Australian Bush Doofs and Psychedelic Commercialization (w/ Dr. Sam Douglas & Rich Haridy)

Russell, Mike, and Neşe sit down with journalist Rich Haridy and Dr. Samuel Douglas to discuss bush doofs, Australian psychedelic commercialization, Entheogenesis Australis, Haridy's new book, and more.

Footnotes:

"Trip Reports: Stories From An Australian Psychedelic Renaissance": https://unsw.press/books/trip-reports/#buy-links

"Report #3: Bryan Cranston does psychedelic therapy on Malcolm in the Middle" (Trip Reports): https://www.tripreports.com.au/malcolm-in-the-middle-cranston-psychedelic-therapy/

The Ethical Trip: https://theethicaltrip.beehiiv.com/

The Ethical Trip Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheEthicalTrip

The Psychedelic Syndicate (Psymposia): https://www.psymposia.com/psychedelic-syndicate-executive-summary-silicon-valley-maps-lykos-mdma-fda-billionaires/

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:00] Or people are talking about psych, you know, ethics in psychedelic spaces in therapy or in at retreats or whatever, but it's always like the framing is always super safe. If it if it's made it onto LinkedIn, you know that that the framing is often going to be it's very safe. It's almost exclusively people who have no actual expertise in ethics. It's always largely, you know, capitalism compatible and it's always largely, you know, medicalization therapy compatible. I starting to think it's been kind of co-opted and people had sort of gone, oh, look, there's an opportunity here. You know, cynically, I think people have seen gone, there's an opportunity here to make some money. To me, the biggest shift has been in just this conversation about medicalization and the way that psychedelics have been deeply boxed in to a container that seems like the acceptable way that they can be talked about.

[00:58] It's very much in a this person took it because they were sick and it was a medicine and it was for healing. And so there's this been push to kind of make psychedelics acceptable by treating them as a medicine. And I feel like that whole narrative over the last 5 to 10 years has been kind of very reactionary because of the taboo space that psychedelics have been in for so long. I kind of I understand why so many people in the psychedelic community have kind of nurtured that messaging to try to pull people like my mother-in-law into the conversation. However, I think now in the mid 2020s, we've got ourselves into I think a really tight spot where I worry that we can't get out of this medical container now.

[01:46] And that's what's probably Yeah. the tension point that I'm seeing kind of nowadays is how limited the conversation is now. Welcome to the Psymposia podcast. I'm Russell here today with my colleagues Neşe and Mike and we're joined by some special guests from Australia today, Rich Herity and Sam Douglas. Thanks for being here guys. Hi. Sam is a PhD researcher involved in some psychedelic projects throughout Australia, some ethics projects, and a worldclass meme maker, which I hope we'll get into a little bit later in the interview. Rich is a journalist who's been covering psychedelics internationally and in Australia for the past decade and just released the book Trip Reports.

[02:35] So I wanted to give each of you kind of a chance to introduce yourselves and any history in the psychedelic landscape that you wanted to put on the record here, discuss. Sam, do you want to kick it off kind of how did you get involved in the psychedelic space and what has your history been in the space? Yeah, sure. So, how did I get involved in the space? Well, when I was a child, actually, you know what really actually got me into the space was that when I was 12, I watched a documentary about permaculture. And then that year for Christmas, I demanded that my parents buy me permaculture one, like the permaculture book. And I read that cover to cover. And there was all this stuff in the back about, you know, that introduced me to the idea of like using plants as medicines.

[03:21] And that's what really started me off on that path. And it all just sort of snowballed from there through my 20s getting involved with the Shaman Aralus Forum here, which was kind of the main forum where a lot of plant and psychedelic people kind of congregated online through the early 2000s. While I was doing this, I guess professionally, I did a couple I did couple of degrees, one of them in a PhD in philosophy, and most of my professional work had been teaching ethics at university. And you know psychedelics and plant medicines were were kind of just you know a hobby a thing that I did in my own time or was interested in my own time. And then through 2018 I got involved with the psychedelic society here. And I guess by the time that CO rolled around, I simultaneously lost all my university work and but people wanted to pay for articles about psychedelics and you know and at the same time as that I ended up as president of the psychedelic society

[04:22] Here from 2021 to 2023 and that's sort of my journey. That's a very condensed version of my journey through it. None of it deliberate. It all just kind of happened. I never expected it to be anything kind of open or high-profile or public. I always expected it would just be a kind of a plant nerd thing with other plant nerds and not something where I' I'd write articles and people would pay me money for them and or I' I'd be interviewed by people. So, it's been a strange journey. Yeah, that's awesome. I love on your website for the psychedelic overground project that you run. The hype free copy was one of the things that you advertise on there. And that's a unique thing in the space currently. You you'll be amazed to learn that if you advertise yourself as providing hyperee copy, no one wants to buy it.

[05:12] Yeah. Thanks for the kind of condensed rundown there, Rich. Same questions to you. How did you kind of get involved and interested in psychedelics? and what brought you to kind of where you're at today releasing your book? Real kind of roundabout journey over about 25 years I think like going back to I think the participation in Australian bushf scene kind of in the early 2000s about 25 years ago when the psychedelic community was a real melting pot back then. It was kind of you had you know your psychonauts and your bush people and scientists and everyone was kind of yeah just there in that one place kind of 25 years ago and that kind of stoked my interest in the world and then over the course of yeah the last couple of decades every different path I've taken has just involved I think psychedelic side I worked in kind of the film world for a while and kind of

[06:14] Programmed psychedelic cinema programs and about 10 years ago I started working as a science journalist and pretty quickly I kind of my interest became well then what's the psychedelic side to this and it turned out to be quite a moment to get into science journalism looking at psychedelics because over the last 10 years it all kind of happened So over that last decade, I've been really kind of yeah, watching it more from a journalistic perspective, but yeah, I still kind of have that grounding in the community from 20 25 years ago. So it's been really interesting to watch. Yeah, just the direction things have taken. Cuz if you asked me 20 years ago, 25 years ago on the side of a dance floor that we'd be where we are now, I would have said you were absolutely crazy.

[07:09] So I feel like we're in a weird timeline to be living in. And it's Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of being fascinated to at least have a be in a position where I can kind of watch it through a journalistic lens and yeah see where things are going for our because we have a largely American audience or many Americans that might not know what a bush do is. So if you could just provide some context about that in Australia. Bush doof. Yeah. So that I'd say it in it started in the early 90s. I'd say it's essentially kind of an outdoor party community that initially crossed over in the '9s with the Goa trans phenomenon.

[07:55] So the Goa psychedelic scene kind of crossed a little bit with the psychedelic community in Australia and outdoor parties just started kind of forming very psychedelic infused. There was a few different movements across the ' 90s and yeah, the terminology just became they we called them doofs. We call them bush douffs. And back back in the day it was an adventure finding your way into them. They were usually kind of buried way in state forests where you had to drive an hour or two to just find someone who had set up a sound system in the middle of nowhere. And yeah. Yeah, it was quite a thing. It's still they still happen. But in the age of kind of digital communication and different types of kind of police surveillance, I think the bush would have scene is very different than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

[08:48] People are still taking sound systems into the bush and doing stuff, but they are more often getting caught by authorities and stopped than maybe we used to be. Yeah. Often before they actually started. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a big difference between just like outdoor raves and a bush stuff? No. No. I'd say a b the difference I guess would be location like an outdoor rave could just be it still in the city. I guess you could call it a rave. But generally because the outdoor party scene in Australia kind of came up through psychedelic circles. It was the kind of separation I guess in terminology in Australia would have been kind of like a doof generally was back in the day psychedelic trance and very kind of psychedelic music and then you had the rave scene which was your hard house techno warehouse community and that was yeah that's the rave.

[09:47] So there's there was kind of that difference, although that has all kind of mashed up a little nowadays and you tend to have a massive diversity of music at inner city raves and outdoor bush parties. So there isn't as much of a kind of line between the types of music that they used to be. But back in the day, there was very much bush for sitrants and psychedelic music and raves were for your hard house like kind of techno heads. But everything's mashed up a little nowadays. Yeah, makes sense. What where did the Goa like how did the Goa Scrance community end up overlapping or like influencing Australia? I probably couldn't answer that. I'm not the biggest. My kind of entry into the world was in the early 2000s and I was about probably kind of 10 years too late to be there from the beginning.

[10:42] So I couldn't say what the initial crossover was or how kind of those seedings happened but I do know that yeah kind of go psychedelic trance was definitely kind of that especially in kind of the mid '9s late 90s was the fuel for kind of outdoor Australian parties. thinking of some of the things that like the music that was popular and it could a lot of it I think was just like thinking about my friends who are really you know part of the scene early on or you know peripherilally at least they would say they were part of the scene you know they all listened to listen to they listen to infected mushroom and I think you know I think there was just a lot of things just kind of percolated simply via sort of taste in music if nothing else yeah that Makes sense.

[11:31] Yeah. Thanks for the rundown on the diff scene and your intros there. One of the reason I was pretty excited to have you both on is I think we kind of mentioned before we started recording was we have been sort of circling each other on social media for a long time and there's a lot of hype and a lot of kind of over-the-top people talking about psychedelics right now. And I think there's kind of a sweet spot that's hard to find in people covering the scene that we try to inhabit at Psymposia at least as well of we appreciate psychedelics. There's obviously potential in psychedelics, but being able to point out and identify kind of the issues and kind of strangeness that's happening in the scene right now in the culture in the industry.

[12:16] And I feel like you two are good at that. like you kind of embody that as well of obviously being involved in psychedelic scenes, appreciating psychedelics, but being able to criticize where criticism is due or point out things that are kind of surreal happening in the culture right now. So, do you find that that is perspective that is growing in the scene? being able to kind of identify where things are wrong or a little bit backwards or is is the hype just on kind of a continual upswing. I think there's a couple of different ways to look at this. One of the things I've noticed especially over the last year is that there's been a change in how some people are talking about I mean talking about psychedelic ethics for example ethics in psychedelic spaces there's been a big change in that more people are willing to talk about it but it's how they are talking about it who's talking about it you know what the framing for that is and this is

[13:17] A thing that I this is a thing that I think about a lot and I talk about a lot with my friend Sandra Dresbach I don't know if you you've met her but she's a ethicist who's out in California. We were a couple of the people who helped we were trying to you know we have founded organization I use the word loosely epic the ethical psychedelic international community and that literally just grew out of us people you know us being in the scene and people going this thing happened and it's really awful and you know what do we do just kind of having somewhere for people to talk about things that happened to them and for a long time you know really was no one was doing it for ages there was nothing you know it was you guys there was us kind of beavering way doing our own little sort of behind the scenes work. And lately, the last year, more people are talking about it. More people are talking about psych, you know, ethics in psychedelic spaces in therapy or in at retreats or whatever.

[14:08] But it's always like the framing is always super safe. If it if it's made it onto LinkedIn, you know that that the framing is often going to be it's very safe. It's almost exclusively people who have no actual expertise in ethics. It's people, you know, and to be fair, these are people often with clinical experience, like they have lived practical, you know, practical experience or they have clinical training, which always involves a bit of ethics education at least, but it's always still kind of safe. It's always largely, you know, capitalism compatible and it's always largely, you know, medicalization therapy compatible. Like so it's the people who are saying things that are harder to hear for people who have money are still kind of out on the periphery I feel.

[14:57] So there is a change. It's been talked about more, but it's also I starting to think it's been kind of co-opted and people had sort of gone, oh, look, there's an opportunity here, you know, cynically I think people have seen gone, there's an opportunity here to make some money and they'll offer some [expletive] you know, for people to do so. They can say they can put a little ethics sticker on their website or something and yeah, so I think it's, you know, the conversation is happening more, but the conversation is also being co-opted as it happens more. Yeah. I think to me the biggest shift has been in just this conversation about medicalization and the way that psychedelics have been deeply boxed in to a container that seems like the acceptable way that they can be talked about.

[15:43] So it's yes, I see so many more people talking about psychedelics now. I see my mother-in-law bringing it up in conversation with me, which is crazy because she was is conservative, but it's very much in this person took it because they were sick and it was a medicine and it was for healing. And so there's this been push to kind of make psychedelics acceptable by treating them as a medicine. And I feel like that whole narrative over the last 5 to 10 years has been kind of very reactionary because of the taboo space that psychedelics have been in for so long. I kind of I understand why so many people in the psychedelic community have kind of nurtured that messaging to try to pull people like my mother-in-law into the conversation.

[16:33] However, I think now in the mid 2020s, we've got ourselves into I think a really tight spot where I worry that we can't get out of this medical container now. And I worry that we the conversation is now just becoming a bit boring to me. I guess as someone who kind of follows it as a journalist, it's the research and the conversations now are all regulatory. They're all very narrow. It's all about how to put this into a medical system and just make a new medicine. And that's fine. Like I I'm sure that I think that psychedelics can be useful as a medicine to lots of people. and I think that that is a good avenue to pursue.

[17:22] But I think that if it boxes off all uses of psychedelics and all ways that we can think about psychedelics from ways of community connection and social cohesion and well-being and all of these other things that psychedelics can do, we've kind of just brushed all that aside and went and gone, here is a new medicine for anxiety. Here is a new medicine for depression. And yeah, I think that that that's been kind of the most interesting thing to watch because I know that maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, a lot of us in the community were cheering on these early stages of research because we ourselves were excited that things were a little bit legitimate and there was a genuine excitement.

[18:09] It's kind of after being told for so many years that these things were dangerous and they'll kill you and there's no other uses to finally kind of feel like, oh no, we can show you that they're not. It was an exciting moment 10 or 15 years ago, but I think we're living now in the wake of that, which is massive pharmaceutical companies controlling the clinical trials and taking the substances and there being very little other conversation. And that's what's probably, yeah, the tension point that I'm seeing kind of nowadays is how limited the conversation is now about psychedelics. It opened up and so many more people are talking about it, but it's narrowed into a way that they're talking about it that is probably I think the biggest thing that we need to kind of break up a bit.

[19:00] Totally. I'm so glad you mentioned that. We talk about that a lot and at the end of the psychedelic syndicate, the report we wrote, that's one of our major takeaways that there's just been such an impoverishment of the imagination that is going to like limit the types of psychedelic experiences that people can have without people realizing that they're boxing themselves in because they just think this is what psychedelic therapy is. This is what psychedelics do. And they don't realize that that was just a kind of a limited construction. Yeah. There's also kind of like an overpromise to it in a lot of ways. Like I think one of I was reading some reviews of your book, RIP, Rich, and one of the themes that the writer of this review took away from the book and I appreciated seeing was can and should the weirdness and unpredictability of psychedelics be separated from their potentially healing properties?

[19:46] And I think that's it. It's hard to sell unpredictability and weirdness. And I feel like that's what we're running into is like the whole industry that's bringing this to the mainstream needs to be able to sell a promise that that something's going to change, that they're going to be able to reliably get an end result from psychedelic experiences that is predictable. And I've always sort of questioned that if that's always a possibility with these drugs. Like they are weird and they are fairly unpredictable a lot of times. And I think we lose something in pretending that that's not true. Well, that's why I kind of I see this that's why I feel like the point that we're in is really strange because when you see kind of the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world buying 5 MAO DMT and pushing that forward as a depression medicine.

[20:38] It's kind of crazy to me because you're taking the wildest psychedelic you can and going we can put this in a clinic and give it to your grandma via a doctor's prescription when she has depression. And I don't understand how that's even a possible future reality. Like I cannot see a world in 5 10 years time where millions of people are having 5 MO right like treatments in clinics like that that's just an in like it doesn't even make sense to me. Do you know what I mean? like the repercussions of that like ontologically in terms of what it does to it just it's I can't so I just I'm fascinated watching this from a journalistic perspective going like seeing kind of the business take hold of it and trying to ram it into a direction but I just don't know how you scale up something that just is is essentially

[21:39] Just a bit too strange and weird to contain and too unpredictable as well. I think that was one of the things I've spoken to a lot of researchers and clinicians and MDMA is is is predictable in a way. I can see MDMA kind of fitting medically a bit more, but when you start talking about drugs like psilocybin and LSD and DMT, I'm like they're not nearly as predictable and we don't even kind of have good connectivity on how they get therapeutic effects. So them scaled up to massive societal kind of treatment things. I just I don't know how it works. I don't know how. So I don't know where we're going with this. Well, you're not the only one that works, right?

[22:26] Like the scientists don't know how it works. They there's a lot of studies that are, you know, functionally unblinded and they're publishing these things like it's the truth. You know, there was a study that came out on 5MO about how it's the most it's like a depression cure that is higher than the theoretical possibly most therapeutic thing for depression. And like it's kind of ridiculous and people don't have I mean scientists don't have like sort of the data in the first place at this point. They're just kind of saying it. I think it's part of the deal with the pharmaceutical industry and the medicalization situation.

[23:12] And yeah, it is too weird. It's inherently unpredictable, right? Like you can't predict what's going to happen with these things and you know solving depression. How many people do you know personally that are like more anxious from having done psychedelics? You know what I mean? Like this is what's also like I think the trials have got very narrow. That was one of the things that I've kind of really noticed over the last five or 10 years is that the trials are very much pushing to a regulatory endpoint. So they're extraordinarily narrow now. They're basically kind of like I have a depression scale and I just need to show that after this drug you drop a certain amount of points on that scale. That's all I need to show. And so that's all they're looking at. and they're boxing that in and sending that data across and that and it might be true that you give me a depression scale and I'll give you a rating and then I'll take LSD and 24 hours later you ask me again and I might be five six points

[24:14] Higher and so therefore you can go here's an anti-depressant but you missing so much of what is going on in that person and the changes that are occurring by just so narrowly focusing on those scales. And that's what's I think kind of the biggest concern that I see in the way that kind of pharmarmacology and research is going is that it's missing so much by just narrowly looking at scales and trying to push something over the line because yeah, I'm sure you could yeah easily do a 5 MO study and show it changing people's lives if you're looking at kind of a Madras depression scale or something.

[24:59] It's like yeah yeah the I mean it's actually it's really like it I mean it's funny talking about functional unbinding you know that one because I didn't know a lot about that depression scale in particular until I'd actually you know not being a psychologist you know until I looked it up and realized that this is a scale this is if you could pick a scale where functional unblinding would skew your results you could not have picked a better scale for that because it's the clinician's interpretation. So it's functionally unblinded then of course they're going to go yeah they seem way less depressed right which is a extremely short version of what happens in that you know a lot of what happens in that scale so it is like just methodologically it's the stupidest thing I can see that I'm not even a scientist I'm a philosopher but I can see how that doesn't hang together properly already but yeah like we're just saying it's super narrow and we already know like this is what frustrates me so much is that there's this thing where we just keep on making the same mistakes.

[25:59] We like clinical trials have not changed a lot. We know what clinical trials for pharmaceuticals are like, you know, and for anti-depressants are like they pick someone who's only depressed and who the [expletive] is only depressed, right? Like that is uncommon. Like I'm depressed, but I'm not anxious. That's unusual. That is actually unusual. So you pick this very narrow cohort of people, you run them through the process, it looks like it works. It gets out into the real world. And then, you know, amazingly enough, it doesn't work the same way when you give it to people who aren't just depressed. And we've already seen that with existing anti-depressants. And we know we're going to see this again with psychedelics. So, it's just so frustrating to me that it's the same mistakes.

[26:44] And, you know, but this is what you have to do to get a thing over the line into the market. My personal take, Rich, you know, in terms of 5 MO, I'll believe that hits the market when I [expletive] see it. Like, you know, it's just mind-blowing to me, you know, where we're going to talk about this. It's like no one talks about reactivations, right? Like from 5 MO like and if I could pick one thing that is going to give the FDA the absolute horrors, it's going to be something that's functionally a flashback, right? But yeah, I a lot of these things I mean cynically I think a lot of these things they're just a vehicle for attracting investment. You don't need to you don't need any of these products to ever hit the market to make money off them. You just need someone else to be holding the bag when the whole thing fails.

[27:32] Yeah, so you know that's still cynically my thing. I don't think that you know depending on how you do the regulatory approach for these things like we have in Australia and I've written about it is this idea that someone's going to make people are going to make billions of dollars selling psilocybin to Australia for therapy. No, you're not because only psychiatrists can prescribe it. There's only 4,000 psychiatrists in Australia and only a tiny proportion of them are ever going to prescribe this these medicines. So there just isn't that there isn't there is no economy of scale here in terms of just manufacturing these drugs. So the whole often for me like for here at least in Australia the whole you know people trying to spin up this narrative and there's one company in particular like Optimize Health loves to do you know a press release like you know we're we we're selling psilocybin to Australia for therapy.

[28:25] Yeah. Like there's more psilocybin growing in Melbourne in autumn in people's garden beds. Like it's just from mushrooms. It's the scale is just not there is just no scale there. Oh, we sold 100 doses this year. What are you talking about? That's not something to base a billion dollar company, you know. So the whole scale is just wrong. The whole narrative is just this thing where people are hyping up this thing, but the actual market may never eventuate. it might turn out to be something like Spravado, but equally likely it might not. Yeah, that was a report that I saw recently was like at least in the US there's all these like strip mall ketamine clinics and things like that and they're all kind of prepping to latch on to psilocybin or 5me whichever one kind of makes it through the FDA first or whatever.

[29:15] But I would love to stress a little bit more on like the Australian industry and market and how it compares to the US market because we talk a lot about US regulation and sort of the politics around psychedelics in the US, but you guys are much more familiar with the Australian scene than we are. How does it compare? Are there mostly similarities as far as how it's framed politically or in like regulation and things like that? How does Australia look to the US? Like as far as the focus on FDA regulation in the US, does that transfer to Australia to some degree? Like is it easier for approval at that point in Australia for you all if things were to cross the FDA line in the US? What are kind of your thoughts, I guess, is what I'm asking on the Australian psychedelic industry and scene as it compares to the US right now?

[30:09] I initially was was pretty critical of the Australian regulatory shift back in kind of 2023 when it first happened. And I still am kind of critical of the way it happened and what played out. But I think looking back now it has left Australia in a pretty interesting position because the pathway that MDMMA and psocin were authorized here in Australia currently is a pretty unique kind of system where it's still not technically an approved good. So it hasn't had an application by a drug company kind of come through and formally be approved as a good.

[30:55] So we have this kind of alternate pathway for unapproved goods. What eventuated was this authorized prescriber process which I know that a lot of I've seen a lot of discourse online people seeing the Australian model as a failure because we're kind of three years in and only a few hundred people have been treated and only a handful of psychiatrists can do it and it costs an amount of a decent amount of money for a treatment course and people are kind of looking at this as a failure. But looking at what's about to happen in the United States, I think that probably at some point next year, people are going to look at the Australian model and be like, "Oh, I wish that we'd set things up that way."

[31:40] Because at the very least, the Australian model has been cautiously putting these out through psychiatrists and having to institute a container that does necessitate a large degree of kind of therapy either side of it. And these are kind of things that an FDA REM can't exactly formulate and regulate. So you kind of have people saying that the Australian system costs, you know, $25,000, say, for a course of psilocybin therapy. What isn't spoken about when you say that $25,000 number is that that kind of includes more than a dozen psychotherapist appointments and multiple dose sessions with two people in the room that are trained medical professionals, often a psychiatrist, for eight hours each time.

[32:35] So the human resources of that add up to, you know, $25,000 when you kind of take three, four months and multiple sessions of therapy and multiple dayong things and go, "Okay, that's $25,000, right?" If you just look at Compass's recent announcement on how much they're going to be charging just for the medicine, just for the psilocybin capsule, and they're like, just that capsule is going to be at least 15,000 American just for one capsule of psilocybin. So, here in Australia, for $25,000 Australian dollars, you can get a multi-month process with psychiatrists and psychologists taking you through several doses for the same price that you'll get one psilocybin capsule next year in America.

[33:24] I think the problem that looms for Australia is that if Compass come to Australia and lodge psilocybin as an approved good here then that pricing structure will then implant on top of current systems. So the question then our TGA would have to grapple with on approving that if Compass do kind of come to Australia is well we already have a system where like you said Sam like Octi supply these drugs but the cost of the drugs here are like five six00 bucks a dose maybe it's pretty minimal it's the smallest part of the treatment is the cost of the drug here in Australia at the moment I just wanted to clarify under the system there as it currently stands where are the what is being used to dose?

[34:13] Is it it's is it natural products or are they producing like capsules there as well? It's synthesized I think. Yeah. Although I think that there's a company now that you might know better than me saying there's a company that's producing psilocybin from a natural source but it's still it look it's still purified and it still meets that like the good manufacturing pract like the GMP sort of pract you know sort of level of things but there are some that are doing extractions. It's not full spectrum and so they are still extracting and isolating that particular like molecules but yeah either way it's effectively you know the same thing it's pure psilocybin in a capsule 25 milligrams usually I think 25 milligrams the standard dose you know so that's how that's happening no no mushrooms yet but I mean which is you know in some ways that sucks because it's not mushrooms but on the other hand it's exactly 25 milligrams every time right?

[35:08] You know, you it's one, you know, at least that's one place where you can eliminate unpredictability is that you know what you're giving patients, which is probably good. Yeah. How does that work with like the Australian health care system because I think it's you're singlepayer healthcare, right? Yeah, kind of. It's sort of a hybrid system in that we do have, you know, theoretically universal healthcare. There is a public system but there is also you can purchase you can pay basically for your own private health insurance. At the moment there is a I guess a trial run in some places where there is one private health insurer is covering MDMA and psilocybin therapy as kind of a trial period with one particular provider or one particular network of providers.

[35:59] And that's an interesting thing and that to pick up on on your earlier question Russell about the one of the differences or one of the things that's happening here because I spoke a while ago to Michael Wllo who's the scientific officer for Amaria which is one of the companies that sort of runs clinics here and he was really and it was their clinics that are doing this trial with private health insurance company and he was sort of adamant that what they wanted to do like they did didn't want hype What they want is to just do this thing for a while and just show that it works, show that it makes sense financially for insurance companies to cover it. And then I mean his opinion was is that once you had enough private insurers on board and the numbers were sort of stacking and you know things were working the way it was supposed to and the numbers were stacking up then it' be like other things that they just kind of quietly slip into the public system once the private sector's kind of taken the

[36:59] Risk the government will go yeah I guess we can do that now that's sort of and I think he was using the example of transcranial magnetic stimulation you as a thing that did sort of start off as a very niche private thing and then after a long time like years and years that the public sector went yeah this seems to you know we're happy enough that this works for this to kind of sneak its way into the public system eventually. Yeah. So that's kind of how it will go I think. Yeah. I did see that Josh Hardman of Alpha recently posted that it there was research that failed to replicate for transcranial magnetic stimulation. I don't know if you saw that recently, but yeah, it's another like interventional psychiatry approach and now there's kind of open questions of is it actually as effective as people have been thinking?

[37:51] Yeah. And as far as like the Australian psychedelic industry, you've mentioned a few names in particular, are there like big players on the Australian front that are pushing for different regulation or things like that? I know the one I think that has most popularly come up in media has probably been Mind Medicine Australia and the whole shroom boom not as things that I think we're familiar with. But who are some of the companies that you were mentioning before? So there's Amira Limited. I think they're based in Western Australia, but they like this is like they don't produce medicine. They have like they run clinics, you know, they're a psychiatry business, I think, predominantly.

[38:40] I think they have a lot of connections to thing, you know, they have, you know, if you dig into them, there's probably some interesting connections, but in the end, like they're not they are providing the service like psychiatry and the psychology services to people. There's those, but there's I think there's more of them now. I mean, I couldn't even name all of them now because they've just kind of come up out of nowhere. There's some of them are more associated with some of the clinics are more associated with kind of have a links to universities in that that the same people who are teaching at universities are also working in these clinics, but not all of them. I mean, there was a time when I could probably name all the prescribers, but that's definitely passed now. There's too there's a few too many of them. But again, like it's this profile thing like these aren't well-known.

[39:26] They're not really well-known companies outside of sphere. You know, it's only the only one that's ever made the news really sort of mainstream in terms of commercial companies is is Amaria and that's only because of the health like the insurance trial. Yeah, there is my AIA al they're probably the only one that has diversified in terms of having multiple locations. In some ways the limited nature of the system here has stifled a degree of scalability. So it's not there's not really a profitable outcome yet for any kind of company setting up a bunch of psychedelic clinics all over Australia. And there was an initial rush for that in kind of early 2024 when the regulations came in. was I think that this could happen.

[40:15] And there were a couple of companies that started to do that and then discovered very quickly that this thing can't really scale up in the way that Australia has set it up because it's going to be expensive. There's no real way to subsidize it. The patient numbers are always going to be limited. It takes a while for a psychiatrist to become an authorized psychiatrist. So a lot of those companies kind of pulled back. There are now a bunch of clinics across Australia that do deliver these medicines, but they all are kind of just I won't say grassroots because that probably gives them a bit too much credit, but it's they are kind of based around individual psychiatrists that have gone about becoming prescriber and then setting up a clinic themselves.

[41:04] Am I the only one that have kind of gone we're going to make this a big business and are set up in multiple states and push wide. Yeah. I mean they already had it sort of infrastructure for things and I think they even a lot of their business is more like agreements with other clinics. It's not necessarily all their clinics. They just have their agreements with other people's clinics. Well, that's I think one of the ways they've discovered is that yeah, a standalone psychedelic clinic has not been a profitable thing in Australia. Plugging the treatment into pre-existing kind of mental health clinics with an authorized psychiatrist has tended to be the you the way that this has slowly started to spot around here. But that has it's taken several years to get to where we are and it's been slow and not scalable.

[41:54] If you were a if you're someone wanting to start a business and be making money, you'd be very frustrated at this point. And so that's why I think kind of what is looming with you guys is is going to be interesting because while we have been doing it over here for a couple of years kind of slowly in a certain narrow way, I think once an FDA tick happens and a big powered company starts to sling it around, you'll very quickly be doing numbers that yeah, we will not be doing. So you will leaprog us next year and you'll become the test case I think. Yeah. And even if something does get FDA approval, it will take a while to percolate to here because it'll, you know, our regulator here will they'll want they're not just going to sort of give it a free pass.

[42:48] They'll want more, you know, onshore trials here before they really approve anything. Yeah, usually pretty slow. So I would expect it Yeah. to take a little bit of time. So yeah, it's kind of I think all eyes on you guys for the I know there's like the there's still like this little piece of my mind that's like I don't know, we could see it not get approved. I was very surprised when MDMA didn't as well. But it seems like all trains are in that direction of approval right now. So we'll see what the next year brings. Even aside from the pharmaceutical route, there's, you know, big push in the US behind psychedelic churches in particular. I mean, that's where a lot of people are now getting psychedelics, it's not actually in the medical pipeline.

[43:36] Is there a big like psychedelic church movement in Australia? Well, constitutionally there can't be. Really our legal landscape is such that you know you can have freedom of religion for whatever you can think whatever you like but the existing laws come first and your religion gives you no real sort of in the end you know the summary is that your religion doesn't give you any protection to do anything that's otherwise illegal. So I mean there is some there is a little bit of wiggle room around that particularly with discrimination unfortunately but for in this case you know and that's actually pretty well established you know so that's people can I mean a lot of people like psychedelics are part of a lot of people's spiritual life here I think probably a growing number of them I think it's been like that for a while and I think it is growing but it's never going to there's never going to be that carve out that that you guys have in the US that's just not a thing that's happening here.

[44:34] I have the I live in Utah, which you may know famously is where Mormons are. And so we have like an extra layer of constitutional protection for religious freedom, which means we have like mushroom churches that are able to sell psilocybin and you can grow it for like, you know, 50 bucks. So when I hear, you know, Compass, you know, doing $25,000 capsules and stuff, it's just like it's so scary to me that And also like you mentioned before about the clinical box, right? like the medical box and being kind of shoved in that like you're we're individualizing pathizing and the narrowness also kind of removes the social aspect which might be the you know most therapeutic part.

[45:24] Maybe bush diffs are, you know, like more therapeutic than these clinical trials that you have to pay $25,000 for. That's like, yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up because that's literally where I get to with the end of my book. Basically, I kind of spent spend the whole last chapter of my book asking that exact question. And that question about whether the true healing capacity of psychedelics comes from the way they fuel social connection is what has been at foremost on my mind I think over kind of the last few years and the way that our current culture so privileges the individual and so pushes us into a space of disconnection.

[46:12] I feel like the medical container is the perfect container for a capitalist individualist society to put psychedelics. It's like here's your psilocybin. Go in a room by yourself. Put your eye mask on and find your true self. Go inside. And that to me, like if we think honestly about all of the cultural uses over thousands of years, that's a pretty weird way to use psychedelics. When we look at traditional uses and look at how intertwined they are with groups and the way that they have been used in groups to fuel kind of group aspects, what we're doing today is weird. It's kind of weird and strange and an unusual thing.

[46:59] And so at one hand we're calling we're trying to capitalize on the ancient plant medicine narrative but we're also not using them in any way similar to an ancient plant medicine where using it in a thoroughly modern western individualist capitalist way. So, it's that kind of clash I couldn't get past and that's where I ended up in my book kind of hopefully trying to put that seed that question into kind of people's heads and ask whether we're losing something fundamental in what psychedelics can do and how they can be beneficial. Speaking our language and we should keep in touch. I have a lot to say. I was just going to say I think clinicians here some of them actually know this because I know that at some of the I don't know if they're still doing I know at least one of the clinics was they would do I mean the dosing had to be individual but they were doing you know they were doing group integration sessions for you know multiple people at

[48:00] A time which is you know they could do that I think at this point in time group dosing for you know in the medical container is just a step too far and I cannot imagine the paperwork that you would have to do for that because of course there's all this here has to do the equ you know it passes the equivalent of it's like it has to have ethics approval. It's like you have the same approval as if you were running like a university study effectively. So it's, you know, there's a lot of hoops to jump through and group dosing is probably a bit, you know, bit too far at this point in time. But even then, it's still group dosing in a medical container, which is, you know, it's still something different. It's weird, you know, it and yeah, and I think Richard is right. You got this weird clash. There's something which is so wild, but we've put it in this box which is just meant to get you back to work so you don't cost the state money, you know, in the end.

[48:51] It's like, does it keep you working? Can we turn you back into a cog and put you back into the machine? And that's what we're going to use psilocybin and that that's what we're going to use 5 MO DMT for. Like are you [expletive] high? Like what is wrong with you? You know, it's Well, I think it's that framework that is before the acknowledgement that tripping with your friends is maybe more therapeutic than tripping by yourself gets acknowledged in the industry. I think group dosing would become a thing for costsaving. Like that's the way that I could see that integrated into the medical system is they say, "Oh, one therapist to six people. That's way more costefficient than one than two to one or something." It's going to be that before it's tripping with your friends is actually a good thing. But I wanted to I know before we got on we were kind of discussing this and it seems like kind of a cultural touch point for Australia that a lot of people on this call were familiar with.

[49:45] But I wanted to bring up Enthioenesis Australas and I know that multiple people on the call have gone to that conference and spoken there. And it's been going on for how long now? Do how long has that been going on? EGA about 21 22 years I think. And it started as a really small I think mushroom club in the hills outside of Melbourne or maybe even up north. I don't want to actually I don't want to get the history wrong. There's a couple of different I think groups in the early 2000s. What have your experiences been like there and what kind of things have you seen discussed at this conference or what does it mean to you all? I know Neşe you had a great experience there as well. Yeah, I'd love to hear. Yeah. Yeah. What what's EGA to you kind of Neşe because you were there in 2011 event.

[50:31] I remember that experience was so life-changing for me because I had just connected with the broader psychedelic community starting in 2010. I mean I my own personal interest preceded that but I wasn't really like plugged in as they say and I got flown out in 2011 because all the conferences were panicking about the fact that they had only men speaking. So I was some you know lowly grad student and got flown to Australia which I thought was so cool and it just blew my mind. I mean, I the fact that it was this like it looked like a festival like indistinguishable from a festival out in nature with really cool design stages except instead of having like EDM music playing, it was like a conference and having talks mix of like very rigorous academic presentations and also more like playful experimental performative sorts of contributions and people would just be out under the shade structures lying on yoga mats that's,

[51:32] You know, just lounged and listening to talks all day. And then at night there would be all this cool art around and lights and people would just kind of like wander and socialize and it very much felt like the psychedelic community gathering as opposed to a lot of like the Horizons for example, it was always pitched to kind of normies like basic 101 the presentations were the same every year. like it's like you you'd hear you know it's like I already know all this information and that's not what I felt at UG. U felt like coming home to me like even though I' never been to Australia before but just like the way that the community was gathered and it was just like so comfy and positive vibes. Yeah, it's always been a real kind of melting pot of different psychedelic communities kind of coming together.

[52:20] And I talk about it a little in my book about the different kind of eras that EGA's gone through because back in kind of the mid 2000s, yeah, like there like the idea of a psychedelic conference wasn't what it is today. So, it kind of could be anything. There were talks on anything by anyone. It was real diverse and random and there was usually a party going on on the sidelines with like speakers and everything was kind of happening. And as the space became more legitimate, that 2017 EGA event was probably the most credible I'd put in kind of quotation marks in terms of being connected to a larger conference center and there was a lot of more straight science being presented in 2017.

[53:07] It was very much kind of the emergence of the psychedelic world into legitimacy, I guess, in terms of the broader mainstream. And then just last year, the 2025 event, felt a bit more back in the bush, more trying to I guess find out what the identity of this is in a world where we have now 100 psychedelic conferences and a thousand studies being talked about and every university has their own psychedelic department now. So what exactly is is is EG in a world where there's 20 other psychedelic conferences every other weekend is is is a kind of thing that I think was EGI was looking for last year in terms of kind of finding its own identity again.

[53:57] But it's been interesting watching these stages of what essentially is still a communityrun event. It's a not for-profit organization that like loses money pretty much every time they run an event and has to scrape together volunteer contributions to get essentially just a bunch of heads in the bush talking about psychedelics for a weekend. That's kind of what it is at its core. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I mean like the last one I think is definitely was was you know a kind of a return to that but it is it's really community based. It's one of the things where like a lot of people you know I go there and I go look this is you know this is home. This is you know my people and you can fit in there.

[54:42] You can be as weird as you want. There's a great place for neurody divergent people and you can just you know it yeah go there be normal be weird. No one cares. Just be nice about it. and you know this super you know super still hard science presentations still people talking about you know people gave talks on how to like Pash's talk on on how to sort of his ideas on how to scale delivery of psychedelic therapy and then there's people doing writing workshops there's people doing co presentations on psychedelic culture you know there's all different stuff there's basic there's me on a little stage basically saying you we need to compost everything and maybe including a few people but you know and yeah it all just kind of it all just kind of worked but the it's an interesting really interesting space and there's nothing else like it anywhere I think well hopefully as more people you know as the field matures as more people realize that sacrificing

[55:43] Everything for this medical model is not going to be worth it in the end and there's more interest in like the community connecting and especially you parts of the community that are interested and like critical thinking and not just like following the standard line. Hopefully there will be more interest in like having community oriented secular conferences and gatherings like that. There is there really is a big interest and one of the things because I still volunteer with the psychedelic society here and we have lots of little groups around the country and people just people you know what our most popular thing is that we with the psychedelic society does is that we go and have a picnic somewhere you know in a like in a park in a botanical gardens and people just want to come along. Yeah.

[56:28] They just want to come along and meet other people who've been there and chat about plants and crazy [expletive] you know, like they just that's people just that they just want, you know, don't even take drugs there because, you know, events are strictly drug-free and they just want to come along and meet other people who've had the, you know, similar experiences and hang out and talk about stuff. So, it's community is is really at the core of it, you know, in the real world. Yeah, totally. And I forgotten because it was like Sydney or something. I did that at one of those gatherings. It was great. Yeah, that sounds really nice. Yeah, everyone I've talked to about EGA has nothing but good things to say. Even in just like randomly like on some other internet community that I'm a part of.

[57:14] Someone brought up psychedelics and one of the people on the forum was like, "Oh, you ever been to EGA? Are you going to come to EGA?" And I was like, "Man, I can't escape EGA sometime. I'll have to make it there. It sounds like a wonderful conference. So, I wanted to kind of bring up, we've talked a lot about how psychedelics are being mainstreamed and often being boxed into like this medical model, but I know Rich, you're kind of like a pop culture, film, and TV buff. Sam, you a big Do you consider yourself kind of a media buff or I'm more like a old science fiction nerd. Like, that's probably my, you know, Okay, cool. thing. I was just curious on on that note, do you have in media, in science fiction, in TV or movies, books, whatever, do you have a favorite depiction of psychedelic experience or a trip that you've seen in the media?

[58:08] What got me thinking of this, by the way, was Rich, your blog post on Brian Cranston recently on the new Malcolm in the Middle. He did psychedelic therapy in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. Like, it was incredible. And if that's not a sign of the mainstreaming of psychedelic medicine, then I don't know what is. But yeah, in terms of depictions, I I've been kind of historically pretty critical of depictions of psychedelics in the media because it's I guess such an ineffable kind of internal it's so hard to convey that and generate that kind of sense. So, I don't really have a singular thing that I think's done the job well. I do have like my favorite in terms of kind of the most amusing is there's a film from the late 1960s called Wild in the Streets about a bunch of counterculture hippies that get the voting age lowered so that they can get a kid into the presidency.

[59:09] And this rockstar kid becomes president and immediately sets up psychedelic concentration camps essentially where everyone over the age of 50 gets bust in and gets forced LSD as a way of re-educating them. And there's this big kind of sequence that yeah treats this whole kind of concentration camp busing situation where they round up all the old people in the streets and they put them on buses and send them into these camps with big peace symbols on them and then they force them LSD. It cuts to just all the old people dancing around in circles singing kumbaya and that's the kind of happy ending of that subplot in the movie and I just thought it was like yeah a perfect encapsulation of that idealistic idea of like we just need to dose

[1:00:10] Everyone and it'll all be fine and that was that point I think in the 60s where like yeah people felt that if as long if we just dose everyone it'll all turn out fine and I think now in the 2020s we've realized that that's not how it works because there's been a lot of people that have dossed up that haven't suddenly turned good in Kumbay. So it feels even more quaint to look back on that period where yeah people just think as long as we just turn everyone on you know it's fine just give them a dose of mushrooms and it'll all be good. It's like, no, I think we've seen enough terrible people get more terrible after taking psychedelics that we know now to that. Yeah, that's not the solution.

[1:00:55] Yeah. Wild in the streets. Love it. Any sci-fi like psychic? Yeah. Look, my I was going to say my favorite one and I had to think about it for a bit because it's been a while since I read it. It's a Frank Herbert novel, a less well-known one pos less well-known novel possibly called the Santa Roa Barrier and it's this kind of psychedelic themed deeply weird novel with this little town of inward-looking town that that all of their food is infused with this mysterious consciousness fuel and it sort of becomes this allegory for social cohesion and but and control. It's really really it's pretty honestly pretty screwed up book even by Frank Herbert's standards. This is not June, okay? Like you will it's really really strange but quite short but it was written I think it was published in 1968.

[1:01:44] So again at that same sort of time period but his take on it is quite different in that there's this mind expanding organism that these people have discovered and put it in all of their food because it makes life really great there. but also it drives a proportion of people completely batshit mad and kills them and there's just a lot of really weird sort of stuff going on there. So his view of psychedelics that comes through in that book is quite complex and I think he's reacting against kind of that idea that Rich is talking about where it's this idea if you just dose everyone everything will be fine. And it's like, well, if you just dose everyone with the substance in this book, everything looks fine, but there's a real there is actually a really heavy price that's been paid in terms of people's sanity and their health and the level of social control that's required to kind of get all of this to hang together.

[1:02:39] That's my favorite sort of psychedelic themed bit of golden age sci-fi. Nice. I'll definitely have to check that out. We had a patron, a shout out to Sarvesh, who mentioned kind of a old school sci-fi story. I'm curious if you're familiar with it. Have you ever heard of Norman Spinrad's No Direction Home short story? No, not that one. I know the author though. Yeah. Okay. It It's really something reading it in 2026 because I want to say he wrote it in the 60s or 70s and it is like precient in a way that is kind of mind-blowing. It's all these like vignettes of a psychedelic pharmaceutical producer, the people who are buying it, the like distributors, and like it just cuts and then like some people who use it in like a church setting and just the descriptions and dialogue in it are kind of like mind-blowing that it wasn't written like yesterday.

[1:03:35] So, I love the sci-fi writers so far ahead of their time. And Frank Herbert kind of dealt with a lot of kind of psychoactive themes in a lot of his work. I know too like reading that too. Good stuff. Mike and Neşe, any off the top of your head favorite or least favorite depictions in media? I have to call out your particular one that you talked about in the chat recently. Was it is it friends? Good friend. What's it called? Friendship. Hilarious. Have you all seen that? I think it was the Toad Venom and he just goes to Subway and it's like this like pathetic Subway ordering situation. It's one of my favorites just because of how silly it is, you know? It's it has it's so not psychedelic in this hilarious way and it kind of like does have this very I guess unique perspective on psychedelics, right?

[1:04:30] Because it's just like sometimes that happens. Sometimes you just go to Subway in a trip, you know? Yep. It kind of subverts the whole like meaning making or the whole like right narrative that's happening right now and is like, "Oh yeah, maybe you just wake up and all you did was order a sandwich." It's incredible. Did you get the answer you were looking for? No, I ordered a sandwich at Subway. The Toad is mysterious. It's a favorite. And I really like Embrace of the Serpent. Have you seen that movie? The Colombian film? It's really good. It's kind of like experimental film. It was kind of designed to be like the like into the into darkness like the there's like all these like literary examples of like white people like going into the Amazon.

[1:05:19] It's like focusing on their perspective and then it was attempting to like tell it from the like the jungle's perspective and like the indigenous groups. And they also worked with indigenous like people who did not have any film experience who just like lived in the Amazon and like collaborated. And it just it's really the whole film. It's it kind of conveys this psychedelic consciousness perspective that I really appreciate. There's a lot of books that are like psychedelic in nature but not particularly depicting psychedelia that I'm really interested in. Doo and Guitari which Miche and I have been reading lately or Gerterbach by Douglas Hoffadder like they produce the psychedelic effect without actually even talking about it necessarily.

[1:06:08] Yeah, I think that's the most like that's the most like visceral kind of psychedelic in media, you know, psychedelia in media to me personally, but it's not I guess what you're asking specifically about portrayals. I find it interesting though that you mention a book as opposed to a visual kind of depiction in terms of maybe conveying that that effect, that feeling of psychedelics and whether that can be achieved best through words more than pictures. Would pictures be too literal? Yeah. Yeah. Like how to I guess convey the feeling of psychedelics. And it's interesting to me that Yeah. you bring up a book like because I think maybe yeah maybe words are a good way to kind of short circuit someone's brain in a way that gives a feeling of psychedelics.

[1:07:05] I think it's like for me and I I've written about it before and I certainly thought about it a lot is that that's what my early I feel like my undergraduate studies in philosophy were like that was you know experiencing a real onlogical flip where you know go to class we talk about something and walking home from class one day and just something just kind of went and I went holy [expletive] I believe in a bunch of stuff that's just not true you know and you know it's you just suddenly and that was just you know studying that was literally just coming home walking home from a lecture on on on you know human perception and thinking about you know what do you believe and why do you believe it and you suddenly go oh well yeah all this all these things that I thought were happening yeah they probably weren't you know so it's that you know there's no like there's no visuals there's no sort of shape to it but it's really like your whole world can kind of change in an instant from

[1:08:07] One thing to another. It makes me think it kind of falls back on the thing we were talking about earlier with the you're talking, you know, just depression scales for example are just like this boxed in thing. The mystical experience scale is like, you know, one of the primary criteria for a psychedelic experience or a mystical experience is ineffibility. But like the effable, you know, we're talking about we're writing words about these things that can convey such a mystical experience in us, you know, and I think that's it's obviously the mystical experience scale is it's has problems, I would say. But it's also interesting to think of like how almost the opposite of what they're saying can do the same thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. I find I I'm always amused by like Yeah.

[1:08:54] The that the attempts to quantify or put a number on on on something like that. And that's just I know that that's the way that science works and that's the kind of it's been interesting watching the growth of psychedelic science and the more studies that come up and the way that people have been trying to quantify psychedelics and put numbers and create I've got a whole new scale now that that'll track a certain thing and it's like yeah that that in and of itself interests me I guess as a psychonaut and someone that does think in a in that kind of way but it's also impossible. It's an impossible task to create a scale that puts a number on a thing that connects to a type of psychedelic experience. Yeah. And it's reductive to as well.

[1:09:40] It's wildly reductive. But it's also the way that I think us humans think. So it's Yeah. That's this interesting tension as psychedelics become more mainstream is that tension. Well, I mean my book project that I'm working on is all about how language can induce psychedelic experiences. And I think this just circles back to what you were talking about in the beginning and I described as like glossed as impoverishment of the imagination because I think that there's been such a focus on the sciences because of this like desire for validation that you described and it's been at the expense of like the arts and the humanities and philosophy. you know that there are all these more interesting things frankly that we could be doing and talking about and I almost you know I'd really like to eventually do like some kind of workshop series of like you know humanities for psychonauts you know to actually like dig into some of these texts with people who are interested in these topics and to show like how many cool tools you can you know absorb into your toolkit to be able to explore the you know outer

[1:10:40] Reaches of consciousness in that way totally yeah look I mean that sounds cool look my PhD was in philosophy of language So like we you know we should talk sometime about this stuff because it's just there is so many things that like the philosophy of the science behind it you know the you know trying to we're trying to it just language just fails because of how language works. So we're trying to kind of in some places and you know there's a whole you we could just talk for a whole podcast about ineffability and what that means or what it doesn't mean. And yeah, there's all these other avenues that we could and should be putting effort into. Well, let's circle back again sometimes. I feel like there's certainly a lot. I think we need to keep in touch. Definitely. And I know we're kind of running up on our time here.

[1:11:27] I wanted to end it on just a little bit of levity. I hinted at the beginning that Sam is a wonderful meme maker. Do you care if I could toss a couple favorites on screen here at the end to look at with you? All right. So, this one is should be popping up here. Let me get myself off screen. Oh, yes. Yeah. I look I was I don't know. I was having a mentally complex day when I made that. I don't know if you could tell. I just You know what it was? It just I was on Canva and there's these weird little all like the product templates on Canva and you know I've been thinking about Jung and thinking about just weird [expletive] that that influencers say and just wanted to see what it looked like on a shirt and you know it's really awful because you know I love laughing at my own jokes.

[1:12:17] So, I don't know if anyone I'm validated to find that there is at least one other person who thinks this is funny. But yeah, I just something about like I really love that sort of soft focus, you know, beauty product vibe that that the template have and then you just put just crazy influ and sort of borderline incel [expletive] on it. Yeah. Yeah. It also just having been too immersed in psychedelic reading and grath and all of this stuff, it is just really quite tickles me to see some of these concepts satarized. Featuring support your sacred retention, fully perinatal, and other hallmarks of the modern wellness to borked esoterica pipeline.

[1:13:02] This shirt is ideal for anyone with unresolved shadow work and a massive share portfolio. Perfect for psychedelic therapists with a sense of humor. Anyone who's survived a corporate breath work retreat, semen retention enthusiasts who can't detect sarcasm. Quite liked it. Yeah, I you know, you will be amazed to learn that I I've had to take a break from social media for a while because of just reading too much of this stuff. Like it's just Yeah. And in the same line as this one really got me. The holotropic gym. It really killed me. Was this around the same time that they were putting out Gra's apologies? Well, I actually had a version of it without the apology and then he apologized.

[1:13:49] So, I'm like, well, you know, I need to add that obviously. That's so good. Integrated beefcake. Lift your shadow. Approved apologies. This is killing me. And then I would be remiss not to throw up the Grim Posia shirt. Believe that's spoofing us here or Well, you know, I made a shirt ripping off maps, so I thought it was only fair. Yeah, the psychedelic marketing department. I loved it. This is the Grimosia shirt cuz one of the funny things that I discovered is that the Etsy has really great search engine optimization. So if you can do something you no one will ever see it. I no one ever sees this, but actually if you make an Etsy product and then backlink it to a post, you can kind of hijack the search the image results for things.

[1:14:39] So there's particular things if I discovered if you search do particular searches for certain patents, the image search comes up with like soft furnishings because I kind of I wrote a blog post and then and did an Etsy item and then sort of backl it. Anyway, the yes, the Grimosia shirt is the literally the only one of these that because I put them on on these Etsy shirts is is just as a joke. It's the only one of them I've ever sold. Really? That's hilarious. I just searched Grimosia and it was the first thing. So yeah. Yeah. So it's actually need to update all the prices because if anyone buys them at this point in time, I will actually lose money on them as the printing costs have gone and I you know I have made I have I sold one shirt which has nearly covered my costs for this elaborate joke.

[1:15:29] But yeah yeah I have sold one of these. I won't tell you who I sold it. I would love. So it says, "Everyone is terrible except the cat." Except us. Sorry, guys. Us is all of us. Us is all of us. Yeah, I dug it. I dug it. And then you've got, of course, the psychedelic centrist shirts and the craps psychedelic marketing department spoofing the maps psychedelic testing department or something or whatever their Oh, yeah. Cuz one of their shirts is the psychedelic research department. I'm like, well, you know, come on. We We know we all know that's not what's really, you know, it's marketing. It's all that's where it's all at now. I think my favorite might be the psychedelic centrist club. That's great. I actually wore that one to I took that one with me to EG. A few people appreciated that.

[1:16:15] All sides have good points unless they reduce my sales. Perfect for people who want to annoy both sides. Your friend who would work with literally anyone to achieve their goal of healing the world when you can't decide between a psychedelic marketing department or Grimosia shirt. Fantastic. Yeah. guaranteed to you know alienate nearly everyone I have discovered. But yeah, you know, I have at least I have one of those because I needed to check if they were print properly. So, you know, I wear that and you know, only people at EG ever actually ask me questions about it. Normal people out in the world just kind of just look at it and go just going to stay away. Blissfully confused. Yeah. Well, thanks for letting me throw those up on screen. I always have fun looking at your satire work there. and thanks for hanging out with us for so long.

[1:17:04] I know we went a little over time. I really appreciate you all staying. Now that we're kind of at the end here, is there anything that you all want to plug here at the end? Rich, I know you had a book just come out that we've talked a bit about throughout the episode. I'm stoked about that. Let people know what that is and where we can find it. And Sam, anything you want to plug? Yeah, look, I had taken a break from my newsletter, The Ethical Trip, but I'm trying to get back into doing that now that I've moved house. I'm still I've got some projects that I'm hoping to bring out with Sandra Dbachark and our work with Epic in the sort of in the ethics field. We are working out how to tell people with money what they don't want to hear in a way that they will still pay us. We have not succeeded in this yet but yeah like we have some long-term projects going on that I think to try and bring a bit more you know ethical expertise kind of to the field and in a way that's not necessarily sort of clinician driven by a couple of people who have experience with psychedelics but also have actual you know sort of education in

[1:18:05] Philosophy and ethics to sort of show you know the complexity of things that are happening. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I've just released the book. It's called Trip Reports: Stories from an Australian Psychedelic Renaissance. I think it should, if you kind of Google my name in it, you whatever region you are in the world, you should kind of maybe find some way to get a copy. I think that most of your listeners will probably enjoy, I think, some of the angles that I come at things. It's kind of like generally a kind of a compilation of kind of a bunch of Australian stories around the psychedelic renaissance. So there's a little bit of history into kind of what was going on here back in the 60s and then there's some stories about woodlover paralysis which is a kind of weird unique phenomenon with some certain species of mushrooms.

[1:18:57] And so I kind of dig into the science behind that. I talk a bit about MDMMA therapy and some of the kind of issues with the maps model. So yeah, I think that hopefully kind of the book's interesting to some of your listeners. That's the main thing at the moment and back in the kind of journalism world. So hopefully I can get some stories out into the wild and I haven't alienated too many people with it's still a bit of a challenge to get kind of interesting stories out into the kind of mainstream media ecosystem. It's very much kind of boxed into the latest thing that psychedelics can treat. And yeah, it's constantly an uphill battle to put maybe some kind of more interesting stories into the ecosystem.

[1:19:44] But yeah, between the book and that, that's what I'm doing at the moment. Good deal. Thanks so much. And are you still producing the Trip Reports newsletter, too? I am. Yes. Yeah. When went a little quiet, but yeah, if you Google my name and Trip reports, you can jump on and hopefully I'll kind of start that newsletter up again. And it was funny. I got Yeah, I got in trouble with the very first issue of that when I kind of went did some kind of digging on that Alzheimer's psilocybin study from earlier in the year that Yeah. was a wild study that I won't tangent the conversation. You can kind of go to trip reports and read my digging on that. But that that was what kicked off that whole project was a story that I couldn't get published anywhere and I'm like someone needs to really like poke some holes in a study that probably shouldn't have even been published in the first place.

[1:20:36] So yeah. Yeah. I was reading that piece earlier and it it's great. We also chatted with a psychiatrist Tyler Black about that study. Yeah. A while back this year. So those Yeah. totally. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, guys, for being here. It's been great talking with you. I would love to stay in touch. Yeah. Thanks.