They're in an altered state, but it's not like they're seeing goblins doing jumping jacks all over the room. It's not that kind of perceptual distortion.
1:30:40I'm all for that, Tim. I mean, like, so one of the things that I think I recently mentioned to you that I went to Dave Asper's Beyond event in Austin, Texas, and there happened to be a stand there for Cana, and I don't know if you're familiar with Cana.
1:30:54Cana African, I believe.
1:30:55Yeah. It's an African medicine. It's not cannabis, but it's like an African leaf or something with a K. Anyway, and I came across through a friend of mine who was there a substance called Cana Lift. I think it's called Lyft. And it's like MDMA, but it's shorter lasting. It only lasts a couple of hours, maybe 90 minutes to 2 hours. And I just thought actually and it's natural as well, which I really like. And I thought to myself, wow, this
1:31:24is really good. I I agree with you. I mean, obviously ketamine is being used a lot and people go in and and have a ketamine session certainly in the US. It's not as common in Australia, but a lot of therapists in the US are using ketamine for depression. But the problem about ketamine is that it needs to be used over and over in most cases.
1:31:46Even bigger problems, it has very, very high addiction potential.
1:31:50Correct.
1:31:51I've seen a lot of lives unravel because of ketamine. has its place. If there's acute suicidality, I do think that IV or intramuscular ketamine has a place, but it is very easy to abuse.
1:32:05Yeah, very, very easy to abuse. Yeah, the Ken check out check it out. Yeah, I'll send you a link.
1:32:11I took a look at it quite a few years ago. The synthetic allnatural thing is an interesting conversation just because I would say that I am interested in all natural to the extent that you might be throwing some of the baby out with the bathwater when you move to say Ibegan from Ibogga, right? And I certainly know a number of researchers and certainly plenty of practitioners who would take that side of things
1:32:41simultaneously. Part of the reason scientists and pharma like to isolate is because you have a less in some instances a less muddied picture of things. You have fewer variables. But in the US for instance, I don't know what the status is in Australia or depending on who you ask.
1:33:01Oh yes.
1:33:01Was viewed as this savior of the people who want to get off of opioids and prescription drugs. But metrogenine or metroinine which is found inratom. Lo and behold if you use it chronically can put you into a dependent state where you need rehab to get off of cratom.
1:33:23That's crazy. Right.
1:33:24Right. And I know people who run rehabilitation clinics and so on. And like if there were maybe there is a chart I don't know where you would find it but anecdotally talking to people who run these type of clinics or people who run clinics offering different services part of which is detoxing from various types of drug dependencies like is up and to the right it's like AI stocks they are matched. I would tell people all natural can be very powerful and it
1:33:52also can be in some cases poorly understood because there aren't as many financial incentives if there isn't something that can can be patented, right? And like we get into very slippery territory here. But I would also say in the case of ketamine, like I'm not a doctor. I'm not giving medical advice, but if you look at say Johnson and Johnson and Spado, sure it's esetamine, but they've created a maintenance model with this drug. But I would say if you suffer from a serious diagnosed mental illness
1:34:22then obviously follow the advice of your doctor. But if you are considering different options and you happen to be in the US and one of the few legal options available is ketamine, I would encourage with the input of your doctor to look at less chronic use as an option.
1:34:41Definitely. And you've got Phil Wolson and others who have certainly written a lot about this. You have John Crystal at Yale who's looked also at IV and intramuscular use of ketamine where you may just need a few rounds, right? You may just need one round.
1:34:57Well, you might just need to have psilocybin therapy instead.
1:35:01Well, there's that, too. Yeah, we have some legal checks to make.
1:35:04Oh, no. I get I get that at the moment.
1:35:06At the moment, for sure. I mean, look, ketamine would not be in my top five list, nor mine. However, there are two huge caveats there. Look, it is one of I believe it's still on the World Health Organization's most essential medicines list. This is a very useful drug as an anesthetic. I mean, it's a dissociative anesthetic. So for instance, if you have any history of using alcohol, even to take the edge off, certainly if you have alcoholism or alcoholism in your family,
1:35:33ketamine is like the dissociative turning off of feelings you don't want that you get from alcohol times 100. Ketamine that is part of the reason why it can be so addictive. However, if you have chronic pain, this is I know not within the sphere of mental health, but for certain types of chronic pain, ketamine is incredible.
1:35:55Yes.
1:35:55In terms of very few rounds with very durable benefits.
1:36:00Yeah.
1:36:00And in fact, I really dislike ketamine in general. My subjectively, like personally, it's not really my thing.
1:36:07But I was getting so many questions about ketamine. This is probably 10 years ago. And I decided, well, look, I'm going to follow basically the Yell protocol and I'll get the whatever it is.5 milligs per kilogram or whatever the magic doses that everybody took as gospel, even though it was like an informed kind of guess on the part of John Crystal and his colleagues, whatever became the dogma, I was like, "All right, I'll do at least one, probably two two week sequences of
1:36:36infusions, so at least I can speak firsthand to the subjective effects. and the experience, right? Like the phenomenology of the experience. I'll be able to answer some questions about it.
1:36:48Mhm.
1:36:49And went in and the clinicians were good. This was in Austin. And you have to be careful. There are a lot of fly by night operations, but I did my homework. I kind of know how to vet this stuff.
1:37:00And the clinicians were so baffled by me because I went in and I had no anxiety, no depression, right? And each time I went in, which was multiple times a week, they would ask me to fill out this assessment to determine my current state, my how they would score me for anxiety and depression. And I just kept getting more anxious, not really depressed, but more and more anxious and
1:37:29maybe mildly more depressed. And the reason was I had a really, really busy two weeks.
1:37:35So, it's like I'm preparing for a podcast with LeBron James, but then I have ketamine and then I forget my backpack and like my short-term memory is [ __ ] and I'm like misplacing all this [ __ ] and then have constipation so it's like hard to sleep and I'm like this stuff is terrible. Right? So, every time I went in I was getting more anxious and they're like this is very confusing for us. We really don't know how to how to make any sense of this.
1:37:57And I got to the end of it and I was like god that stuff is weird and it is not for me. I was just like look I can handle it. like I went like I pushed it with a lot of clinical supervision. The IV allows you to do some very interesting things that you can't do with intramuscular. Intramuscular like you you hit the golf ball and the golf balls hit like you're gone. But with the IV you can dial it up and down and experiment with things like interacting with the therapist at different dosages.
1:38:26Have you heard about IVD 5me?
1:38:28I know quite a bit about IV NNDMT where they extend it out to about an hour. There's been some research at Imperial College. Would I do it? I think I'd be open to it.
1:38:39I don't think that's automatically a free lunch. I mean, that's gonna be pretty intense.
1:38:44Yeah.
1:38:45But, you know, I'd be open to it. On the ketamine side though, the reason I brought up this whole story preparing for podcasts and getting anxious and being kind of annoyed that I had to go in and do this thing because I'd committed to this experiment is I I finished my first series of infusions and I was like, "All right, never doing that again. That was a total waste of time." And then I noticed about a week later I had this really horrible pain in the like middle of like my
1:39:14thoracic musculature in my kind of midback. And this had been from a horrible injury 15 years ago, something like that. You where I basically almost tore my lad off my back. Really bad accident. And it had plagued me ever since. And I would sit there and I'd be like, "Oh," and sometimes I couldn't turn, sometimes I couldn't cough, sometimes it would hurt to breathe deeply. I mean, it was really this chronic plaguing injury. And after
1:39:42I had that whatever it was, week or two weeks of infusions, that went away, never came back.
1:39:51Wow.
1:39:51And that is one of the indications for ketamine is certain types of chronic pain. And I was like, "Holy [ __ ] amazing." I was like, "Okay, there's a place for it." That was worth it.
1:40:02Wow.
1:40:03I really didn't like that experience, but it was worth it. And I do know multiple people who are like, "I'm going to blow my head off tomorrow."
1:40:11And they go in and they have an infusion or intramuscular injection and at the end of the session, they're like, "I don't know what I was so upset about." I mean, they're able to look at it in a dispassionate, more well, dissociated obviously capacity, right? They're almost an observer of their own state and the stories they were telling themselves. So for that also I think it's useful. But yeah, personally it wouldn't be on my top five.
1:40:37No. No. Well, it's not being used much in Australia, but I feel there's going to be huge shifts globally over the next few months and that there's going to be psilocybin probably through compass pathways and sona will be registered. I think is it resilience? What's the name of maps now? I can't remember now, but they keep changing names. I think it's resilient. resilience. I think that's going to come through as well, especially given that the president's given that executive order. I think that potentially by mid next year, who knows
1:41:06what's going to be registered and yeah, the whole landscape's probably going to change and a lot more countries hopefully going to be following Australia and hopefully there'll be less bureaucracy and we can have way more people being treated. Yeah, a lot of people may not realize that Australia is a very fascinating landscape when it comes to conducting certain types of science and globally
1:41:34a lot of clinical trials from companies around the world have gone to Australia and China.
1:41:42Those are kind of like the two places you want to do it. That's kind of fun for people to check out if they if they weren't aware like there is a global market for conducting clinical trials and Australia is one of the best places.
1:41:54Yeah.
1:41:54I wanted to come back to advice for advocates in other countries and things you might do differently. And you were mentioning that you're very persistent which you are.
1:42:09You and your husband. So here's another quote from this is abc.net.au. Hey, you and I think you'll get a good chuckle out of this. All right, so here's the quote. I actually had to on several occasions say to staff, look, I know they're driving you crazy, put their approaches in the way they work to one side. Think about the medical criteria and the scientific criteria and the regulatory issues only. And I also counseledled Mind Medicine at some stages that they were perhaps working against their own case by frankly being so aggressive. I lost count of the number of emails they would have sent
1:42:38staff here. I think this is Professor Scarat.
1:42:41Yeah, that's right. told background briefing that he did provide MMA with the names and public phone numbers of the chief health officers in each state.
1:42:48Hilarious. The committee of experts and state regulators that advised TJ were similarly displeased by MMA's outreach according to a TGA in so you're a force of nature. You guys have have accomplished some amazing things. Were there any cases of pushing too hard?
1:43:04Right. Because there are cases when people like push with me. If they hit me from like 17 different directions, I'm like don't like it. to brute force and I'm like blacklist I won't engage right which is not to say that you should have done anything differently but I am curious like are there cases where you're like all right I should have waited an extra week I should have approached that slightly differently how do you think about that I think in this case I mean certainly I know that me personally
1:43:32can be too pushy at times and I've had to really scale that back and one of the things that the medicine has taught me is to be more accepting and I have become more accepting, you know. So, if a door or something doesn't seem as open as I first thought it was or if it really feels really shut, I just don't go back and knock on the door as much anymore and I just go, "Okay, there's other opportunities. I'll go to them instead and I'm going to go for the lowerhanging fruit." So, that's that's
1:44:00just me personally nowadays. I'm much less driven about that than I was. And I think it's better.
1:44:08Mhm. But in terms of this particular campaign, I don't really think that anything less would have been enough.
1:44:16And I feel that we had to keep pushing. And even my husband who's less pushy than me, he's English, you know, I'm Jewish. I've got a lot of hutbah. You know, I was I was brought up with a grandmother who invented the first foldable umbrella.
1:44:31She was a woman in the 1920s doing stuff that was way ahead of her time. But even he says that you know we had to do what we had to do. We had to just keep pushing and moving forwards and we did have to knock on every door and we had to use every bit of the networks that we developed over decades to achieve what we achieved. But it was all done because of the data and science. It wasn't done because we pulled some
1:44:58favor. That was not the case at all. We all have this in our lives. We all have people in our lives who are suffering immensely and we owe it to them to push for the most safe and effective options available and a lot of safe and effective medical options are not available. They're being withheld from the public and this is only one example of that. And so we all have to push as I say we all have to become our own chief
1:45:27medical officers. We have to work out what's going to work for us, what's going to make us whole and healed so that we can live our best lives possible. And for me, that's the reason why I'm here. You know, like I saw an article by you. I read it. I immediately felt inspired.
1:45:46And that has led to everything else that we've created. So, you know, we blame you entirely for all this and all the plaque that we cough.
1:45:56Yeah. You know, I can say this now because like to see that part of the journey.
1:46:01It's just extraordinary, you know, and we receive these letters now where people are just like, you gave us our lives back.
1:46:07Yeah.
1:46:08We've given people their lives back, Tim, and that's something that you should be so proud of because if it were not for you, I wouldn't have even known about this. Certainly not at that time. I would have probably discovered it at some point. But there's always a thing about timing.
1:46:22Yeah.
1:46:22And that was really important timing.
1:46:25And we all have to just if we really believe that something has to be done, then we just have to go for it and we can't let anything stop us. I've told you the story in my TED talk, how singing together changes the brain. I was told as a 14-year-old girl never to bother having singing lessons by my best friend. I talk about in my TED talk and one of the great things I learned was to never let anyone snatch your dreams away.
1:46:51And you can't.
1:46:53Yeah. too important.
1:46:55Thank you for saying that, everything you just said. And man, we are here for such a short time, right?
1:47:02It's like you got to get after it or not, but you got to do your thing, I suppose. Tanya, so nice to spend time with you. Thank you for making the time.
1:47:12My pleasure.
1:47:13Where would you like people to find you and Mind Medicine Australia? And do you have any asks of the audience? Is there anything you're trying to accomplish at the moment where maybe there's someone listening who may actually be able to help or hold the keys to something?
1:47:29Well, I have a couple of asks. So, one of them is that we have our patient support fund and we're a registered charity. So, all donations to us depending on what tax vehicle you're giving through can be taxdeductible where so we have full deductible gift recipient status. Certainly in Australia, we also have people from overseas who donate to us regularly. And our goal is to raise at the moment $2.5 million so that we can really enable a lot more patients to have access to
1:47:59these treatments who otherwise couldn't afford the upfront cost. So we're talking here about helping support veterans, first responders, single moms, people who demonstrabably can't afford the upfront costs of these treatments.
1:48:11That's my first ask. would people find if they're interested in considering that is that mindmed medicineustralia.org.au is that the place to go or yeah mind medicineaustralia.org.auu and then the second thing is if you're a clinician or therapist out there and you really would like to work in this field and you want to learn from the world's best well we have the most extraordinary global faculty that is teaching our certificate in psychedelic assisted
1:48:41therapy. So people like Bessel Vanderol, Gabbor Mate, who I know is a great friend of yours, Tim and mine as well.
1:48:47People like Bill Richards and David Nut and Rick Doblin and all those people are on our faculty, Jim Wolson, other lots lots of people that you know, Wayne Davis. So these people you can study with through our worldleading certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies. And our next intakes are in February and July of 2027. Our current intakes full. All our intakes get booked out, but we really welcome you and we have people coming from all over the world to study with us. So, we've got people from Switzerland, you know,
1:49:17Europe, the US, Canada, even from the United Arab Emirates and Asia. Now, we feel there's huge markets potentially opening up in Asia and the UAE.
1:49:28And so, we're seeing quite a few clinicians coming into our training from those regions.
1:49:34And just look us up. We've got an amazing website. It's an amazing learn section. Everything you could ever want to learn about psychedelic assisted therapies is on our website. Tim, I've got an ask for you, but you don't have to say yes, and that is we'd love you to join our advisory panel, but we can talk about that offline. We also have an extraordinary webinar series, and it's free. And the next one's on eating disorders. We just had Dr. Peter Lavine and before that we had Dr. Gabbor Mate.
1:50:01And is that Peter Lavine walking the tiger?
1:50:04Peter Leavine. Yeah, that one. And later in the year, we've got Bessel Vanderolk and I think we've got a Dick Schwarz one coming up as well. So, we have this extraordinary faculty. We have extraordinary people working with us.
1:50:16And just reach out. We're really friendly. We have a huge community and we're building a movement that's building this massive other movement that we just we just need a massive movement globally that is saying we all need to have access to treatments that can heal us. But bigger than that, our bigger reason for being here was to make sure that the worried well that people like you and I, Tim, could get access to these treatments to raise our
1:50:45consciousness and to expand our beings and for us to really learn and become curious because I think one of your questions is commonly, what would you put on a billboard? And I would put be curious and these medicines really help us to be curious. And if we can awaken people's curiosity in a world that is so dominated by AI, we just need to go back and be curious and start to ask our own questions, not just to AI, but to
1:51:15ourselves and to what's here.
1:51:18So I would say to everyone, let's just keep asking questions and not outsourcing ourselves to all of the chat bots and all of the robots. Yeah. Well, sometimes it's a good idea to take a break from going outside for entertainment. Go inside for Entertainment. Entertainment.
1:51:44There's a lot to be curious about.
1:51:46There's so much inside. So much inside.
1:51:48And that was probably the greatest gift of the medicines was it really taught me to explore my inner terrain.
1:51:54Mhm. I'd always been such an extroverted I was very introverted as a child but then I was pretty extroverted as a performer and I still you know I'm pretty extroverted person but for me to be able to go inside and to actually explore every single night I lie in bed and I just explore what's going on inside I couldn't have done that without these medicines they gave me that yeah it's a category of catalysts that
1:52:21that is very interesting many people who I think listeners would associate with meditation actually never took up meditation until they had their mind changed the cosmic egg cracked open by psychedelics which is not to say you have to start with psychedelics you don't but many of them have been greatly informed by psychedelics you know Ramdas certainly being one primary example that you mentioned and
1:52:51there are many many others well one of the great things that he said to us when we were with him was we're all walking each other home.
1:52:57And I think that's one of the really most important things that these medicines teach you that really we're all we're all here together. We've come from whatever that place is. We're going back to whatever that place is. And we're here for a really short time to your point. And so why can't we all just reach out a hand, get out from behind our boxes and screens and start walking each other home? So, I write songs about that.
1:53:25That's amazing. It's too bad I never got to meet him. I did watch the documentary about sort of the last chapters in his life. What an incredible human.
1:53:33Amazing. Becoming nobody. Have a look at that one.
1:53:36Becoming nobody. Exactly. Tanya, thank you so much for the time and thank you for doing what you do. Please say the same to your husband for me. and the website. I'd like you to add anything else that you'd like to, but mindmed medicineustralia.org.au. That's for the trainings for the resources. If you want to consider donating and supporting this nonprofit, you can find everything. My understanding is at that website.
1:54:05Yeah, I have a personal website, too.
1:54:07So, that's Tanya Dong. T A N I A D E O N G.com. My personal website. Please feel free to reach out on any platform. I like LinkedIn, but there's lots of others. And I just want to just really say to you, Tim, that I just want to say a huge shout out to you for everything that you've done, not in just in this field, but for your willingness to try to question, to be
1:54:34curious, and to to really try to hack yourself and to find things that you can share with others that are going to work for everybody. And honestly, if it were not for you, and you can see this in multiple interviews that I've had, probably we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. Australia probably would not be leading the world in this field. And I just want to thank you for all the resources that you give to people every single week. I love your
1:55:04five bullets.
1:55:05Thank you.
1:55:06I open a huge testament to you and you just as you said when we first met you never know where these things are going to end up but I want you to know that your work helped change a whole nation and not only a whole nation but because our nation has changed that has changed the whole world and there's there's a real possibility now there's a real hope for everyone that we can actually heal some of the immense suffering in our world and that brings tears to my is just even
1:55:36saying it because we've seen the suffering and we have seen as you would all the time the most devastating letters and emails from people who've they just deserve a chance.
1:55:47Yeah, I do.
1:55:49And that was the reason we did this. And I think in spite of us being pushy, our hearts were always in it for the right reasons.
1:55:57Mhm.
1:55:58And I think people realized that.
1:56:00Well, thank you Tanya. Thank you for saying that. And you're right that often times I mean the fible Friday right I've been writing this newsletter for god I don't know 10 15 years however and do it every week and sometimes I'm just like is anybody reading this I really am not sure it just gets fired off and because of the format I'm just kind of like I really have no idea what is resonating what is landing so I have to
1:56:28just follow my own curiosity and just like if I find it compelling if for whatever reason, even if I can't justify it, it's tugging on me in some way, I'm like, "All right, look, maybe there's at least one other person out there who might resonate in the same way. Let me give it a shot." I mean, there are 8 n billion, whatever the number is, people on this planet. There has to be one other person who speaks English this might get to. And thank you for saying all of that. really admire you and what
1:56:57you've done with your husband and everybody associated with with MMA and you know the people who also said yes at the TGA and everybody involved. Mhm.
1:57:07It's such a beautiful story and the fact that you were an outsider, that you weren't steeped in this from day one and you were able to just experiment and test and cold email and offer to sing and fly to freaking Wisconsin, the land of cheese. Like most people are like Wisconsin, isn't that where people eat a lot of cheese? and to move mountains, right, bit by bit by picking the right
1:57:35place to stick that Archimedes lever. It's a really inspiring story. And part of the reason I wanted to, and I've already said this in one way, but have you on this podcast was because I think there are many people out there who underestimate how much they can do if they just kind of increase the elbows and get after it. And it's like, yeah, you're going to make tons of mistakes. Yeah. I'm sure you'll piss somebody off.
1:58:00Yes. Yes. Yes. And but you might also just make a huge thing happen.
1:58:05Exactly. And do you know what? You never know until you ask. And most people never ask.
1:58:10Yeah.
1:58:10And you know what? All you have to do is ask. And it's amazing how many people say yes. Like literally just about no one has said no to us to to join our advisory panel. Literally just about no one we've ever asked to do a webinar has said no. People want to support good causes and good, you know, good pioneering efforts. We so need this. We are living in a world that is becoming more and more boxed in.
1:58:34Yeah.
1:58:35So, we need all of you out there to just grab your dreams, ask for help, and then set them on fire. Like, just not in a bad way. Sorry. Set them on fire in a really good way.
1:58:47I think I think they get it. Yeah. Yeah. No arson endorsement on this podcast.
1:58:51I'm not very good. I always mix my metaphors like that. But so TLDDR, get after it, folks. We're all going to be dead and dust no time flat.
1:59:01So exactly. What have you got to lose?
1:59:03Seriously, what have you got to lose?
1:59:05Ask for it.
1:59:06People can find you at mindaustralia.org.auu and your personal website, which you've mentioned, your name.com. And to everybody listening, we will have show notes as per usual at tim.blog/mpodcast. Just search Tanya. I believe you are the only Tanya that I've had on the podcast. Tia, and you'll be able to find everything we talked about, all the people, all the documentaries, all the organizations, etc.
1:59:31Yeah, it's all there.
1:59:32We'll put it all in the show notes. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary. Just try to be a little bit kinder than is necessary.
1:59:41Loving kindness to others, but also to yourself. That voice that you put out should echo if you're being compassionate. The voice that goes in. Do your best. I know it's hard. Thanks for listening everybody. Thanks for tuning in.
Insights
Tim Ferriss
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- How to Change Your Mind — book by Michael Pollan. Tim Ferriss highlighted it as having “really shifted the tectonic plates” of what was possible for psychedelics in the US and elsewhere, saying that a very high percentage of prominent philanthropists and supporters trace their interest to it as a tipping point.