Pod Insights The Psychology of your 20s 256. The psychology of psychedelics ft. Paul Austin About this episode We have been hearing a lot about the use of psychedelics to treat mental health in recent years, but what does that actually entail? What do psychedelics actually do to our brain? What would it feel like? What would it look like if psychedelics were as easily prescribed as antidepressants? What are we currently getting wrong about mental health?
In this episode, we bring on an expert. Paul Austin, a psychedelics coach and the founder of Third Wave to explore the future of these drugs and their history, including:
The ancient tradition of psychedelics Why they are so transformative for depression and PTSD The impact on the brain and neuroplasticity The groundbreaking studies on their effectiveness The limitations and ethical considerations, and much more! Follow Paul here: @paulaustin3w
Buy his book on micro-dosing here: https://www.amazon.com.au/Microdosing-Psychedelics-Practical-Guide-Upgrade/dp/1980670919
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:14 Jemma Sbeg? It's more than travel. It's the membership that flies, dines, streams, rides, and arrives with you. Because when you have a membership that's as unique as you are, there's no telling where your journey will take you next. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world, you know the deal. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course, break down the psychology of our twenties. Dealing with our mental health, our mindset in our twenties or any age can feel like an extremely uphill battle. And a lot of us are definitely looking for a solution, we're looking for some magical cure,
2:58 Jemma Sbeg? some way out, a better way to cope with our everyday experience. So when we hear about something as seemingly life-changing as psychedelic treatment for our mental health, I think a lot of our ears immediately perk up. You know, these drugs that for such a long time have been really associated with like a party, stoner lifestyle, like they're suddenly being talked about a lot in the healthcare community and this scene is very, very promising. Even though the FDA did recently reject the use of MDMA therapy to treat PTSD as we are recording this, it does seem like in general across the world, like the tide is really turning and I think we have a lot of questions. What does this actually entail? What would it feel like?
3:42 Jemma Sbeg? Could this, you know, one day be as common as treatment as antidepressants? And it's such an evolving space, personally one that I'm so fascinated by, but I'm definitely not an expert in. So today I thought I would bring on someone who is someone who knows so much about this, more than me, more than the average person, more than most of us for that matter. Paul Austin, the founder of Third Wave, welcome to the show.
4:05 Speaker 02 Thank you Gemma, it's great to be here. I love the introduction, you touched on so many hot items when it comes to mental health and psychedelics and I'm so excited to be able to talk with your audience about this today. It's a topic that's become very popular these last five or six years and there's still a lot of unknowns about it. So I'm hopeful that we can clear up some of these misconceptions and provide a great contextual understanding of what these medicines can do.
4:31 Jemma Sbeg? Paul, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into it? What's Third Wave? Like what's been your experience that has gotten you to the point of being like basically an expert psychedelic coach?
4:43 Speaker 02 So I grew up in a very traditional family in the Midwest, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Church was the center point of my upbringing, not in a fundamentalist way, but in a, in a sort of strict, you're going to church every Sunday. And this is what we do as a family. And so as part of that, naturally, my parents were very anti-drug. They were very against especially illegal drugs like, you know, weed and cocaine and heroin and psychedelics. And at the age of 16, my best friend in high school introduced me to cannabis. I started to experiment with cannabis a little bit until my parents found out. And they sat me down one Sunday after church.
5:28 Speaker 02 And my dad looked at me and said, you know, I haven't been this disappointed since my brother passed away in a car accident 30 years before that, before we had sat down, before they found out that I had smoked cannabis. So clearly it was a monumental impactful thing that their only son had decided to start to experiment with cannabis. Now, what I felt in that experience was I felt happy, I felt laughter, I felt like it was very curiosity provoking. And I was starting to learn more and more about cannabis at that time. Why was it illegal? Why was it prohibited? Was it as bad as we thought it was?
6:09 Speaker 02 And so that started to lead me down this path of what Carl Jung would say is called individuation, which is the path of becoming oneself, right? Where I was like, clearly this person who I'm becoming won't be accepted by my family. I'm going to have to just keep this part of myself closed off. And soon after that, when I was 19, that same friend who introduced me to cannabis introduced me to psilocybin mushrooms. And at the age of 19, I had my first experience with psilocybin mushrooms. Soon after that, I started to experiment with LSD a little bit as well. And whereas cannabis was like fun and I laughed a lot and helped me to get over some social anxiety, psychedelics are very profound.
6:52 Speaker 02 There, there were some really deep insights and awarenesses that I came to, one of which was, I'm not meant to live a conventional lifestyle. That life is much more malleable than I previously had thought. I can create how I want to create, so why not do that? So. Soon after university, I moved abroad. I taught English in Turkey for a year. I became a digital nomad. Soon after that, worked and traveled everywhere. And at the age of 24, was in Budapest. This was 2015, almost 10 years ago. Noticed that more and more people was starting to talk about psychedelics, Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss and, you know, more clinical research was coming out about it. Cannabis was being reevaluated and legalized.
7:37 Speaker 02 And I thought, I think this is going to become the next thing. So in 2015, I started Third Wave with the intention of making psychedelic education more accessible and more available to everyone. And so the idea of this Third Wave of psychedelics is that the First Wave was the ancient and indigenous use of psychedelics. The Second Wave was the counterculture, the 50s and 60s. And then this Third Wave of psychedelics is the modern sort of Renaissance around psychedelic substances. And I believe it's critical that as part of this, we both
8:15 Speaker 02 honor the lineage and the indigenous wisdom of these medicines, and we also utilize best practices based on scientific frameworks and what we know about these psychedelics and how they interact with the body and the brain. So here I am, talking about psychedelics, talking about microdosing, and it's been a pretty wild ride these last, you know, 10 years or so, as they've really started to come into prominent mainstream attention.
8:44 Jemma Sbeg? I love that summary. And I really, really love what you said about combining the ancient indigenous wisdom with some of the more like, I don't know, I hate to say like Western, but some of the more scientific, like quote unquote, scientific ways of seeing how this impacts our brain. And of course, I'm sure there have been so many populations who have been able to witness this since like the dawn of time, but a lot of their knowledge has been snuffed out through a lot of impacts, through colonization, through just like a genuine disinterest in anything that was like counted to what a Western belief was. So I really like that we're acknowledging that because, I don't know, I just feel like
9:29 Jemma Sbeg? there are so many things that we're returning to the roots of. I think about how there's been this like huge biological reductionism of so much. To do with mental health. And now people are like, hey, what if we, you know, just made sure that people had community? And what if we like went back to a sense of purpose? And this feels very akin to that, like very similar of returning to something that's been known for a long time. With your experience, what did you find that it kind of unlocked for you? I know you you spoke quite generally about it, but did you see like a shift in how you saw the world, your attitudes towards the world, or just your own mental wellbeing?
10:08 Speaker 02 So one of the core things was this reconnection to spirit, we'll call it, or God, or source, or oneness. You know, I mentioned I had been raised in the church. It was a Protestant. So, you know, there's Catholic, there's Protestant, we were Protestant. And it was very dry. It was beautiful, but it was very dry. We'd sing hymns, we'd say the prayers, we'd read the Bible verses, but it wasn't, I didn't really get it. I never really experienced God in its full entirety. And that's true, I think, of the majority of people who grow up in a religious environment. It's a lot of the rituals, it's a lot of the prayers, it's a lot of the hymns, but it's not a lot of
10:49 Speaker 02 the direct experience. And so I was becoming an atheist until I started to work with high doses of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. And when I had those experiences, all of a sudden, it helped to almost remind me of how connected I was to something greater than myself. It sort of reopened this concept of spirituality for me. And that had a number of downstream positive benefits, one of which was I recognized that I was deeply connected to everything around me. So the sort of classic cliche of LSD and psychedelics is hippies hugging trees, right? And yeah,
11:29 Speaker 02 anyone who's done a psychedelic in nature understands that because there is this deep love and connection to everything around us. And how the indigenous peoples who worked with these substances, their interactions with it was because it helped them to remember that they were just these organisms. They were just these people that were part of nature, not above or better than nature. So I experienced that a deep and profound connection to the natural environment. I also experienced a sense of comfort with myself or authenticity of who I was and who I am.
12:08 Speaker 02 That when raised in a very religious environment, you are often shamed for who you are or guilted into behaving a certain way. And when I started to work with psychedelics, I came to realize, oh, I could just let go of a lot of that conditioning. At my core, at my essence, there's actually a deep sort of sense of innocence and love and purity. And I could tap back into that and remember that, which helped me, again, as cliche as it may sound, to love myself again and love myself in a very deep way. And I think the outcome of that then was a lot of the depression and anxiety that I'd struggle with.
12:48 Speaker 02 When I started to work with psychedelics intentionally, they just helped me to commit to meditating more often, eating healthier, spending more time in nature, spending less time on screens, committing to practices and behaviors that ended up having a really positive and beneficial effect on my mental health, because certainly when we take a psychedelic, that's doing some really interesting things to the brain, that's great for some of these clinical conditions. But a lot of it is how are we changing our behaviors after the fact? And who we hang out with and who we spend time with. And psychedelics help that because they facilitate something called neuroplasticity. But it's not just the drug that's a magic pill. It really is a catalyst for change.
13:32 Speaker 02 And we still have to commit to making those changes in our everyday life if we want to live better and feel better on an everyday basis.
13:39 Jemma Sbeg? And that's the thing, if anyone ever offers you like a magic pill to cure every single problem in your life, walk away. Like that's, yeah, be highly, highly skeptical. And I think it's great that you're saying that about this as well, right? Like you can. Do, you can take anything, any substance under the sun, but if you don't do something with the experience and put that into practice afterwards, it's not going to work. I also really like what you said about experiencing a sense of oneness. And we had someone on just recently called Dr Lisa Miller, who is a professor from Columbia, who talks about spirituality and psychology. And I think a lot of us have, you know, who've experienced religion, the institution of religion
14:23 Jemma Sbeg? over the years, feel very like silenced by it, restricted by it, it feels very clinical. But there's this new wave of people who are like, actually having a sense of purpose, feeling like there is something divine and bigger is incredibly psychologically nourishing. Because the opposite of that is feeling like we are completely alone, all of us are alone, no one can understand our experience. That like isolation is completely depressing. Like, how does one not experience a level of like endogenous mental health experiences? If you really do believe that. But I want to move on to the impact on the brain. And you talked about neuroplasticity, probably synaptic pruning comes into this.
15:08 Jemma Sbeg? Before we get into that, actually, we need to clarify one thing, which we haven't clarified yet. Look, I'm getting ahead of myself. What does it mean when people say that psychedelics or medically supervised microdosing could be used to treat things like addiction or PTSD or end of life care? Like, what do they actually mean? We've talked to someone about like a more recreational usage, shifting to like more of a medical environment or being used in like mainstream care. Is someone literally going to give you a tab of acid and say, off you go? Like, go and walk around?
15:37 Speaker 02 So, in the 1950s, when LSD first came on the scene, it was invented in 1938. Psychedelic properties were discovered in 1943. It was used for about the first 15 to 20 years within strictly clinical environments to see what impact it would have on addiction, anxiety, depression. Like I said, over a thousand clinical papers were published on the efficacy of LSD to treat a range of conditions. And unfortunately, when it got out into the mainstream culture and was associated with Timothy Leary and turn on tune and drop out, the government prohibited and shut down not only the recreational use, but also the clinical research. And that wasn't resuscitated until the late 90s.
16:21 Speaker 02 When Johns Hopkins started to study this relationship between psilocybin and what they called mystical type experiences, or, you know, experiencing God. And what they found in that early clinical research is that the more profound of an experience, a spiritual experience, an individual had, the more likely it was to heal their depression, or heal their addiction, or heal, you know, OCD, or some of these other clinical indications that they were struggling with. So on the one hand, it could be described at a spiritual level, that when we experience the profundity of psychedelics, we are connected to this source of unconditional love. And when we feel in our every sort of part of our body, that, that, that experience of
17:06 Speaker 02 unconditional love, it has these incredible impacts in our capacity to love, our capacity to, to be with ourselves, to understand ourselves. And again, most importantly, to start to make changes in our everyday life that really honor and acknowledge that sense of, of self-love. Now, if we look at it from a neuroscientific lens, the, the common thread between depression, anxiety, addiction, OCD, even PTSD, is that when you do brain scans of people who struggle with these clinical conditions, the, the, the two hemispheres of the brain are not actively communicating, right? So the brain activity is sort of withering away.
17:48 Speaker 02 And when you take a psychedelic, it's like, you know, putting fertilizer into your brain. All of a sudden, it activates both hemispheres, neuronal connectivity gets turned back online, they start to communicate across the hemispheres again. And that activation allows for a loosening of these constricted ways of being. So one of the...
18:12 Speaker 02 One of the technical terms is called the default mode network. And the default mode network is a network in our brain that helps us to do our everyday patterning. It's sort of the habitual part of our brain that is on autopilot that allows us to navigate our everyday existence. When that becomes too rigid, when that becomes too constricted, then people start to notice that they're struggling with depression or addiction or anxiety. And so part of interrupting those patterns or interrupting those ruts is introducing a psychedelic. And so the psychedelic comes in and it creates a more entropic system.
18:53 Speaker 02 So more chaos, so to say, and that chaos allows for a new perspective, a new look at things, which allows people to sort of get out of the pattern that they feel they've been stuck in and actually see that they can experience life in a new and unique way, that they don't have to feel that way all the time, that they can actually feel this other way. And then so much of working with a psychedelic, when it comes to working with a therapist in particular, like in medical supervision, is it's not only the drug experience, but also how that coach or how that therapist or psychiatrist is supporting you after that drug experience. Because when you take a psychedelic,
19:34 Speaker 02 when the brain becomes more entropic, then it's opening something called a critical learning period. And the critical learning period is like when you're four, five or six, your brain is in development. It's a sponge, it's soaking up all of these, you know, you know, language and patterns and social behaviors and music, it can just soak it all up. And then as we get older, that that learning period dies away, which is why they used to think, okay, when I'm, by the time you're 26, you know, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And now what we're discovering about psychedelics is it actually reopens that critical learning period for at least three to four weeks after the high dose experience.
20:18 Speaker 02 And so people have this experience, they're able to see out of their depression or out of their addiction. And then the therapist or the coach is supporting them in that month after to start to integrate, what are actually new patterns of behavior you can start to implement that will help you feel this way more often? How do you have a more regulated nervous system? How do you not eat, you know? Fast food or processed food? How do you get more sunlight and exercise? How do you spend more time with loved ones or cut out a toxic relationship? Right? Like the psychedelic can help us to go aha. But the therapeutic work, the coaching work actually allows those ahahs to be integrated and be contangible in our everyday life.
21:04 Jemma Sbeg? And you can totally see how that would also be remarkable for PTSD, right? You have all this trauma that's wired your brain one way. And I'm sure like another thing that comes up is like long-term potentiation, right? Neurons that fire together, wire together. You've got all these major highways in your brain that have been paved in concrete that say, this is scary. This is trouble. I should be fearful. I should be worried based on these previous experiences. And it sounds like when you introduce a psychedelic, it's kind of like a tornado comes through, it might seem kind of scary. But with that opportunity, you can say, actually, no, like that road doesn't really fit here anymore. That road like isn't really leading me to places where I want to go.
21:48 Jemma Sbeg? Like the roads being the neural highways in your brain. And so it allows for that neuroplasticity, as you said. And another really fascinating point that you brought up that I absolutely love that you said is this misconception that our brains are fully developed. We're done by the time we're 25, 26, 27 for men, 25 around for women. And that is just being, and I know that I've said that on the show before. I've been like, yeah, you know, your brain only gets fully developed at 25. It's like, absolutely not. Yes, like you have this frontal, like your frontal lobe basically like locks into place. But within your brain, there's so much opportunity for flexibility. It's why as people get older, their personality changes.
22:32 Jemma Sbeg? It's why we see a decline actually in the experience of mental health as people get older as well, like past their 50s and 60s. So the brain is constantly evolving. Has there been any longitudinal or like in-depth studies on introducing psychedelics to a population group or to like a group of participants and seeing what's happened? Like, is there a study you can pull out that is like? A pretty important one that says this has changed people's lives or this has had this impact.
23:09 Speaker 02 So, yes, I mean, kind of a few notes here to to highlight in the in the like 2010, 2011, maybe 2012, there was a research paper published that was a longitudinal research paper that essentially had asked people who had been using psychedelics for 40 or 50 years since the 1960s. Are you healthy? Are you okay? You know, because a lot of the the sort of mainstream stigma was all these psychedelic users are, you know, dropping out or becoming schizophrenic or losing their mind. And what they found was,
23:51 Speaker 02 when you look at it over a long timeframe, psychedelics are really well tolerated by the majority of people in a population, that you do have, you know, the 1% who are schizophrenic or have potentially a personality disorder that should not be working with psychedelics, but that the broad population can tolerate psychedelics really, really quite easily and quite well. Now, in the last 20 years, there's been quite a few clinical research papers published on the efficacy of psychedelics. The there's probably, I would say, three to emphasize.
24:35 Speaker 02 One is the research on MDMA for PTSD. So you mentioned PTSD already. When we have an acute trauma, it can often become stored in our body and our brain. And that trauma, that emotional imprint, will lead to a lot of nasty side effects over the long term. When you work with something like MDMA, it creates a space of safety for the nervous system and for the brain to heal that underlying trauma. So that trauma can be opened up, it can be processed, it can be integrated, and it's no longer this festering wound. That's in the subconscious of the psyche.
25:19 Speaker 02 It actually gets brought up and out and it can be healed and properly worked with. And, and this nonprofit group MAPS, which has a for-profit arm called Lycos. They were the ones who attempted to get MDMA approval. They did phase three clinical trials. So it was done over 12 weeks. They had therapists that were there with them. They did MDMA three times. Over those 12 weeks, 70% of those participants healed their PTSD. And they had PTSD on average for 17 years, which is
25:49 Jemma Sbeg? Wow, it's a huge number. 17 years.
25:52 Speaker 02 Huge number. Seven, 17 years, seven, zero percent. So that's, that's one really fascinating clinical trial. The, another really fascinating clinical trial is this, is this distinction between how psychedelics work in the brain and SSRIs work in the brain. Because a lot of people who are coming into psychedelic work have been on SSRIs or are currently on.
26:17 Jemma Sbeg? We'll just quickly say SSRIs are basically antidepressants.
26:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's helpful to, to clarify. So, and I'll provide a caveat here. If someone is listening to this who is on one of these medications and they're interested in, in getting off, make sure you do so under the guidance of a medical professional. And there's a substance called ketamine, which we can talk more about, which is legally and medically available and can be safely taken with a lot of these SSRIs under the guidance of a trained medical professional. And there are a lot of psychiatrists and other clinicians who are currently practicing this. But typically if folks ask, I say, look at ketamine. It's legal. It's available. Uh, it's, it's been cleared by the FDA and, and check that out.
27:02 Speaker 02 But the, the research paper that I'm referring to compared the mechanism of action of psychedelics versus Lexapro, Zoloft and, uh, these other SSRIs. And the big difference was the typical classic SSRIs are almost like a Band-Aid. They numb the person. So if your typical range of emotion, you know, is one to 10, an SSRI is going to make it three to six. So the, the lows aren't going to be as low, but you're not going to have the same level of highs either. Essentially numbs you and, and, and creates this sort of Band-Aid. Um. So you can sort of float, but it doesn't necessarily get to the wound that's underneath
27:44 Speaker 02 the core thing. Whereas with psychedelics, they tend to open up the psyche. They tend to almost force a catharsis where the underlying trauma that may be causing the depression or the addiction, which is in most cases adverse childhood experiences, um, which for your listeners, the ACE score was developed in the nineties. Uh, it was clinically proven that, um, children who had these adverse childhood experiences were much more likely to be alcoholics or have addictions or be depressed. And so a lot of the new context around mental health is it has a lot to do with trauma. It's not just serotonin. It's
28:27 Speaker 02 not just biology. It's actually the, the, the psyche and how it's been treated. And so when we work with a psychedelic, it opens that up and that, that trauma can start to be healed, that wound that's been festering underneath can start to be released and we can look at it and it can be integrated as well. So that's another really interesting, um, research trial. So the three that I mentioned are longitudinal data from the sixties that psychedelics are really well tolerated across thousands of people, uh, that have been studied. The clinical trial showing how effective MDMA is at treating PTSD, 70% remission rate with participants who on average, uh, PTSD for 17 years. And then showing specifically how
29:10 Speaker 02 are psychedelics different than SSRIs? Well, Lexapro, Zoloft, Prozac, numb us, whereas psychedelics actually make us more enlivened and they allow us to get to the core thing that's underneath the trauma. So it doesn't continue to persist over the long term.
29:28 Jemma Sbeg? Hmm. I really love that explanation. And I love that you said, you know, SSRIs, they have their time and a place. And I think it's really difficult because you will go to a doctor and that is the first thing that they will prescribe you. And of course you're going to trust your doctor as you should, you know, but I think it's also, we've gotten to a point where that has been the major way of treating things for a long time. And yet, um, and I'm saying this as someone who like has been on SSRIs before and you know, we, we've been doing it for a long time and yet rates of mental health are increasing. So if you can imagine like, People being like, oh, we have this cure for cancer. We have this, you know, treatment for cancer and they're giving it to every cancer patient.
30:11 Jemma Sbeg? And yet no one's getting better. Like you do have to start asking questions. Um, also with the adverse childhood experiences score, really worth looking into because there was a recent study on this and it's really interesting because I actually helped with this study. It was done in Australia. It's called the Child Maltraitment Study. And you might think like childhood trauma is neglect, abuse from parents. Can also be sibling abuse. It can also be bullying. It can also be experiencing the death of a parent, a natural disaster, a family trauma, financial insecurity. So a lot of people might think, well, you know, nothing really that bad happened to me when I was a child.
30:54 Jemma Sbeg? And then you dig into it and you can be like, yeah, but there's also, you know, the system that you grew up in may not have actually been able to support you. It's not all about individual events. It's also about a culture, a society that may have been emotionally neglectful. But we're going to take a short break because I'm getting, I'm letting time get ahead of me here. I'm so fascinated by this conversation, Paul. So we're going to take a short break and when we come back, I want to talk about some of the important ethical standards that we should be considering when it's not entirely helpful to be using psychedelics. And also what the future of this treatment might look like.
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33:20 Jemma Sbeg? These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors,
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35:04 Jemma Sbeg? And this product is perfect for that. I also find that Moisture Surge is a great lightweight base. If you like something under your makeup, it makes your skin look so plump and soft, especially first thing in the morning when it's maybe not looking that way. Basically, I think it feels exactly like how you want a moisturizer to feel. Fresh, lightweight, and deeply hydrating. Try Clinique Moisture Surge 100 Hour today at clinique.com. Feels like Moisture Surge. All right, so we're back with Paul Austin, the founder of Third Wave. Paul, we have talked a lot about how this is like so magical. This treatment just sounds absolutely wonderful. And there is just so much evidence to prove it.
35:49 Jemma Sbeg? So much research being done currently. But we can't talk about this and I know people are going to be like, well, what about schizophrenia? What about if I have a really disruptive and distressing experience? So what are some of the important kind of ethical standards that we need to think about as this practice is rapidly growing, both in a personal usage way, but also in like a medical usage way?
36:19 Speaker 02 What I often say is that the most dangerous aspect of psychedelic work is the fact that these are still illegal almost everywhere. We have seen some momentum over the last few years. The state of Oregon has legalized psilocybin mushrooms. The state of Colorado has legalized all plant medicines, psychedelic plant medicines. Jamaica and the Netherlands have legalized psilocybin mushrooms. Australia even has rescheduled psilocybin and MDMA from schedule nine to schedule eight, I believe. The TGA did that last year. So it's becoming more accessible and available, but these are still largely illegal substances. And
37:01 Speaker 02 that is, in fact, the most dangerous part about psychedelics is that they are illegal. I would say that the second aspect of this, and I mentioned this in the previous section about research and the longitudinal studies around psychedelics, is those who have a family history of schizophrenia or psychosis, or a personal history of schizophrenia or psychosis, should not be taking psychedelics, even at a microdose, a very low level. Those who have a personality disorder should not be working with psychedelics. Those who don't feel called to taking psychedelics should not be taking psychedelics, right? There does have to be this sort of willful choice that's involved if you want to do this work
37:46 Speaker 02 because doing a macrodose, a therapeutic dose of a psychedelic is not necessarily for the faint of heart. It can be very intense emotionally. It can be very difficult at times. There can be a lot of anger and grief and sadness and challenging emotions that come to the surface that need to be processed and held. And that's why it's so critical that when working with psychedelics, you pay attention to set and setting is the number one. Set or mindset is how you come into that experience. And setting is the physical environment that you're in. It's really critical to have a physical person who is present with you. That could be for some folks, a sitter or a friend who is just there to make sure you're safe.
38:32 Speaker 02 For those who are really looking at deep clinical issues that they're looking to heal and resolve, that most likely will be a therapist, a trained therapist. There's also other guides and shamans and coaches. In fact, through the psychedelic coaching institute, we train coaches, therapists, practitioners and guides, and what I call the five key elements. And I'll briefly describe those five key elements because I think these are essential to the ethical use of psychedelics. For those listening at home, that if you're working with a coach, a guide, a therapist, a practitioner, they should know how to assess you. So what is the assessment process like? They should know how to prepare you. How are
39:14 Speaker 02 they preparing you? Or what's preparation like for the experience? They should have a sense of how to facilitate the actual experience. You should be asking them questions about what medicine is appropriate? How much of that medicine? Where are we going to do it? What's the overall flow of the experience? Will there be music involved? Will there not be music involved? You know, just getting a sense of some of these questions for how the experience will go. Integration is key. So after we have that experience, will they support you on an ongoing basis to ensure that that experience can be woven in back to your everyday life? And then microdosing. I say that, you know, most practitioners should know how microdosing can support the integration process. And microdosing is a sub-intoxicating
39:58 Speaker 02 dose of a psychedelic. It's about one tenth of a normal therapeutic dose that people might do two or three times per week for a period of time because it helps with mood, energy, sleep, and a number of other things. So the ethical use of psychedelics comes down to, I think, those five key elements: assessment, preparation, facilitation, integration, and microdosing. Now, the final thing that I'll emphasize is because psychedelics are illegal, because they're prohibited, it can also be very difficult to get a sense of who can I work with, right? Because the other shadowy, sort of risky part about working with drugs that make you more suggestible, that alter your consciousness, is
40:41 Speaker 02 There have been stories out there where people feel like boundaries have been crossed. You know, they feel like, you know, maybe they worked with a male shaman or facilitator and there wasn't consent for a certain type of touch as part of the experience. So I think the really big ethical consideration is make sure if you do this experience with an individual, you get references or it's that, you know, you've had a trusted friend who has sat with them before, or you know, someone who can vet for them. Because unlike doctors and therapists and, you know, these people who are certified by boards, whether it's, you know, a national board or a state board, there's not a lot
41:25 Speaker 02 of mechanisms to report people who might be unethical in the psychedelic space. And so it's really critical that if you're interested in this, that you find a practitioner that is trustworthy, who you can work with. And thankfully, you know, on our website, Third Wave, we have a directory of practitioners. So we have retreat centers, clinics, coaches and therapists that we've vetted and that we recommend to our audiences, folks that they can work with. Because I do think this is the biggest ethical risk is that people are not waiting for the law to change to start to take psychedelics. In fact, last year in the United States, eight million people took psilocybin mushroom in 2023 alone. That's 3.1% of the population.
42:10 Speaker 02 Four million of those people were microdosing, right? So interest is growing, but people who are working with this, if you're going to do a therapeutic dose, a high dose of a psychedelic, have a guide, have a sitter, have a therapist, have a coach, a practitioner who you trust and can hold that space for you as you're navigating.
42:28 Jemma Sbeg? That is such helpful advice. And it really does point to this huge problem, right? If this isn't legalized or if there isn't progress towards making this a genuine therapeutic intervention, you do have these problems. And so we know that the current approach of like, don't do those things, just no, don't touch that, like, don't do drugs, whatever. I sound so lame saying that, but that way of thinking about it that I think a lot of like government bodies want us to take on board is incredibly unhelpful because people are still going to do it, but they end up and can end up, not always, in pretty dangerous situations.
43:08 Jemma Sbeg? Um, I like that you pointed out the fact that it is illegal means that there is no um way to discern at times like whether what you're consuming is something that you want to be consuming. You know, in Australia, we have uh problems with that with like N D M A and it being mixed with things that perhaps you don't want to consume. Uh, and I just think all of that is just more of an argument as to why this should be more widely accepted by the medical community. Obviously, that takes time with needing studies and approval. But until that does happen, you are going to see those instances that you briefly spoke about, which don't dominate the experience as well, um of it being unsafe because people aren't vetted
43:52 Jemma Sbeg? by, you know, you don't imagine like if you had this um approved course, like what it would take to become a psychologist or a surgeon, so people could know that they were going to an expert. And it sounds like you're kind of doing some of that work before the traditional like medical community catches up. Um, and that kind of brings me to a great question and probably one of my final questions. Firstly, what is holding us back? Is it just stigma? Um, and and secondly, if you could like envision a future where this was part of our medical system, like what would that look like? What would you want that to look like?
44:36 Speaker 02 So what's holding us back? This is a great question. Um, and it's something I reflect on a lot. I think at a very high level.
44:46 Speaker 02 As a, we have never had psychedelics available to us as a global culture. Another way to describe that is historically, when psychedelics have been used, they've always been in the underground. They've always been in sort of specific indigenous groups and communities. In ancient Greece, they had these things called the Eleusinian mysteries that Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius participated in. And they were the mysteries. You couldn't talk about them. If you talked about what happened in these experiences, you were either killed or excommunicated. Right? That's how sacred they were. So there is this deep relationship between psychedelic use and sort of the underground, the mystery, the unknown.
45:30 Speaker 02 And so when we're starting to bring this above ground for mental health and for a lot of the current ills that people face in modern society, there's a big question about how to do that safely. Because in the past, it wasn't that everyone had access to doing five grams of mushrooms or drinking ayahuasca or significantly altering their consciousness. And the drugs that we are most familiar with, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine, are very different than a psychedelic experience. So I think the first thing to point to is, instead of a stigma, I think it's more a
46:10 Speaker 02 lack of psychedelic literacy, that we are still learning, oh, ketamine is different than MDMA, and MDMA is different than psilocybin. And these psychedelic class of drugs are actually very different than cocaine and heroin and, you know, highly addictive substances. Because one thing I may have emphasized, but I'll reemphasize again, is psychedelics are anti-addictive. They actually help to heal addictions. They're not like these other illicit drugs, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, et cetera, et cetera. Very, very different drug class. So I think, on the one hand, it's psychedelic literacy. I would say, on the other hand, it's just the momentum that is required to develop policy and regulatory frameworks that
46:55 Speaker 02 Work for people who want to do this legally. We've seen this in Oregon. Oregon has legalized psilocybin mushrooms. They now have a regulatory framework in place where you have to get licensed by the state as a service center or facilitator. The people who want to take psilocybin mushrooms have to go into these service centers to do it there. Colorado has a bit more of a flexible approach now.
47:18 Speaker 02 Where it's not just psilocybin, but also ayahuasca in San Pedro. And there are various centers that can be licensed and it's quite open. So I think a lot of it is just. You know, we have a phrase in sort of startup world, which is you're building the airplane. As you're bringing it down the runway. It's a little bit like that with psychedelics. It's this thing that's never been done before. We've never made them accessible and available to a wide populace. And that's why I firmly believe in the utility of microdosing. I do not believe that everyone is necessarily suited to do a high dose of a psychedelic.
48:02 Speaker 02 I think for a lot of people, it's too chaotic. It's too much. It's too overwhelming. It's too destabilizing. What I do believe is that the vast majority of people, and when I say vast majority, I'm thinking. 90% plus of people would benefit from microdosing with a psychedelic. Because it's sub-intoxicating. It's not changing your everyday perception. It's shifting things enough, making your brain slightly neuroplastic. But it's not overwhelming it with new information. It's anti-addictive, unlike SSRIs, back to SSRIs, right? 50% of people who start taking SSRIs cannot get off of them because the withdrawal symptoms are so bad.
48:46 Speaker 02 With microdoses of psychedelics, with psychedelics generally, there's no, there's no withdrawal symptoms. So I feel like microdosing is the way of the future. And so part of what I'm most excited about is, you know, we have Third Wave as our educational brand and company. We have our Psychedelic Coaching Institute, which trains practitioners. And a couple of years ago, I also started a nonprofit called The Microdosing Collective. And we're focusing on how do we develop policy? So people can access microdoses of psilocybin mushrooms in a safe and legal way. Because for anyone who's listening to this, who lives in New York, or you live in LA, or you live in Austin, or you live, you know, in Sydney.
49:30 Speaker 02 Mushrooms are everywhere now, right? Like, the DEA is focusing a lot of their time, energy, and effort on fentanyl, as they should. And cocaine and organized crime, as they should. So there's this been this massive growth of interest in mushrooms and all of these chocolate bars and supplements and everything that's everywhere. And it's all illegal, for the most part, except in Colorado. And it's not regulated. And so people end up getting this, they don't know what's in it. And so we feel like with The Microdosing Collective, people are gonna do this anyway. We need to develop consumer protection. We need to have third-party tested supplements. And people need to be able to access this because as we were talking about before,
50:16 Speaker 02 Prozac is no better than placebo. Right? And a lot of people who get on Prozac and Lexapro can't get off. And there's all these nasty side effects. We need different treatments. We need treatments that actually work. And I do believe that psychedelics and microdosing in particular is a treatment modality that can transform our medical system, where the emphasis is much less on just take a pill to fix every ill. And the emphasis is much more on how can psychedelics and other tools like breathwork and yoga and meditation, other contemplative practices that facilitate neuroplasticity? How can those be catalysts to behavioral change?
50:57 Speaker 02 So we eat healthier, we sleep more, we exercise more, we practice gratitude, we spend more time outside. At the end of the day. Drugs are drugs. They aren't the fix themselves, but psychedelics are catalysts. They're neurocatalytic, so we can actually change our behaviors. And that makes me hopeful. It makes me hopeful that we'll move from having a sick care system to a real healthcare system. And we'll start to focus not just on taking a pill for every ill, but actually taking responsibility for our health and wellbeing and making intentional choices to live in a more connected and loving way.
51:39 Jemma Sbeg? What a beautiful way to finish. What a beautiful way to finish. Um, I'm going to ask you one final question. I feel like I, that was just such a beautiful way to put exactly what we're talking about today. Um, this is a question I ask every single guest. So you're coming on during like our 12 days of guest series, obviously. And it's just like a chance to talk to like 12 people who just know this shit, are really cool, are experts, have a new perspective. What would be your one, your biggest piece of advice for people in their twenties? Doesn't have to be related to what we talked about today, but just one thing you wish that someone had sat you down and told you.
52:18 Speaker 02 My biggest piece of advice for someone in their twenties is to pursue work, to pursue a career, to pursue some form of profession that is more about the art of it, rather than the outcome of it. And what I mean by that is we are so often conditioned that we have to be immediately successful. We have to make a lot of money right away. We have to, you know, have the car. We have to get a nice place. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think the most valuable part of our twenties is the capacity to experiment and the capacity to live in a way that I would consider to be frugal.
52:59 Speaker 02 So we can have the freedom to pursue work that is deeply meaningful. I think the biggest mistake that people in their twenties make is they, and this is particularly for Americans, it's not as prevalent in Europe and Australia, but they leave undergrad, they get a job right away, and they essentially stay in that job for years and years and years and years. And they end up becoming very miserable. There's no meaning in the work that they do, but they are now tied to it because of the, what they call the hedonic treadmill. And I think the greatest opportunity with our twenties is to pursue work that feels artistic, to pursue
53:41 Speaker 02 work that feels like you are creating something, that you are responsible for something, and to trust that if you are contributing something of value to those around you, that there will be reciprocity in that, and that you will be taken care of. That would be my biggest, my biggest piece of advice.
54:01 Jemma Sbeg? I love that as well. I found that to be the case for me. So I have to say I 100% agree. And no one else has said that yet. So everyone's getting something, everyone's getting something unique. Paul, I want to thank you so much for coming on, for giving us just so much to think about, giving us so much of the science, so much of the research, and your opinion as well, your expert opinion. So I really, really appreciate the effort that, the work that you're doing, the creative work that you're doing. Where can people find you if they want to learn more? I know you have an amazing book, and I was actually reading, this is so strange, but I was reading some of the reviews, and I was like, wow, this looks, this looks like a good book. So where can they find more from you?
54:42 Speaker 02 So Mastering Microdosing is the book that's on Amazon. You can get it on Kindle, thethirdwave.co, thethirdwave.co, that's our main educational platform. Our training program is there, our courses are there. I have a podcast that I've hosted for nine years in the psychedelic space. You can check that out there. We have a newsletter. And then I'm on social, mostly on Instagram and Twitter, but also on LinkedIn. If folks are listening to this, add me on LinkedIn, send me a note. Paul Austin, three W is my social handle. Follow me there, send me a note. I post almost every day, sometimes fun memes. Usually, like, sometimes I'll post long scientific threads on Twitter about cutting edge research that's been published.
55:26 Speaker 02 So if you're interested in staying up to date on this, the third wave, Paul Austin, and my book Mastery Microdosing.
55:33 Jemma Sbeg? Look at that. Perfect. Again, thank you so much to Paul for coming on. As always, guys, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to give us a follow. We have so many more guest episodes with amazing people coming out. And it's my favorite time of the year to hear from just such wonderful experts. Until next time, stay safe, stay kind, be gentle to yourself. As always, we will talk very, very soon.
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