Announcement [00:00:00] Please don't try the techniques discussed in this podcast at home for more information, please contact your relevant health practitioner.
Intro [00:00:16] Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Mind Behind it. My name is Huda and I am Sahil
Prash [00:00:24] I'm Prash. I'm a doctor. I did my training in psychiatry, but from the time I started my psychiatry training, I guess the entire purpose and motive was to operate and work with psychedelics. The operative term I prefer to use is that I'm a psychedeliciartist rather than simply a psychiatrist. And within that stream, most of the work I do at the moment is within the research focus to looking into the therapeutic potential of the applications of psychedelics in psychotherapy. It's a nascent field, so it's still very much in the research stage at the moment. But we look towards that becoming or having sort of clinical application in the near future. The other stream of what I do is that five years ago I founded a cryptocurrency brokerage firm which would be foreign to a lot of people,
Sahil [00:01:10] Not right now. So this is interesting because I think our paths have crossed for a reason. We delve into my inner sanctum. And what I really am interested in is I'm heavily invested in crypto right now because I have you know, it's it's the best way to tell the financial institutions to fuck off.
Prash [00:01:27] That is exactly that is exactly why I got into it right at the outset. It was the ideology, not so much the sort of fiscal opportunity. But yeah, I got into it very much as a means of investing myself and then gradually turned that into a means of selling it to other people. And over the course of the last few years, that brokerage has expanded out now. We've got a team of about 35 people sitting out there for what we do. We are the largest retail crypto brokerage in the world. Can quite comfortably say that. And that is my other stream, both disruptive innovation, the challenge to sort of destabilise the status quo. The industry is from the dissatisfaction of the industries from which they spawn,
Sahil [00:02:08] like from an Asian parents perspective.
Prash [00:02:12] Terrible.
Sahil [00:02:12] No, well, you hit the jackpot in the sense it's a very misguided jackpot because, hey, my son's a doctor. Really? What does he do? Oh, he researches into psychedelics. Oh, okay. What's the other thing he does. Oh, cryptocurrency. Why? Because he thinks banks are bullshit.
Prash [00:02:28] Yeah.
Sahil [00:02:29] Like you're going against the grain but in the grain.
Prash [00:02:31] Yeah. It's a very conflicted state. The number of times I have said to myself or my friends 'Oh my poor mother', that line is almost it's become a bit of a parable.
Sahil [00:02:41] 'What's Prash up to. It's difficult. And isn't he a doctor? It's difficult'
Huda [00:02:46] That's all you leave it as.
Prash [00:02:47] In the in the early days of starting the brokerage back when there was still a lot of doubt and suspicion around cryptocurrency. And the sort of sense was very much 'All these years you went to medical school and now you're a moneychanger' which technically I could not disagree with, because as a brokerage, that's kind of what you are. You're moneychanger,.
Sahil [00:03:04] You know, she gave you the best title ever, the best hashtag for crypto, which is money changer in Bitcoin. If Satoshi hasn't used that, he's a fucking idiot.
Prash [00:03:13] The Chettiar seems to have this thing called a Kandangi. So in south India, the Chettiars were known as the moneylenders or that. That's how they gain their fortune. And the Kandangi is where all the money changers were. They usually had a box in front of them, looked a bit like a harmonium, but it was basically a - it didn't produce music, it produced money. And there a ledger where they held their money where they wrote down the records. And I think that's what my yeah, that was the sort of visual image that they probably had. I don't give them enough credit. My parents have become well educated in cryptocurrency at the age of seventy five, which is quite impressive.
Sahil [00:03:45] I just realised we have a lot to talk about. So we'll focus on, you know, your work in psychedelic therapy. So let's just start with - I was actually interested to know your first experience with underground psychedelic therapy. Very few people know about that. It's quite hush hush. People are not allowed to really talk about it. But in the UK, it's becoming a big thing. Now, more and more people are sort of open to that kind of therapy. So how did you find your first experience with that and where was it?
Prash [00:04:10] My first experience with psychedelics, per say, was not in a therapeutic setting. My first experience with psychedelics was.
Sahil [00:04:16] I hope so. I hope so.
Prash [00:04:17] Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a recreational setting as a lot of people are -.
Sahil [00:04:22] How old were you?
Prash [00:04:22] A little late in the game. Twenty seven.
Sahil [00:04:24] And was it with a mate?
Prash [00:04:25] I suppose you can sort of differentiate between pure recreational setting. Sort of Charlie went to a music festival and took acid in the crowd of ten thousand people who didn't know. Then there is this Charlie, who's with with a group of close friends who decided to use psychedelics for intellectual exploration and went off to a cabin in the woods and proceeded to sort of fragment their minds and assemble it back together again. And then as Charlie went to an underground therapist with a particular intention to go through a guided therapy programme. And my introduction was definitely the middle one. The second one. And it was yeah, it was it was profound. It made me question everything I knew about what I thought reality was.
Sahil [00:05:04] What did you think reality was?
Prash [00:05:05] Pretty black and white,
Sahil [00:05:07] Even at the age of twenty seven?
Prash [00:05:08] I still believed, I guess, that there was an idea of an objective reality. And even if I didn't necessarily think that, there's a difference between thinking that and actually living. Yeah, you can, you can understand it is a very abstract concept, the idea, that objective reality doesn't exist. That all reality is purely subjective and it's only perception. This is a very Hindu concept we call Maya or illusion, but then to truly embody that and live it is a completely different thing altogether. And I think to do that requires a certain level of experience within the realm of completely subjective reality to start to understand and embody it. And that is what this psychedelic journey took me towards. Now you want to talk about more underground therapy itself? I guess I won't talk in too much intricate detail because there are obviously legal ramifications to this. But know that and I think it is relatively common knowledge that underground therapy and underground therapists have existed forever and continue to do so today. And certainly in the UK and certainly in Australia, and particularly in the Northern Rivers region, the New South Wales, there's a thriving community of underground therapists, certainly in far north Queensland for the thriving community of underground therapists. That's probably the two main centres I can think of. And this has continued for many, many years. And within the world of underground therapists, there's really good ones. There's a lot of knowledge there. There's also a lot of sort of neo-shamanism which can again be divided into the ones who are unintentionally sort of benevolently, non beneficial and can do benevolent harm. Having a feather in your hair and dreadlocks does not a shaman make and having had five psychedelic trips in your life, does not make you a shaman all of a sudden. And there are those that are well intentioned but misguided individuals who can do harm accidentally. But there is also a subsection of a malevolent harm, intentionally misguided and that still exist within the underground therapy world. It's hard to combat because it's a completely unregulated space. And one of the principal motives between the clinical regulated psychedelic therapy movement is to move away from that risk. And that's a very inherent risk. And when you consider the power of these substances and the potential that they have, to quote Spider-Man 'With great power comes great responsibility'. And the potential to do good is always balanced with the potential to do harm. And so attempting to minimise that harm: 'Do no harm is the first principle'. That's the journey that I'm on. And it's a journey that a lot of my brethren within this industry are
Sahil [00:07:43] Let's go back to, you know, starting psychotherapy. Why were you so attracted to psychedelic therapy? So I've gone through my fair share of therapy. So just to give you some background, I actually OD'd on Molly, which is a recreational drug, and I'd never done drugs before that. I took it for three days straight and the first two days were great and the third day, I had a trip. And I was fine in a couple of hours. But the next day I had a drink and it happened again. And it kept on happening to me for months. And I obviously became really anxious, lost a lot of weighty. Like my life just came to a standstill. And then obviously I took treatment, which was like getting on medication. And CBT, and obviously medication, kind of became to go route which is what most of the people want to study in this field. But obviously, you had an interest in psychedelics specifically. Why was that?
Prash [00:08:26] Well, I mean, I never wanted to be a psychiatrist. At no point did I really want to be a psychiatrist. I finished medical school and I was heading down the path of being a surgical trainee. And then I discovered psychedelics and spent quite a few months deep diving, both experientially as well as sort of theoretically. And all of a sudden the body just wasn't that interesting anymore. And the mind gained this immaculate significance and interest. And psychiatry gave me, without sounding like Dr Evil, his unfettered access to the human mind and the capacity to study the mind on a day to day basis. But in particular, it was the possibility of being able to understand how psychedelics worked with the mind and work with psychedelics. And this was 2012. And back then psychedelic therapy was very much in its infancy. I got into psychiatry to work on psychedelics and it wasn't the other way around to being in psychiatry and then discovering the potential for psychedelics in psychiatry and therefore choosing to specialise in that. In my third year of psychiatry training that I came out of the psychedellic closet, so to speak, and start speaking openly about this. And it was it was terrifying at the time, sort of exposing yourself to your colleagues. The first three or four years of that was a lot of stigma and criticism that I've been speaking at conferences a couple of times a year and invariably getting slammed, particularly at medical conferences. And it's usually stigmatised views that are not necessarily based on evidence. But you can't necessarily blame people when they when they've been indoctrinated over years and you just get really good at countering the stigmatised accusations, not facts and evidence.
Huda [00:10:02] So what are the main ones that they throw at you?
Prash [00:10:05] Oh, man, that it's dangerous firstly. How can you be recommending this when it's dangerous?
Sahil [00:10:12] Yeah because medications are not dangerous at all. I mean, please keep taking them. Not a problem.
Prash [00:10:16] Point one. Point one. Nothing is without side effects, but also psychedelics have no overdose potential or addiction danger.
Huda [00:10:23] I thought they did.
Prash [00:10:24] You find me one person who has physiologically overdosed on mushrooms.
Sahil [00:10:29] It's always the chemicals, the hard chemical drugs that people tend to O.D. on. It's never mushrooms. I think people have a scary trip on it, but they never overdose
Prash [00:10:38] There are psychological impacts. But there are countless tales of people taking what would be a thousand times a dose of what would be a usual recreational dose of acid, for example. And yeah, they may never be the same again psychologically because it's hard once you're fragments of reality has been broken down to that extent to come back again. But physiologically, fine. Are you take a thousand times the dose of anything else you try. Potatoes and
Sahil [00:11:07] Woah! potatoes is really sensitive
Huda [00:11:09] I fucking love potatoes
Sahil [00:11:10] Be really careful how you tread, because potatoes is life.
Prash [00:11:14] I should not, I will tread carefully
Sahil [00:11:16] Going back to that. What I really struggle with is, you know, a lot of times people with psychedelic experiences are very abstract. And I understand because they always have they always have a very abstract
Prash [00:11:27] There is a word for it. Ineffability
Huda [00:11:29] I love that word. Ineffable.
Sahil [00:11:30] You're going to use it everywhere.
Huda [00:11:31] No I'm not
Prash [00:11:33] The incapacity to define in words.
Sahil [00:11:35] And that kind of frustrates me sometimes because I'm like, I want to try this thing, but I'm too scared. Right, because I did it once and it completely changed my life. And of course, I'm really, really scared to do anything else because I'm so scared of the trip. But if you were suggesting someone to you just to do psychedelic therapy, how would you prepare them for that? What are some of the things you tell them before their first session?
Prash [00:11:56] That's probably a far longer discussion than we can have in an hour. General psychedelic therapy session, we might talk about this a bit later. The preparation assessment session, those are about four sessions, that's about four hours of preparation for it. And even then, it's the tip of the iceberg, really. You can never really prepare someone for how it's going to be. It is a phenomenological experience and we are limited by this very blunt tool that we call language to try and describe things. And when you are talking about experiences and perceptions that are so outside your conceptions of normal reality that you don't even have words for it yet, how can you possibly communicate that? There are a few brief concepts that you can kind of allude to. For example, people often talk about ego disillusion, the disillusion of the ego, the dissolving of the ego.
Sahil [00:12:47] Which is quite common, that's the first thing you hear.
Prash [00:12:49] You talk about psychedelics and that's a very common construct. It sounds scary. This idea of your ego completely dissolving
Huda [00:12:56] Also kind of important.
Prash [00:12:57] It's essential. Absolutely essential to how psychedelics sort of exert their positive effect.
Sahil [00:13:03] How do you define ego Prash? Like you? How do you define ego?
Prash [00:13:06] So, yeah, we'll leave aside the sort of Freudian definitions of ego, superego, I think, of the ego as being the interface that acts between the self and the outside world. And in a lot of cases, it's something that we utilise to form a shield against our fragile inner selves. Our true selves are fragile. The soft, mushy insides and the ego is essential so that we're not always constantly crumbling in abject, abject distress. And so at one end, you have narcissism where the ego is so strongly scaffolded and that shield is so strong you can never quite penetrate to the inside. And then at the other end you have complete abject anxiety where there is no shield. It's just this slumber, really. And so the ego does act as the interface, but by virtue of being the shield, it does protect against vulnerability but also prevents vulnerability.
Huda [00:14:01] I was literally just about to ask about vulnerability.
Prash [00:14:03] If you consider that a lot of therapy is trying to understand the self better and trying to understand your own internal deficits and your own scars and where all that comes from, the ego in that setting, if anything, it is a detriment because it's constantly trying to prevent you from being able to access those soft, mushy insides. So the idea of ego, disillusion, which strips away those ego defences, allowing you to actually peer in and discover the sort of dungeons and the demons that crawl within the basements, cellars of your psyche becomes an incredibly valuable experience. So ego disillusion is one another that's worth considering and sort of bringing up is that anything that is experienced in that moment in the psychedelic trip is of your own creation? The mushroom has no thought content. The thought content is certainly within you. The demons you see, the insecurities you feel, the paranoia that you go through. These are the negative experiences, but also the joy that you feel, the beauty that you experience, all these things, all the hallucinations, anything you see which has content is your own creation. It is of your own creation. At least when we think about the negative side of things and people often have a bad trip. I like not to use the word bad trip, but a challenging trip. Bad is a value loaded term. Challenging trip is often where all the learning happens because in a challenging trip you consider that the thought content is all within you. Then you recognise that that's stuff been in you the whole time. It's the kind of psychological stuff that sort of rears its head on Leidel Tuesday, blindsides you and then you call that an anxiety or you call that a panic attack, or you call that mood swings and you call that various different things. But that content is within you, but it's subconscious and you're not consciously aware of what it is and psychedelics instead. And that zone of having your ego stripped away gives you an opportunity to go down there and you've got a castle. Imagine your psyche as a castle and there's rising damp. You've got two options. One, which is like batter down the hatches. I don't want to hear about it. Or here's an opportunity to actually go down there and discover where the depths rising from and over time work at fixing the leak.
Sahil [00:16:10] My psyche is like Taj Mahal. It's it's beautiful. It's big, but under there are two dead bodies of two lovers.
Huda [00:16:18] So it essentially brings everything to the surface
Sahil [00:16:21] Which is what I guess therapy wants you to do. Right. It's to access the vulnerable side of you,
Prash [00:16:26] which is absolutely.
Huda [00:16:27] And that's almost kind of in line with Jung psychology theories as well, isn't it?
Prash [00:16:33] It's very in line with a lot of Jungian psychology and it's definitely in line with a lot of Oriental mysticism, as they would say. In fact, talking to my parents about psychedelics, which, you know, that is a whole other podcast.
Sahil [00:16:49] Dialogues with Kala (Prash's mum)
Prash [00:16:50] Dialogues with Kala. But it was actually a lot easier than I thought it would have been because approaching it philosophically. My parents are Hindu as I am, and Hindu philosophy and psychedelic philosophy are actually very much one of the same, the concepts are very, very alike as is as a lot of Buddhist philosophy as well. And we were often speaking very similar language, just different dialects.
Sahil [00:17:12] Yeah. And I guess when it comes to that idea of trying to access that vulnerable side of you, is the ego a result of human evolution? It was made to protect us from something like if we dated back to, like centuries and centuries ago, were we as human beings initially when we came on this earth where we like these vulnerable beings and over time, did this ego come about or do you think it was always there?
Prash [00:17:34] This is, again, another podcast on psychodynamic theory. And there are various different theories about the ego. And one explanation that I can give you is if you existed alone on a desert island, there would be very little reason for an ego. But we, but we live in society and we live with other people. Consider this the idea that there is a true self and there is a false self and the false self, because the projection that you put forward to the rest of the world and to society and the true self is who you truly are. And they are never the same. And the truly enlightened perhaps is the one who has managed to narrow that discrepancy between the true self and the false self. I would even go so far as to suggest I speak to my patients that one way towards a path to contentment is to narrow the discrepancy between the true self and the false self, because then you are truly comfortable with who you are. But considering that by virtue of living in society, we can never quite be that, then there needs to be this buffer zone and the operator demodulator of that buffer zone becomes the ego. And it is and it is a necessary construct if you are looking to survive in society. It's essential, but it can be a problem depending on the situation you are, the context you are and whether it is overinflated. It's a dynamic equation that can change from time to time, depending on where you are, who you're with. Your ego isn't a problem with your friends, but maybe a problem with your parents or the other way around.
Huda [00:18:56] So we were speaking to someone a while back who struggled and still, you know, we all struggle with it, I guess, some form of mental health illness. But his was mostly regarding depression and the comment that he made, which I think really stood out. And it's something I've always kind of believed, but he kind of articulated it the best. You know, when we're experiencing depression and anxieties and all that sort of stuff, we often are selfish because we're in fight or flight. So for us, this is just the only way we're trying to survive. And the best way that he found to combat is by being more compassionate. And I feel like when you say the importance of ego dissolving a part of that is that it will open us up to vulnerability and compassion.
Sahil [00:19:39] Yeah, that was fucking profound.
Huda [00:19:42] It was just mostly I made the connection to that, because when we talk about depression as such and we talk about anxiety and all that sort of stuff, a lot of it, unfortunately, it's like a double edged sword. You know, we are trying to survive. However, we're also becoming more selfish, which is then closing us off to people around us, which is then exacerbating our depression,.
Prash [00:20:00] Maybe not as much an acute depression, but that is probably something that you will see as a trend for anyone who has suffered with chronic depression, because over time you start to develop that hardened shell as a means of self-protection.
Huda [00:20:14] Yes, because I think we all kind of are depressed, like we all have some form of depression that comes out
Sahil [00:20:19] I don't. No, I don't want that talk.
Huda [00:20:21] And I think that I think once you experience it, that's kind of it. Right. And the rest of your life, you kind of work to deal with it and how you're going to manage it better. Right. And that's kind of key because it's like the only way, like we all experience it. You know, we're humans and we live in a society where everybody experiences it. The daily difference between someone who's happier and not is the way they've handled it or managed it from their perspective.
Prash [00:20:44] We all experience distress, we all experience distress and to varying degrees but to make that transition from distress, to depressed and sort of semi arbitrary line in the sand. But usually you consider something that's far more pervasive, far more intractable, and that doesn't fluctuate over time. And it's yeah, it's something that stuck in one year and you can just extricate yourself from that. But your point earlier about the depressive position, again, this is a common sort of paradigm of difference in the way people think about psychology. But there is an entire school which stems from the idea that we come from a predominantly depressive position and we're constantly just seeking those sparks that lift us up from it. And, yeah, it's a slightly pessimistic view. William Burroughs. If you've ever heard of who said perhaps all pleasure is merely a relief.
Sahil [00:21:32] I do think there's some truth to that, because I've kind of realised in the last year, I think being in lockdown and, you know, just I think it was a time of soul searching for a lot of people. And some people just watch porn or whatever. I was soul searching because I am a resourceful human being and I kind of realised that my depression tended to be worst when I had fluctuations in my mood. And I realised that the whole idea was to try to get away from those fluctuations and make them smaller and smaller. And not being too happy or not being too sad was actually the best neutral position I could get to. And I didn't want any piece of news to make me too happy or too sad, because both of them have disadvantages, because once you're too happy, then everything else feels shit compared to that.
Prash [00:22:12] It certainly isn't a universal position. There are certainly a lot of people who prefer that. And this is the difficulty with psychiatry that there is never a one size fits all approach and sort of tailoring that to the individual and the way their sort of psyche has formed up until that point and allowing them to understand what works for them better. One of the key things that my analyst has told me, the first thing he said to me is this is called psychoanalysis. It's not called psycho-fix it. We ain't here to fix shit. It's not about fixing anything. It's about analysis. It's about allowing you to understand what is subconsciously affecting you all the time and allow you to bring that out into the conscious so that once you understand what you're working with, then your conscious mind and your cognitive capacity can put in compensatory strategies. You can tailor your life such that it works towards your psyche and the way it is, because a lot of people come into this at 30 or 35 or at forty five and by that point there's a lot that has already been built up which is going to take a lot of un-training. You're thinking of fixing it. Right. And so a lot of the times it's about just gaining a greater understanding. Self-knowledge is the means of liberation, and this is what psychedelics aim to do in a far more truncated, quite intense manner.
Sahil [00:23:30] You made a fantastic point there, which was we analysing it and not fixing it because after my drug trip for a long time, so I had what's called depersonalisation and derealization, a lot of it. And the whole time my thought was this is never gonna end. This is never going to end. This is never going to end. And eventually what happened over years and years is that I forgot about it and it just became life. So you saying that it's actually quite interesting because there is nothing to fix. Yeah, you can analyse it, but as soon as you say you want to fix something, which is what the human mind tends to do,
Prash [00:24:03] There's an end point that you have.
Sahil [00:24:04] Yes.
Sahil [00:24:04] Yeah. And if you don't get it, you get depressed because every time you're like, I haven't got it, I haven't got it. I'm not there, I'm not there.
Huda [00:24:10] When we are in that state, a lot of the time it's all about managing how to deal with it really.
Sahil [00:24:16] Yeah. And I think going back to psychedelics, I want to ask you, even if it's a bad trip, I don't think anyone's ever depressed during the trip.
Prash [00:24:24] Look, bad trips can be terrifying. Yeah. Call them challenging trips because that's still the term that I think is far more appropriate. Challenging trips can be absolutely terrifying. But there was a really interesting study. Roland Griffiths. I think it was 2017 or 2018, which looked at a kind of a sample size map, but it was pretty large and real that 60 percent of people surveyed stated that they had experienced a challenging trip as part of their psychedelic experiences and that that challenging trip was rated in the top three most difficult moments of their lives. But I think, again I should have these numbers. But like 85 percent of them said they absolutely would do it again,
Sahil [00:25:00] Even though it was challenging.
Prash [00:25:01] Absolutely. And anecdotally that that is one hundred percent, in fact I would say I would say the 15 percent who didn't say that, didn't say that they would do it again or didn't actually have a positive outcome from it, the issue isn't with the psychedelic experience. The issue was with the integration, which is a whole other concept which we probably need to talk about. So in every psychedelic therapy session, the general route that it follows is, let's say, three to four sessions of preparation and assessment. And then you actually have the psychedelic therapy session, which can last anywhere from six to ten hours, depending usually with-
Sahil [00:25:39] That's like a school day.
Prash [00:25:40] Yeah, but a lot more interesting
Huda [00:25:44] It's way more interesting.
Prash [00:25:46] So anywhere from six to 10 hours with two therapists. And then after that you have what we call integration. So once a week, an hour, with usually one of the therapists was there in the session almost like once a week, psychotherapy for six weeks or 10 weeks. And that process of integration is a means of taking all of the learning that came from the psychedelic experience, reformulating that into a structure in a form that you can then incorporate into your life going forward. Any experience in the presence, any experience in the present is left behind in the past, unless you make an active effort to integrate it into your future. That is any experience and that is even more relevant when you have an experience that is that profound and that impactful, that there is no point to having all of this wonderment if you don't actually make active efforts like integrate that and apply it and learn from it. And I would say of that 15 percent who had been challenging the experience and that didn't necessarily gain a beneficial outcome from it, I would hazard a guess that a large part of that problem was a lack of integration or effective integration. Because the challenging experiences are really where the magic happens.
Huda [00:27:02] Yes.
Sahil [00:27:03] It would be worth discussing with you know, obviously we we don't want patient privacy thing. But what were some of the wonderments that came out from some of your patients or people that you that that underwent or even for you? What were some of the yeah, the knowings that they got out of these experiences?
Prash [00:27:19] There isn't patients that we are sort of treating now clinically. And in Australia at least, we're gearing up for maybe a couple of trials in the year to come. But the qualitative studies from around the world in terms of the learnings that people have taken away from this, one of the key ones is a greater understanding of reality and the purely subjective nature of it, the issues with persisting with a very fixed idea of what reality is and therefore one's view of the world. That's one. A greater sense of purpose and a greater sense of meaning are again one of those very common threads that people come out of the experiences with a greater sense of connectedness to other humans and to nature and the world around them is another very, very common thread. I often describe that there is a moment in every, maybe not every, but in a lot of psychedelic experiences. On one hand, you become so aware of the enormity of everything around you, particularly if you're out in nature, looking up to it, to a tree and recognising the enormity of this thing that has existed for millennia and your absolute insignificance in comparison with all this wonderment around you, but at the same time recognising just how your carbon atoms fit into the carbon atoms of the rest of this ecosystem and how you are an integral thread in this greater fabric of what is reality and that point of recognising your absolute insignificance and your absolute significance at the same point. The technical term is a mindfuck.
Prash [00:29:03] Yeah, that recognition is yeah. It can be can be quite vital. And depending on which position you're coming from, for those who have been living their lives completely convinced of the absolute significance, can't be a really sobering reality. Really sobering reality. But while still not necessarily breaking them down to an extent, because they still aware of their significant and conversely, they're coming from that other position,.
Huda [00:29:29] It would probably humble those.
Prash [00:29:30] Yeah. And so as a as a means of equalising those who are sitting on either end of that bimodal spectrum,
Sahil [00:29:39] Which now thinking about it and thinking about depression, Huda said this in the beginning. It's you are so in your head and inside of you. And with an experience like that for the first time, you can actually sit outside and it's relief. It's actually quite relieving because you're like, oh, my God, I don't have to sit in that brain for a bit. And you can look at other things around you and kind of like appreciate that. But when you're depressed, you have a lot of negative thoughts, it's all in your head, and when you were mentioning, you know, just looking at the tree and mentioning the significance of something that stood for millennia, your brain has those really, really deep connected thoughts. You haven't experienced them in a while or
Huda [00:30:13] Or you don't give them much, much thought or.
Sahil [00:30:17] Weight. Exactly
Sahil [00:30:18] Like Oh, I've got to do laundry. I got to go to work. And the banal I guess I don't know if it leads to people being existential because everything else kind of becomes a bit banal.
Sahil [00:30:27] Absolutely, it does. And that's absolutely it does.
Sahil [00:30:30] That can again be a good thing and a bad thing like depending on the person. But yeah, it gives you that relief where you can just sit outside of yourself and look at both sides, the duality of life and go, OK, so there is no clear answer here. So what am I looking for?
Prash [00:30:44] Yeah. And to look at yourself from the outside and see yourself for what, what you what you truly are and what it all really is. There's this idea of you can't read the label from inside the jar.
Huda [00:30:55] Yeah, that's true.
Prash [00:30:57] And to be able to remove yourself and if so much of it mentioned reality and the fallacy that it is, but if so much of reality is perception or all reality in my mind is perception. And so much of perception is perspective and anything that allows you to shift that perspective to view things from a completely different angle. This is where Hindu philosophy, psychodelic philosophy, quantum physics all meet at this singular juncture, because that's that's very much one of the basic premises of quantum physics, which is expected.
Sahil [00:31:34] Yeah. And-
Huda [00:31:35] I always say that in your like 'you always say that'
Sahil [00:31:38] What? Quantum physics ?
Sahil [00:31:40] No I say persepective all the time
Sahil [00:31:41] You've never mentioned quantum physics.
Huda [00:31:44] I'm not really good at quantum physics.
Sahil [00:31:45] Well, not a lot of people are because it's still again, it's a very nascent science and I because I took physics in high school, like we kind of had this one segment on quantum physics, which was quite small. But I think there was a reason it was so small because it's very hard to grasp and -
Prash [00:32:00] It's humanities as much as it is a science.
Sahil [00:32:03] Yeah. And I think it's kind of the closest we will ever get to understanding, you know, a lot of people now tend to focus on, you know, having these experiences so they can alter their consciousness and alter their reality and aim for this other reality that they can go into. But funnily enough, I think psychedelic experiences probably help you with your current reality and make you go, oh, that's not too bad. This is not the worst thing thing in the world.
Prash [00:32:28] No. And the problem with looking is that you can keep looking and keep looking and looking and looking. And by definition, the rabbit hole has no end. How long do you want to keep looking? And this again is what I think I've mentioned briefly earlier in terms of the risks and the stigmatisation of the field, this idea that psychedelics have zero addiction potential. Zero. When you're find one person again who's physiologically addicted to psychedelics and I'll stop talking about the subject forever. That's one way to end a career, I suppose, and from a physiological standpoint, there's plenty of research behind this that that is true. But from a psychological standpoint, I've often had this sort of question asked of me: 'if it's such an amazing place to be and don't you want to just keep going back there, just want to be back there all the time' And I say, actually, no, because it's it's tiring. It's incredibly tiring.
Sahil [00:33:25] Well, six to ten hours
Huda [00:33:26] Doing mental work. It's a lot.
Prash [00:33:29] Six to ten hours of cracking a brain open. That's that's tiring. And yeah, usually after that there is some time needed to process and this idea that people want to just keep living in that space is-.
Huda [00:33:40] But they're talking about addiction as if it's like there's opioids that people take as an addiction. So it's like, well, where you know, where...if you're going to talk about addiction then...
Sahil [00:33:51] Well, I think the reason is actually quite clear why people are so against having psychedelic therapy. It's because the opioid industry is so fucking big. Companies like Pfizer, well, they like these companies have lawsuits every year that they have to fix. Right. They've got a certain amount of money dedicated to lawsuits like $200 million. If you started more of something else like psychedelics, their industries are going to be ruined. So they want you to be taking that shit.
Prash [00:34:15] The answer is complex.
Sahil [00:34:15] Don't be diplomatic.
Prash [00:34:17] No, it absolutely it absolutely is. And I would say that that's definitely one piece of the puzzle, but it's definitely not that which started the problem. It's certainly perpetuating it. And yes, I don't think that it's sort of conspiratorial to suggest that big pharma that produces anti depressants has a vested interest in sort of maintaining the status quo. Yes, I truly believe in that course, but they didn't necessarily start the problem. Yeah, the problem, if you really want the answer to where the problem started, psychedelics have been utilised in religious sacrament for probably as long as there has been religious sacrament. There's a phenomenal book called 'The Infinity Key' written by a guy called Brian Moresco, tracking the use of psychedelics throughout world religions over the last few thousand years, which is very interesting. But the modern rebel psychedelic revolution started by Albert Hoffman in 1943, doing a story about acid. Do you know the story about acid?
Prash [00:35:14] And so on the 16th of April 1943, Albert Hoffman, who was a scientist working for Sandos Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, he was experimenting with a derivative that they were trying to make a respiratory stimulant and it wasn't really doing what they thought it would do and he pulled it out again to try to experiment with it. The story goes, you may have some on his fingers. It's still unclear, but whatever happened, he went home and things weren't just quite the same again. So three days later, on the 19th of April, 1943, he ingested two hundred micrograms micrograms of the substance, lysergic acid, twenty five diethylamide LSD-25. And then he got on his bicycle and rode home or tried to ride home. And that was the world's first intentional acid trip and the 19th of April is still celebrated around the world as Bicycle Day. More people take acid on the 19th of April than on any other day of the year. Look it up.
Sahil [00:36:17] It's like 4/20 but for acid
Prash [00:36:19] Yeah it's day before.
Sahil [00:36:20] Oh, it's April 19.
Prash [00:36:21] Yeah, 4/19, giving us far more actual historical precedent. But that's that kick started the modern psychedelic revolution. And what again, you bring up big pharmas, what Sandoz Laboratories did then was probably have this thing be like, OK, so it does all this stuff. How do we make money off? For about a decade, Sandoz would basically send out vials of liquid LSD to any researcher that asks for it. It was called Dialisit because they were desperate to find some pharmaceutical clinical application for it. Like 'please research this find something that it could do that we can then turn this into a medicine' and so between 1943 till about 1970, that research was rife. The US government themselves sponsored about one hundred twenty trials to psychedelic research and then in 1970 Richard Nixon-
Sahil [00:37:12] During the Vietnam War.
Prash [00:37:13] And that was the problem because what happened...in 1969 was probably the zenith of the hippie counterculture movement, which was pro love, anti war and the one thing you could not have at that point, it was anti-Viet war which was already such a fragile situation. You couldn't make thinking illegal, but you could definitely make legal anything that made people think more.
Huda [00:37:38] So it's almost like a form of control
Prash [00:37:41] Absolutely...and we've seen an apology from Harry Anslinger in the US at the time talking about exactly how this was very much a political move.
Sahil [00:37:52] Yeah, well, the Watergate incident, which is which is pretty bad, but that's actually quite what Bharat said. A friend of ours who's a psychiatrist as well. And he said it's like you have to know about the story about psychedelics and where it all started. They actually had tons of research in the 1960s and just before the Vietnam War. And then people realised that, you know, all these hippies were using it and questioning and they're like, holy shit, this is not what this was for.
Huda [00:38:16] Well, you don't you don't often find hippies being arseholes, really? Like, a lot of the hippies are nice people.
Sahil [00:38:22] Yeah. And I think it scares us. Yeah, it scares us. And I think people become really jealous and go, oh, that's a great way of living.
Prash [00:38:30] Questioning power structures are one of the most dangerous things you can do.
Sahil [00:38:34] Yeah, I think sometimes like the reason we get so busy with our lives is so that we can't question like they are purposely made like this or that, like why do you need to do so much laundry? I don't get it. Why do you need to iron clothes?
Huda [00:38:46] You've been going on about laundry all day.
Sahil [00:38:47] Yeah. Because it's so banal and like just we just spend so much time doing banal things or figuring out how to put fitted sheets, fuck fitted sheets! Why do we need sheets, like all these really...
Huda [00:38:57] I'd say humans have a remarkable ability to take something very simple and complicate the bejesus out of it. And I will use the psychedelic industry as one example of this. There was a great quote from the Johns Hopkins where they were running one of the psychedelic trials and psychedelic trials are incredibly expensive. And one of the reasons for that is that there's huge security protocols that are necessary. Just to store these things. So cybin is stored in a safe, which is in a double locker room, which is at the end of a corridor, which has got video cameras all around it, which is that corridor you need a swipe card to enter. And it's in a building which is a security guard on the outside. And there's all of this. Imagine the cost that goes into all of the permits and the import restriction licences. But you walk out of that building at Johns Hopkins and you sort of turn left and you walk about two hundred metres, you get the edge of the campus and a state forest at about one hundred metres in stuff growing on the ground. And along with that Compass Pathways is part of the biggest psychedelic company around the GMP molecules and cybin and they are running clinical trials on this, and they just reached a one billion dollar valuation, a bit more than that, actually putting up to about one point five dollars billion valuation. And yes, they're doing a lot of good work in that they are synthesising psilocybin. So it's a controlled form so that we can use it for clinical trials. Then they apply for the patent for the synthesised psilocybin super control form. We can use them in clinical trials so we can empirically analyse the data and prove how it works. All of this amounts to a one billion dollar valuation for a mushroom which grows in the ground for free. Yes, I'm simplifying things. Yes, I'm taking away from all the protocols and all of the work done around it. But I think it's a perfect analogy for the way really simple thing, that we build complex structures around it and we build complex rules to govern those complex structures, then we put in government and authorities to enforce those rules. And we bring in punishments as retribution for when you don't follow those rules and then you need further structures and it just goes and goes and goes and goes. And then we have something we call society
Sahil [00:41:12] That's a great way of summing up society...
Prash [00:41:17] And then you have to do laundry.
Huda [00:41:19] You'd rather just fucking do laundry?
Sahil [00:41:21] No, fuck no. I said I still wouldn't want to do it. Fuck'em
Huda [00:41:25] So I know that you talk about mushrooms as the psychedelic drug. What about what are your thoughts on marijuana? Because I know there's a big thing about marijuana at the moment.
Prash [00:41:33] That's kind of a sativa indica and Fredrica, the three main strans. The word marijuana was actually another result of the drug long movement back in the day. So Harry Anslinger and his and his team were desperately on a mission to stigmatise cannabis. And one way to do that was to associate it with immigrants, particularly around
Prash [00:41:56] ...the border in Mexico. They started popularising the terms marijuana, which was the term that the Mexicans used. So that's where the whole term comes from. Cannabis isn't technically a psychedelic. Cannabis has a number of different compounds. The two main compounds are THC and the cannabidiol for which there is CBD, CB1, CB2, CMB. Those are the ones that we know about. There are also about a few hundred terpenes which are plant oils are really barely been studied. THC it seems is the more psychoactive component. CBD, the less sort of psychoactive, more body active, more of a depressant. If you want to think of sort of conventional logical classification of things, no drug is clearly a stimulant or depressive psychedelic. They're all set somewhere on that set, a little bit of a depressant, a little bit of a psychedelic, a little bit of the other axis. Often think of it as a pathogen. That idea of inducing feelings of empathy and oneness with your fellow man, THC, per say, does and a lot of people will probably agree that it does have, particularly in high doses, relatively relatively strong psychedelicesque effects, but in relatively high doses. Now, medical cannabis is probably what you're asking about, certainly hasn't been used or explored from the realm of being used in psychotherapy. CBD has been started to be investigated for and very cautiously and very few studies for the treatment or management of schizophrenia, which is pretty interesting because cannabis itself has been implicated in triggering schizophrenia in people who already have a predisposition to developing schizophrenia, cannabis can sort of trigger it and set it off. But consider that THC and CBD have always coexisted in the plant. And if THC being the more psychoactive component without getting too esoteric about it, nature always finds a way to find an equilibrium. It's been around for way longer than we have and it's worked out well. We have started to mess and tinker with the system. The concentration of cannabis in street cannabis now is about four times higher than it was about twenty years ago, just THC. CBD has always been the more sort of psycho protective compound out there, then it makes sense that it's been there to constantly sort of counter the psychotogenic effects of THC. And so that's probably the only realm where it's sort of into use in psychiatry or psychotherapy. The rest of it is being used in a variety of physiological complains, chronic pain, lack of appetite, bone pain and cancer, multiple sclerosis. I'm not the person to comment on that. There's certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence. The actual empirical evidence is that I don't think there's a firm stance on it.
Sahil [00:44:35] Ayahuasca,.
Huda [00:44:36] I was literally about to ask that...
Sahil [00:44:38] Because you ask everyone the same question...
Huda [00:44:40] So there's DMT and then there is 5 Meo DMT. DMT is dimethyltryptamine. 5 Meo DMT is DMT with a five methoxy compound added to it. Five Meo DMT is naturally found on the mucous excreted from the sweat glands of toads and actually in Australia, the cane toad and DMT is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a brew that is brewed from the Caapi vine and a bunch of other leaves found deep in the Amazon. And it is brewed into this tea, which is drunk and produces, again, probably a 10 hour and one of the most intense psychedelic experiences which has been used ritualistically and then therapeutically in healing for generations. Interestingly, Australia has some of the highest concentrations of DMT in the world in the bark of the wattle. So the acacia has it in incredibly high concentrations.
Sahil [00:45:41] And where would you find that?
Prash [00:45:43] Everywhere.
Huda [00:45:44] Wattle's everywhere.
Prash [00:45:45] We are absolutely awash with psychedelic, absolutely awash with psychedelic. We got cane toads hopping around, we got mushrooms sprouting everywhere. Right now it's autumn, its mushroom season. We've got DMT in Acacia and we don't have knowledge of the history of psychedelic use within indigenous communities in Australia. Their theories on this and one which can be controversial. You come to a land and you spend your first times there shooting all of the people. Is that in any way going to incentivise the people to reveal their deepest, most powerful secrets to you? I would think not.
Sahil [00:46:34] Which country are you talking about?
Huda [00:46:36] Colonialism.
Sahil [00:46:36] I want to know which country you're talking about
Huda [00:46:38] You know we talk about colonialism so much it's insane.
Sahil [00:46:40] Well, it's funny how-
Sahil [00:46:42] We talk about it a lot.
Prash [00:46:43] You wonder about where we're dream time came from there. Yeah. Rainbow Serpent came from. And I can completely understand why either they don't want to share it or whether all the time a lot of this, a lot of wisdom has been has been lost or whether it is still there, buried deep within. And it's been a it's been an aspiration of mine to be able to one day support a PhD student to look into this. But there's a lot more complexity in that in terms of, to an extent, indigenous cultures should be allowed to remain indigenous culture. But who are we to say they come? Come on, tell me. Tell me your secrets. No, let them be. We got our own ways. There's enough.
Sahil [00:47:21] You know, a lot of time I hear people talk about mushrooms. They're like, you know, you want to go to a quiet place and be with people that you trust. Why do they say that?
Prash [00:47:29] Set and setting are the two things that determine whether you have a good trip or a bad trip. Set being your mindset at the time. Are you in a good headspace or a bad headspace and setting being your environment, your physical setting? Are you warm? Are you cold? You feel comfortable? And when you consider our earlier conversation that when you let down your ego defences, when the ego disillusion has happened and you're in that vulnerable flubber state, you are so perceptible to any external stimuli. All of that content can feed into and warp . And so making an active effort to structure the setting to be the safest is is most definitely the way. One thing I want to say also is that there is a big difference between recreational use and therapeutic use. And let us not confuse the two. And I think the scientific and clinical movement is is trying very hard to make that very clear. The difference between therapeutic use and recreational use is the difference between shooting up heroin in a back street and getting opiates for your pain when you've broken your leg in hospital. That is the difference. And to equate the two, which a lot of people do, and it just further feeds the stigma and then it's really so obvious that they're completely different things. And that everything we are working towards at this point is towards a regulated, safe use of psychedelics such that it can be used for therapeutic healing.
Huda [00:48:54] Thank you so much for your time.
Sahil [00:48:56] It's been one of your best podcast experiences. You can't deny that. You know why I can say that? Because he was going to move around and he hasn't moved from his chair.
Prash [00:49:03] I have not.
Huda [00:49:04] That's true.
Huda [00:49:06] I did notice that as well. Didn't you say you were going to walk around?
Sahil [00:49:08] OK, now let's not fuck it up. Bye Prash
Prash [00:49:13] Thank you. Bye.