#883: How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia's World-First Breakthrough

Leading a global regulatory shift

0:00Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Tanya DeYoung, co-founder of Mind Medicine Australia. She and her husband Peter did something amazing. They beat the odds, and they came from the outside to lead a push that in 2023 made Australia the first country in the world to allow MDMA and psilocybin to be prescribed for psychiatric conditions. This was a huge moment. It took the whole world by surprise, and I wanted to understand how the hell did this happen? What did they do? What were the strategies?

Was there a blueprint? Was it luck? Was it methodical step after step after step? What did they do? Is there a blueprint for making this type of massive change, or are there strategies at least, bits and pieces that you can apply in your own countries or to any ambitious project you might be trying to get off the ground?

0:56Because Tanya came into this field as an entrepreneur and a singer. She had no background in psychedelic research or psychedelics or drugs writ large, and ultimately helped build a massive campaign that changed an entire country. We get into the practical details. As you know, that's the point of the show. We get into how did she manage to book first meetings? How did she identify the right people, recruit people who know more than she did at the time to be allies? How did they respond when regulators said no? And more, that's just the beginning. There are some very unlikely turns along the way. There are some wild stories along the way. And as I mentioned, even if you don't care anything about psychedelics, if you're trying to get something really big off the ground, and you feel like the underdog, if maybe the deck is stacked against you, there is plenty in this conversation.

1:50Before I get, the show notes for this episode will contain all the exact dates that come up. Tanya and I both mentioned articles and events from more than a decade ago. So some of them are slightly off, but a lot of them are right. But nonetheless, show notes, tim.blog.com slash podcast. You can find all the specifics. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Tanya. I did. There's a lot of tactical takeaway to be applied. And you can also find her online and everything she's up to at mindmedicinaustralia.org.au. Thanks for listening.

2:22Where do you think it makes sense to begin? I mean, we could just begin with the trip treatment and how that domino knocked over so many dominoes.

2:56It did. And then what you did with all the momentum of said dominoes. Do you want to just begin there and we'll just chat through it?

The first psilocybin experience

3:04In 2015, I came across your blog. Well, I'd been signing up to your blog for ages. I mean, you know, I've been reading your books and admiring your biohacking courage to try all different things and experiment for yourself because that's very much how I also like to operate. I just don't believe anything until I try it myself. So being that person that had never had any alcohol, really, don't drink coffee,

3:37never got high, never had any drugs in my whole life until I read your five bullet blog back in December. I think it was 2015 when you said that you had donated a hundred thousand US dollars to the Imperial College with psilocybin for depression. I think it was, Tim. 2015 would have been Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths. So there was a depression study there.

4:08That's right. So that was like a light bulb went off for me and I clicked on the link and I read the article and it was a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine called The Trip Treatment. Michael Pollan, the one and only. That's right. By Michael Pollan. And I said to my husband, we have to do this. Please read this article. And he just, I think he thought I lost it. And he read the article and then he said, why don't you see if we can get into a trial? And so we then approached Robin Carhart-Harris,

4:42who has subsequently become a great friend of ours. But at that time it was, well, can we get into one of the trials in Europe? And he said, well, no, you don't qualify. You don't have a mental illness diagnosis. And then he proceeded to see if he could introduce us to the psychedelic society. And finally, we were introduced to a guide in the Netherlands and we flew over to Europe and we had this extraordinary experience where we took a large dose of psilocybin. But for me, I had spent the

5:17previous six months when we planned this, just getting more and more nervous. I was just petrified. Sounds normal. Yeah. And I was like, am I going to lose my mind? What's going to happen? Meantime, my husband's just not engaged in it at all. And so it got to the day before where we're going to go and meet this guide. And I wrote an email to my accountant and I said, if anything's to happen to me in the next 24 to 48 hours, these are my last wishes. You know, I was that scared,

5:49scared of losing control, scared of what this would all mean. I'd never had any drugs in my whole life before. And was I going to go crazy? So anyway, we went and my husband picked up the guide at the airport. We were meeting him. He surrounded him in his white robes, sort of Ram Dass style, hippie Indian white robes, gave him a huge bear hug. Then my husband asked him all the way back, what's going to happen? How does this work? Run a show for me. Yeah.

6:20Right. And after 45 minutes, he was no wiser. And then literally we, the next day, took the medicines with the guide and we were blasted into multiple realms of consciousness, all different dimensions of consciousness. And it was an extraordinary experience, as you well know it, a sense of being connected to self, to others, the planet, feeling like you're part of everything, that everything's

6:53part of you. I think I said to you last time we spoke that I never saw a single piece of nature the same since that day. So every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass, just everything was transformed by that experience. And I could see the energy in everything. My husband was also completely blown away. It brought us much closer together, which was also something we didn't plan for, but it was a

7:26fantastic bonus. And we then just started going, well, what has just happened to us? And it was such an extraordinary experience. It took us about a year to really integrate what had happened. And we kept talking about it. And, you know, it was a true mystical experience at the highest level. When you say it took a year to integrate, was it really just letting the snow globe settle and seeing what was discernible after things had settled? Or were you using therapy to talk through the

8:00experience afterwards? What did integration look like for you guys? No, it was sort of the snow globe. Everything had sort of been blown, you know, like a huge fireworks display. And actually, it was like a fireworks display at times. So for us, it was letting that settle. And then for me, I'd thought, well, there's no way I'd ever do that again. Like it was challenging. I mean, it was beautiful, but it was also challenging because a lot of material came up relating to my ancestors, probably relating to other ancestral lineages that I'd had before. And

8:34I thought, there's no way I'm going to do this again. But then as the year went on, and we were going to go back to Europe again and stuff, I thought, okay, well, maybe we'll have another go and see if it's the same or if that was just a fluke or what happened. And so we went back again and we work with the same guide, Dutch guide, and we had an even higher dose and it was even more profound. And so by that stage, we said to one another, wow, well, if this is having this impact on us,

9:08and it was really healing us personally, there was something going on. There was some kind of magic, I mean, magic mushrooms, but there was some kind of golden thread that was trying to connect us back to ourselves to integrate us into ourselves and then connect us to one another and to other people. And we said to ourselves, we'd already founded five charities between us by that stage. And we just thought, wow, well, if this is happening to us, imagine if this could be applied to all the

9:42people who are suffering with like homelessness or domestic violence or unemployment or disabilities, people suffering with depression that we come across through all of our charitable work, because underpinning all kinds of disadvantage is usually some kind of mental illness, some kind of trauma, depression, something that has happened to that person in their lives. And it's usually that they've ended up being unemployed or committing domestic violence or whatever it happens to be, but it's

10:14through the intergenerational trauma that they've experienced. And so Peter and I just started looking and going, let's meet all of the people around the world. Let's go to all the conferences. Let's start meeting all the researchers. And we did that. And we started meeting researchers from all over the world, which was absolutely extraordinary. And we attended events and we learned everything we could. We watched every video. We listened to every recording that we could.

10:45And then by that stage, Peter and I were like, this is extraordinary. And we spoke with Rick Doblin at about that stage, which was in 2018. And in 2018, he said to me, Tanya, I think you should set up a charity in Australia to do this. And we were mad enough to do that. And for people who don't have the context, just to describe Rick briefly, Rick is really one of the primary drivers, probably the primary driver, I would say. And there are a lot of people,

11:19of course, who've played large roles behind the psychedelic movement through this organization called MAPS. And they have been predominantly focused on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. That's been the main indication. So he has been a fixture. He's very unorthodox. He is very well educated in policy, incredibly colorful. He's just one hell of a character. But he's been forging ahead since the 70s or 80s, well before there was any kind of tip of the hat from anywhere

11:57in the mainstream. So that's Rick Doblin. And he's very good at helping other people and encouraging other people. Yeah. I mean, he's dedicated his whole life to this work. And it's just extraordinary. And he was a total inspiration to us, as was Roland Griffiths and Robin and David Nutt, Professor David Nutt, the head of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. Just amazing people, these legends. The thing was, in Australia, we really didn't have a lot going on. You know,

12:29there was one trial in the making. It was a trial for end of life stress and anxiety through terminal diagnosis, which had been replicated in other parts of the world, like at New York University, and Johns Hopkins University. And we just knew that if Australia could start to position itself in this space, that there might be a chance to heal a lot of people. So we did start a charity, Mind

Launching Mind Medicine Australia

12:54Medicine Australia. We launched it in February 2019. And we started working in this field, starting to work out, well, how could we get these medicines to Australians as quickly, safely, accessibly as possible and cost effectively as well. We originally approached the Therapeutic Goods Administration, I think it was in late 2020. And we asked them if it would be possible if the medicines could be

13:26rescheduled. So let me pause you. I apologize, Tanya, just for the Yankees listening and others. The TGA is roughly analogous to the FDA in the US. So if you want a new drug approved, if you have something that is in a highly restricted drug class and you want to make it more readily available through prescription with fewer controls, et cetera, then you have to contend with, in our case, the FDA, but in your case, the TGA. Is that a fair way to put it?

13:59Yeah, that's exactly right. These bodies require a lot of data and evidence. And generally speaking, pharmaceutical companies make applications to them for the rescheduling of medicines. And in this case, we wanted to make an application to move these medicines from prohibited substances, which in Australia was called Schedule 9, but in the US is called Schedule 1, to a Schedule 8 medicine, which is a controlled medicine so that it could be used in clinical environments. And so we started

14:31applying to the TGA and we put an application in at their encouragement. And then at the interim stage, it was knocked back. And then at the final stage, despite many public submissions, it was also knocked back. And so we thought, let's put it in again. And one of the things that the TGA has to do is it has to provide its reasons for knocking it back. So my husband, who's an extraordinary intellect and strategic, I guess, mind, started really working on these applications and really

15:06addressing their concerns. And so then we put in another application to reschedule psilocybin MDMA for the treatment of depression and trauma in Australia. And again, at the interim stage, the application was knocked back and they had to provide their reasons. And then we put in a final submission. And in that period, there was another public consultation period. We did this huge campaign and we were educating people all the time through this period. We were presenting webinars and we

15:38were presenting talks to politicians and health professionals and anyone we could, business leaders. We were talking like we probably gave thousands of presentations about these medicines over that period. And then finally, we put in a submission and over 13,000 Australians supported this submission through public submissions to our Therapeutic Goods Administration, supporting the medicine. And over 98% of people supported the rescheduling of these medicines. And this was the largest amount

16:09of public submissions ever received by our regulators for rescheduling any medicines. So there was this huge pressure. Yeah. I imagine not every one of those recipients was super happy about the volume, I have to imagine. Right. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. Because they had to publish them all as well, you know, like on their platform. Yeah.

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18:15once is Dr. Walter Longo, USC professor with decades of peer-reviewed research on fasting, nutrition, and aging. And as some of you long-term listeners know or readers, I regularly fast. I've done a lot of experimentations with fasting over more than a decade, including intermittent fasting, extended water-only fasts up to 10 days. And I've looked at the before and after. Frankly, the fasting has been one of the most incredible unlocks that I have found. The before and after, looking at glucose control, oral glucose tolerance tests, hemoglobin A1C, et cetera, all these things that really do matter

18:49for the long-term, for mental health, for physical health, have had dramatic, dramatic shifts. And I've talked about that before. But the sad truth, the truth about fasting is that it can be really hard. And that is why Walter is interesting. He's best known for something called the fasting mimicking diet, FMD, which is essentially a way of eating that produces many of the benefits of fasting while still allowing you to eat food. So if we look at that a little more closely, he took what he learned in these randomized control trials and so on and packaged it into a five-day

19:22program called Prolon, P-R-O-L-O-N. It's five days. So for five days, you restrict your food a bit. And what Prolon does is makes it idiot-proof. It comes in one box. Everything is laid out. There's no guesswork. You just follow the packages. And in scientific studies, five-day cycles of the fast tank mimicking diet improve markers tied to metabolic health and aging, help people drop fat while holding onto lean muscle, and even associated with measurable drops in biological age. And to put some numbers to it, with glycemic management, blood sugar management, we were able to see in one RCT

19:56improvements in 53% of FMD participants versus 8% of controls. So it does make a difference. You get the benefits of fasting, including autophagy, your body's cellular self-cleanup process, while still eating real structured plant-based meals. So you don't have to negotiate with yourself. You don't have to struggle. It all comes in one box, and it's right there, laid out, simple to follow. And there are other people who recognize friends of mine,

20:26used Prolon. For a limited time, Prolon is offering my listeners 15% off site-wide, plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five-day program. Just visit prolonlife.com slash Tim. That's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E dot com slash Tim to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. So a couple of questions. At that point, was it still just you and your husband who were working on this, or had you assembled volunteers to assist you guys in various ways? What did it look like at

21:00that point? No, it was like this massive movement by then. I mean, like we had started chapters in communities all around Australia. So we had over 30 chapters in places like Byron Bay or Brisbane, Darwin, Perth, you know. And that would be chapters of Mind Medicine Australia. So it'd be like MMA. Yeah, people who were just like behind this mission. Yeah. Just chapters and chapters of people. When you have chapters, how did you, I'm just thinking of the challenges involved with like retail and franchising or whatever, like quality control, right? And giving people marching directions

21:35of some type, when people would reach out, how would you enable them or what materials would you send them? What would you encourage them to do if you've got people in Byron Bay and 29 other locations across Australia? What would you guys send? Well, we had templates for everything. So we had precedents and templates and we had how to actually do this. So we made it as easy as we could for the public to put submissions in. And we had volunteers in all those places who were leading these campaigns

22:07and getting a whole lot of people together in those places. But in addition to that, we also had clinicians. So we had already started training clinicians through our world-leading certificate in psychedelic assisted therapy. So we started that training in 2021. And we've already trained now over 750 clinicians. So psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, Oc therapists, social workers, counsellors, you name it. We've trained a lot of clinicians in Australia.

22:39So we already had an enormous amount of clinicians who were starting to put pressure on their peak bodies and professional bodies, as well as the general public. So there was also an enormous amount of people, not necessarily in our chapters, but just people who, just families, you know, who had people who were suffering with mental illness in their families. There was workplaces. So there was a lot of people who had people in their workplaces suffering with depression or trauma or addictions. And people just started to really jump on the bandwagon to start to really learn about

23:12these medicines. And the medicines at that point, just to define the molecules we're talking about, that was MDMA and psilocybin? Yes. Yes. Let me bring us back for a moment to David Nutt. And the reason I'm going to bring David Nutt and UTT back into the picture is because in the process of doing homework for this conversation, came across a number of allies that you had recruited over time. You really had a multi-pronged approach.

23:48And I want to talk about some of those. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. That's a big approach. So this is abc.net.au. And it mentions you engaging new lobbyists, Hawker Britton, known for their cozy relationships with the labor government, who, and that goes on, understand the dynamics of Canberra. The organization then flew out Imperial College of London neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt for a roadshow up and down the East Coast. And it goes on to mention him as one of the celebrities of sorts in psychedelic circles,

24:20certainly within scientific circles. And during a whirlwind, I'm going back to the piece here, during a whirlwind tour sponsored by herbal tincture and organic chocolate brands, perfect, he addressed packed town halls in Byron Bay, Sydney, Canberra, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, and Melbourne. Then there were black tie events with philanthropists and stakeholders at the Australian clubs in Sydney and Melbourne. It goes on and on. So if there's any more color to that, I'd love to hear it, like the purpose of doing that. No, absolutely. I mean, that was a huge part of it.

24:51Yeah. And the reason I'm bringing this up and the part of the reason I want to have this conversation is because you did something very remarkable and, you know, there were other parties involved and a lot going on, but I mean, MMA was a real driving force behind some incredible world first, like on the playing field of sort of global pharmacology and mental health treatments. You've accomplished something really impressive. And there are pieces of the playbook

25:22that I think people could apply in other locations. And this would be, I think, potentially one example of that. So could you speak to what you did with the roadshow with David and maybe how you used lobbyists and also like, how did you pay for all that? Yeah. Well, I mean, these are really important questions and we are being asked by a lot of other countries and organizations how we did it. And it was very tough, but we tried everything. So we never gave up. And my husband and I are very persistent people. So, you know, every roadblock that we'd get,

25:56we'd think, okay, what are we going to do now? And we would climb around or over or through that wall, whatever we could do to keep going. So what happened was in 2022, David, who'd become an incredibly good friend of ours and someone we deeply respected and we just adore his humor and his intellect. How did you first connect with David? Cold email or how did that happen? As you would see, we've, one of the other really strong prongs of our strategy was to put together this world leading advisory panel. So we've got about 75 or so leaders in this field or people who

26:33are really great advocates for these medicines, scientists, doctors, researchers, and others. And

Building a coalition of advisors

26:39I just started reaching out to two people, but also in 2018, I went to a conference run by USONA in Madison in Wisconsin. Yeah. That's a trip. It's a bit of a trip for you. Yeah. USONA for people who don't know is an organization, at least last I checked, predominantly focused on psilocybin. Correct. And their medicines likely to be registered as just about as soon as Compass Pathways, another huge pharma company who's an applicant for psilocybin. Over the next six months or so,

27:12we anticipate a number of these medicines becoming registered medicines. We can talk about that shortly, but back to the time that we brought David Nutt out. So basically I had approached a lot of people. I'd also met a lot of people at USONA. And so I then started inviting them to join our advisory panel. And so that was how I met Robin Rowland, David Nutt, all of these people. And as we'd meet one person, then they'd say, well, have you met this person? And have you met that person?

27:42So I know you're persistent, but these people get asked to do all sorts of stuff all the time. How did you make it easy or compelling for them to say yes? What was the pitch to someone like Robin? Because at that point, I'm trying to put a date to it, but Robin at that point had probably appeared, I'm just guessing, on the timeline here in How to Change Your Mind. He's somewhat of a main scientific protagonist or certainly figure within How to Change Your Mind, a book by Michael Palm that really shifted the tectonic plates of what was possible for psychedelics in the US and

28:17elsewhere in some ways, in a lot of ways, in many, if not most of the best known philanthropists and supporters of psychedelics, not all of them, but a very high percentage would kind of reach back to that as the tipping point for their interest. So how do you get then Robin's like the hottest girl at the dance? And he's very charismatic. He's good on camera. He's good in audio. I met them, Tim. I met most of them actually at the USONA conference. And also I happened to sing

28:48at the USONA conferences and speak. So I gave a speech. I spoke about what we were hoping to achieve in Australia, also sang. I serenaded Roland Griffith. It was beautiful. I mean, I miss that guy so much. So I met these people and we just connected and they were inspired by the fact that we were trying to move the needle in Australia. I don't think that they thought that we could do it. And to be honest, I didn't know that we could do it either. It was just persisting and persisting. And so I think people just started joining us because maybe they believed that we

29:22could do it. I mean, we had set up five charities before that had already done some significant things. How did you end up speaking at the conference? Because that seems to me an important piece of the recipe for why suddenly you could talk to them afterwards. They were already a warm audience at that point. So how did you end up speaking at that conference? Well, that was through Bill Linton. So Bill Linton is the founder of USONA and as you, I'm sure you know, and you know him and he's just a lovely guy. And again, we connected. I wrote to him.

29:53What did you say to Bill in the email? You know, I'd really like to speak at your conference. In fact, I think they even had heard what we were doing and that we were trying to do this in Australia. And then they actually, I said, look, I can also sing. And maybe that was, maybe that was part of it. And he just said, well, look, I'd like you to come over. I'd like you to sing. We, I think we probably had a Zoom call or something like that. And they then invited me to speak and to sing. And it was a long trip.

30:24It was a very long trip. And literally I had to get off the plane. I was in an altered state. I was in some time warp then. Yeah. You know, I want to just sidebar quickly that sometimes it is the weirdest, not that singing is weird. I have much stranger obsessions and interests, but it's the most unexpected maybe talents or side interests or fill in the blank that you do on the weekends and evenings that sometimes is the thing that opens the door because it is the thing that other people

30:59aren't leading with, right? So when you're like, oh, and I also sing and they're like, you know what? She's scrappy. She's willing to fly all the way from Australia. Oh my God. Like to Wisconsin. Okay, sure. Yeah. Why not? Let's give it a shot. Well, also I think by then I'd also had that connection with Ram Dass. So that was also a help. I haven't mentioned that. And that was very significant. So actually, and I want to come back to David now with you, which I really, because that's really important. But back in 2016, after you'd woken me up into this whole space and then we did the medicine with this Dutch

31:33guide, he played us some Ram Dass at the end of the medicine session. And I went, who's this guy? This is amazing. And my husband's one of these guys who, when he hears someone really inspiring, he goes, well, is there a way we could meet them? And so, okay, well, why not try and meet Ram Dass?

Meeting Ram Dass in Maui

31:50So what we did was we wrote to him via, again, his people. And we found out that you could indeed spend a week living at Ram Dass's house in Hawaii and get to spend time with him, you know, living there. So we were lucky enough that we got to fly to Maui. Well, hold on. How does that work? Because I'm sure a lot of people would love to hang out with Ram Dass. What are the hurdles you have to clear to live at his house for a week? Or how does it work? Or is it just pay for play? Or how is it?

32:21We made a donation and we got to live in the house that was on his land there and live right next to him. And then every day or two, we'd get to hang out a little bit with Ram Dass. We'd come into the main house. We'd spend some time meditating with him. He'd invite us to some of the ceremonies that he'd be having at the house. Went to the beach with him because he had this incredible wheelchair that had these amazing inflatable tyres and he'd be wheeled out in his wheelchair out into the ocean. And one particular day, there'd be two rainbows that appear when Ram Dass gets out into the ocean.

32:55It was like pinching yourself, you know, like, is this really happening? A lot of it was sitting in silence with him because he had had that stroke. And by this stage, it was about a year or so before he actually would pass. And so he was still vibrant though. And when you looked in Ram Dass's eyes, you could just see yourself reflected back in him. And I remember singing to him as well. And there were tears rolling down his face when I sang to him. And it was a song called Coming Home. It was all about coming home to yourself. And the minute that we would mention psychedelics

33:29to Ram Dass, his eyes would light up and he'd start talking about, you know, his time that he gave his guru in India this huge dose of, have you heard this story, right? And nothing happened. It's in B here now and his guru in India. So Ram Dass, again, just to provide a little context for people who are like, what are they talking about? All right. Ram Dass, which is, I believe, servant of Ram. Yeah. Servant of the God is the non-birth name of the man formerly known as Richard

34:07Alpert, who was at Harvard with Timothy Leary, who some people may recognize. And they were both kicked out of Harvard, little known fact, in part due to Andrew Weil, then an undergrad writing, I think it was in the Harvard Crimson, about their dosing of psilocybin. And there was some discussion, I don't know if it was verified of them giving it to undergrads. And it became this huge scandal and they were booted out. And at one point, Timothy Leary was designated by Nixon, and President Nixon is the most dangerous man in America, which is ridiculous in retrospect. But

34:39there you have it. And there's a lot more we could say about that. But suffice to say, Richard Alpert decides to go to India. And at one point, he somehow finds his way, right? This pre-internet, pre-smartphone, somehow finds his way to this guru. Again, we just described him to be here now. Maharaji. Yeah, Maharaji. And he's, I think, trying to explain to him something about psychedelics. And he's like, well, do you have any? And he's like, yeah, I do. And he had

35:09from outside LSD. And he gave him, it was either 400 or 600 micrograms. This guy had never taken any psychedelics. Took that and just sat there and clearly would have set in. And like an hour later, as if nothing was happening, just kind of looked at him with a smile and was like, hmm, interesting. And I think he said something like, sure, you can like peek in and say hello to Christ consciousness or whatever you want to call it. You're not actually going to get to know the depth. But the fact that

35:41somebody could take 400 or 600 micrograms, to put that in perspective, 100 micrograms is considered a, let's just call it standard hit. If I were to take 200 micrograms, I would be completely incapacitated for 8 to 12 hours. So the fact that somebody could take 400 to 600. I think that would even happen to me on 50, to be honest. Yeah. And could just carry on having a conversation as if they'd only had a glass of water is somewhat mind boggling. And Ram Dass went on to do a lot of writing and a lot of recording. And it's just incredibly compelling to listen to.

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37:54So you spent time with Ram Dass. So the Ram Dass card ends up being helpful to get to Madison. And then Bill Linton and co invite you with open arms. You sing, you talk, you meet this whole cast of characters, including, I'm guessing, was David not there in Madison? I'm not sure that David was there, but Robin and Roland and everyone else was there. Yeah, they're all a stone's throw from David.

Presenting to the regulators

38:24So then, this was like the year before we started Mind Medicine Australia. So then I wrote to David and I said, we're launching a charity. It's on February the 13th. That was the date of our launch. Would you come to Australia and speak at the launch? And so we flew David to Australia. He spoke at our launch, which was at the University of Melbourne. And we then became very friendly with David and his wife, who's delightful. And we've brought him over a few times since then. And that launch was packed

38:54out. And then what happened was in, I mean, cut a long story short, I'm cutting through a whole lot of things here, but in 2022, we invited him to Australia to present at some town hall events in public. But then we also brought him to the Therapeutic Goods Administration. And we asked the Therapeutic Goods Administration if, you know, we could present to them. And we asked the head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, how many people approximately would come to the meeting, that we would have David out there. And we would also have a woman there whose husband had tragically

39:30lost his life because he'd got depression and had not been able to cope. I'll talk about that very briefly in a second. So what happened was the head of the TGA said, oh, there'll be probably 10 or 15 people that turn up to the meeting. 140 people turned up to the meeting. Some of them were in the room, some of them were on Zoom. And these are all people internal to the TGA. These are all employees. Yeah, they were like Department of Health people, executives, you know, or from all different parts of the Department of Health and the TGA. And so what happened was we had invited this woman

40:02called Vanessa to speak just before David Nutt. And Vanessa's husband had got depression a few years prior, just out of the blue, all of a sudden got depression really badly. And he woke up one day and he said to her, I need to go to a hospital. And so she took him to a doctor and they started him on some SSRIs, antidepressants. And then they didn't work. And then he got taken to an institution because he was really unwell. He was put in that institution. And they've got a young daughter,

40:35very successful man, by the way, no previous history of depression, just came on. So he was put in this institution that didn't help. They saw every professor and expert that they could. She's kept a 20-page dossier of every treatment she tried. During the middle of him trying many, many treatments, she rang me up and she said, Tanya, you know, I've heard about psychedelic assisted therapies. Could Franco, his name was Franco, could he get psychedelic assisted therapies? And I said, look, no, not in Australia. At the moment, we're trying really hard to get these medicines

41:08rescheduled, but he would have to go overseas to do this legally, like in the Netherlands, where psilocybin truffles are legal, for example, or somewhere else. He was not well enough to be taken overseas and they didn't want to break the law by going underground in Australia. And this applies to a lot of people. And so what happened was they kept trying all the different other treatments, the professors, he was in the institutions. She said to me, she rang me about another year later, said, he's begging me to go every day. He wants to go. He wants to leave. Hang in there.

41:40We're really working hard on this. Anyway, he couldn't wait. She had kept this 20-page dossier and she got up in front of the TGA and she said, I believe that if my husband had have had access to these treatments, that he might still be alive today and that our young daughter would still have a father. And, you know, this is all the treatments we tried. It's not like we didn't try to get Franco well. We did. And there wasn't a dryer in the room at this stage. And then Professor Nutt comes on and starts presenting about the science and all the research, the data, the evidence that by that stage,

42:16there'd been a lot of trials, as you know, that had taken place. So he presented and then we presented and still everyone was going, there's no way this is going to happen. There's no way the rescheduling is going to happen. There were scientists and clinicians and others that just said, it's not going to happen. But this was in about November of 2022 and we just kept pushing. And then in February, February the 3rd, it was 2023. We're standing in the kitchen and my husband goes,

42:49it's, it's been rescheduled. And I just said, no, I'll be serious. And I said, you've got to show me this. And I read the document. I kept thinking, there must be an error in the document. Can't have been rescheduled. And no, it's been rescheduled. So we start dancing around the kitchen. It's like, this is unbelievable. Like we were so, this is really amazing. We were so thrilled. Then like the headlines start coming out from around the world. Australia has rescheduled. Australia's the first

43:21country to do this. You know, look at Australia. Now Australia's leading the world in this field. And it's like, this is surreal. Like this is so incredible that this actually happened in Australia because, you know, Australia tends to be more of a follower than a leader often, but, you know, to do this was incredible. So then a few months later, the rules changed so that the psychiatrist could actually start to treat patients in clinics. And that was the whole purpose of this was that there should be clinics around Australia with clinicians that we'd been training since 2021

43:56and that patients should start to be treated with these incredible sacred medicines with therapy, obviously. And so there was these multidisciplinary teams and psychiatrists could start applying to the Therapeutic Goods Administration for what's called an authorised prescriber status. So you psychiatrists put an application into the TGA and we help a lot of psychiatrists do these applications because they're quite onerous and they have to put in their protocols, how much medicine

44:28they're going to use, where they're going to practice from, all these different protocols. And then those are reviewed by the TGA and an independent ethics committee. And if they get the TGA stamp and the ethics committee stamp, they can start using psychedelic assisted therapy, psilocybin assisted therapy, and MDMA assisted therapy in their clinics. And so there's now over 20 clinics around Australia, mostly led by clinicians that we have trained through our certificate in

44:59psychedelic assisted therapies. And over 400 patients or so roughly have been treated. Now that doesn't sound like a lot because there's millions of Australians who are suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. And there's millions of people globally suffering from these conditions who are not getting well, like Franco. And one of the arguments that was really important for the Therapeutic Goods Administration was there's a risk to not doing anything. So if you don't do

45:30anything, if you don't reschedule these medicines, that's actually a risk because patients who've tried everything, like Franco, might end up taking their own lives and that would be tragic. And we, through the period that we were making these applications, heard of other stories than Franco. We had a lot of people who write to us. They texted us, they emailed us, and they begged us. We even had politicians writing to us saying they've got a son or constituent saying, could we please provide the medicines to them? And we said, well, no, we can't until these medicines are rescheduled.

46:05So we kept having people begging us for the medicines. We obviously couldn't provide them. We're not a medicine provider. And important to say to everyone that these medicines, you don't take them lightly. You take them in a very controlled setting. Personally, I love nature, but we have to do it in clinics in Australia under these circumstances. And it's really important for the patient to have the right preparation and mindset so that they can be open to whatever is coming

46:35through the altered state and then bring all of those insights for their life, their work, their health, whatever it happens to be back into their life. And usually that's done through therapy. So a patient goes through a three or four month process protocol. And we are seeing 60 to 80% remission rates in Australia, which is replicating what we've seen in trials around the world. So all those 400 patients

47:06that have been treated so far around Australia, 60 to 80% of those are going to remissions and there's been no serious adverse events. What does the pie chart split look like for out of those 400? How many are psilocybin for depression versus MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD? Yeah. So more of them are MDMA. So more psychiatrists started out doing MDMA for trauma. It's probably a good idea. I think

47:37it's good to get comfortable skiing the blue squares before the black diamonds. So probably it's about 70-30, I'd say. Yeah. Tends to be more manageable. And you know, many of the psychiatrists felt more comfortable administering MDMA first. There are some patients in Australia, I think, who've been administered both medicines, not at the same time, but subsequently. But it's probably about a 70-30 split. But psilocybin is starting to creep up. And we're also seeing psilocybin now being researched for a whole

48:09range of other conditions, as you know. So for addictions and obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia. I think MDMA is still very underestimated as a tool. It's sort of been in the zeitgeist long enough that a lot of the writing or videos or podcasts that get attention are focused on the latest and greatest or what they might consider the new kid on the block, like a 5-MEO-DMT. Okay, everything's about 5-MEO-DMT because it can be crammed into 15 minutes and it's

48:43the businessman's path to God and all this stuff. Which from a commercialization perspective, I understand. But at the same time, you have something that is already very well researched that has actually been around a very, very long time. I want to say it's the 1920s when MDMA was first patented and then it was shelved and then the patent expired. And then Sasha Shulgin in his little lab, sort of, and his tasting parties conjured up hundreds of psychedelics. If anyone has ever heard of 2CB, 2CE, you can thank Sasha Shulgin. But also resurrected MDMA, which basically replaced

49:20MDA as the underground therapist's tool. And I think MDMA is very underestimated. Given how broadly speaking, how manageable it is relative to many of the other psychedelics that we could discuss. And I think partially because it doesn't necessarily, I would say pretty typically does not provide the 17th dimension shattered into stardust technicolor grand finale fireworks show,

49:50which make for good stories, that it gets underestimated as a tool. Because it's maybe not making the rounds at as many cocktail parties because it's unlikely you're going to be like, yeah, and then these dancing crocodiles with sapphire eyes came out and danced around me and so and so, which you'll certainly get if you're hanging out with your ayahuasca friends. So MDMA is really, I think, a tremendous, tremendous tool given the risk profile, given the manageability

50:21of it relative to other things. Question, I suppose, related to the integration you already mentioned is the therapy that acts as the kind of latticework of support for these experiences in Australia, is it standardized or is it really up to the clinician and the patients to select the therapeutic modality? Is it standardized in perhaps in the way that MAPS was trying to standardize with like IFS informed dyads and things of this type? So it's not standardized. And many of our clinicians,

50:58the ones who've done our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies, you know, use a whole lot of different modalities. So yes, some of them may use PARTS and IFS therapy, internal family systems therapy, or they may use other types of therapy. So there's all sorts of different therapies that we encourage our clinicians to look at. And I feel like one of the things that's becoming most important is even just nutrition. So just coming out of this experience and having the right nutrition, because if you go back into your life and just start eating or say if you were eating a lot of sugar before or

51:32drinking a lot of alcohol and you go back to that, well, then you're probably going to relapse. So there's all sorts of things around nutrition and exercise that we're hoping will be more and more included as integration therapy post-treatment for anyone doing psychedelic assisted therapies. But we don't believe that there should be a cookie cutter approach. Every therapist has different skills that they bring to the table. And many of them, most of the therapists that we're training are trauma-informed, but not all of them. And they're just learning, you know, and they're

52:07learning to bring their own skills and work out what works for each patient. And I think that matters a lot because everyone that we're treating through these clinics, you know, they're all individuals and not everything's going to work identically for every patient. Just the same way that the dose of the medicine's not going to be identical for each patient. How many patients would you hope, not in a pie in the sky, best case, green lights all the way scenario, but in a kind of base case, right?

52:38Not worst case, not best case, kind of right down the middle case. How many patients do you think could be served with these medicines over the next three years in Australia? What do you think?

Real world clinical outcomes

52:51Well, it's an exponential thing. So we're seeing a huge exponential growth. So just even now, as we speak, we just found out that now there's 120 authorised prescribing psychiatrists in Australia for either MDMA or psilocybin or both medicines. So that is a huge jump. You know, we started with one or two psychiatrists back at the start of 2024. We're now at the middle latter part of 2026. And that is an exponential increase in authorised prescribing psychiatrists. In the first year, we trained

53:26about 80 therapists. We've now trained 750. In the first year, only a handful of patients, maybe, I don't know, 15, 20 patients were treated. Now there's been nearly 400. So maybe it will get to 5,000 by then. This is me being conservative. Yeah, 5,000. Because it could be a lot more. But maybe 5,000 is a realistic number. But that's a fraction of who needs it. Right, which I understand. But I don't want to let the dream of boiling the ocean

54:02minimize the impact of even 400 people. Because what people listening may not realize is that if you look back at the early studies, if you look at a lot of current studies, they are expensive, at least in the United States. I'll speak for the United States. Well, speak for the United States. What a sentence. I will speak to some of the clinical trials in the U.S., many of which I've been involved with. And because these compounds are still Schedule 1,

54:36it is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to recruit subjects, to get approvals through ethics boards, IRBs, et cetera. And as a result, what you could get on the street very easily, mushroom chocolates or otherwise, for $50 for a patient in a proper clinical trial run at a university could cost $15,000 per person. I mean, something like that. It is incredibly expensive. And what that means is you end up with these studies that are well-designed

55:12and hopefully properly powered. And people can dig into that if they want online, if they want to read up on what that means from a statistical perspective. But you end up with 10 people. You end up with 8 people. Maybe you end up with 15 people. And certainly if you're a for-profit company, Compass and others have been able to and have had to have larger sample sizes and larger cohorts and so on and so forth as you move through the different phases. 400 is a lot, but there's a big but. And I'm hoping

55:44you can tell me the answer. I'm sure you can. Is there some type of requirement for data reporting from people who are authorized? Because it's really only, it's most valuable as a way of building momentum and creating a virtuous cycle if there is mandatory data reporting that then provides a signal or many signals. Yes. Well, no, and that's a really important part of our strategy. So our strategy at Mind Medicine Australia was to build the ecosystem so that we could make sure everyone's

56:19trained that the public and clinicians were fully educated and we keep doing that, that there is ongoing research for new conditions, that clinical rollouts and the medicine supply can happen very smoothly. And then there's the whole pay-all part, which I'll come to. So there's the whole cost of it all. But the data collection is really, really important. And one of the things David Nutt did with us was he was really like, we have to make sure there's real world evidence being collected. So he worked with Professor Paul Fitzgerald at Australian National University and Mind Medicine

56:54Australia has funded a registry, which we have no influence on. We simply funded at the Australian National University, which collates real world evidence, the data from the baseline of a patient when they go in for the treatment, then what they're like when they come out of the treatment. And that's being collected all the time. It hasn't published yet, but we hope that it will publish over the next few months and then continue to publish periodically as they collect more and more data. And this data is critical because this is what can show the government, well, firstly,

57:28they know there's been no adverse events, serious ones, because there's been nothing reported to the TGA. But it's also really important to show the government, wow, well, these remission rates are around 60 to 80%. That's compared against 10 to 15% for existing treatments for PTSD and psilocybin with MDMA and psilocybin treatment for depression and trauma in Australia at the moment. So 10 to 15% versus 60 to 80% remission rates, that starts to become very important for a government

58:01because they go, well, wow, there could be some serious cost savings here. We could save millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a patient's lifetime. And one of the other things we've done at MMA is we've helped to really bring on the payors for these treatments. So we now have the Department of Veterans Affairs who are supporting treatments for veterans. We have the National Disability Insurance Scheme also funding treatments. And we have Medibank, which is our largest health insurer, who have basically said that any eligible gold members

58:37of Medibank can get pretty much the whole treatment cost paid apart from a couple of thousand dollars. So everyone's shifting to Medibank. What does it look like to recruit any of these payers? So how do you even bring the first of these payers online? What does the outreach look like? We went to them all from early on. So we were talking to the Department of Veterans Affairs from early on because we had seen what happened in the US with veterans. And we knew that that was a core strategy that Rick Doblin and MAPS had also used. And it's an important strategy because veterans and

59:12first responders have served their nation and more veterans die through their own hands, through suicide, than die on the battlefield. And they experienced so much trauma in the work that they've done. And we knew that the Department of Veterans Affairs was really struggling with the amount of veteran suicides that were occurring. So they were someone we started talking to and presenting to from very early on in time as Mind Medicine Australia. The National Disability Insurance Scheme

59:43came on board because they obviously want to try and reduce the costs of treatments. And this is a really good way to reduce costs over time. Though the cost of the treatment is relatively expensive up front, over the course of a patient's lifetime, the potential cost savings are enormous. Rick Doblin and MAPS did some economic modelling and showed that the cost per patient, this was a few years ago already, could be well over US$100,000 of cost savings. So we knew that cost would be a barrier. And so we

1:00:17also started a patient support fund at Mind Medicine Australia. And how we managed to do a lot of this was through our own philanthropy. So we're philanthropists and social entrepreneurs. And then we got other philanthropists that we know to come on board and start to support our patient support fund and to start to support Mind Medicine Australia's work. And that's really how we've enabled a lot of this to happen. We just went in, we didn't let anything be our barrier. We just thought, well, anything's possible. We can do this. And if we get enough people behind us and we spend

1:00:52enough time, energy in the end, yeah, we've also donated a lot of money to this. Peter and I have done this pro bono for the last eight years, completely pro bono, because we just want to help alleviate suffering and want to see people get their lives back. We want people to have meaningful lives. We want them to feel healthy. We want them to be able to see the sacred in everything. And that's one of the great gifts that these medicines give you. Whether you're washing the

1:01:23dishes or you're looking at the beautiful tree outside or a beautiful sunset, it's starting to see the beauty in everything in this life. And if that's a gift we can give people, wow, why won't we do that? A couple of questions all over the map. Is it true that you, with your facilitator from the Netherlands, were given psilocybin with Syrian rue or was there no Syrian rue? No, it was Syrian rue. Why did he decide to include that? My understanding, and I haven't

1:01:55looked this up in a very long time, is that Syrian rue contains, could be multiple beta-carbolines, like harmine, harmaline. Paganum harmala. Right. So, paganum harmala is the Syrian rue.

Working with psilowasca protocols

1:02:07It imparts, when combined with psilocybin, a kind of an ayahuasca twist of lemon on top because it's adding the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Why did he choose your facilitator to approach it that way? I think that was the protocol that he used. Anyway, it was his standard protocol. Now, I think it's a great protocol for the right clients. I think for us, it was the right protocol.

1:02:39Firstly, it's an MAOI inhibitor, as you've just mentioned. So, he has this protocol, which he calls psilowasca. So, it's a combination of psilocybin and ayahuasca. That's how he sort of describes it. Now, when I went in, if I'd known that it was ayahuasca, I probably would have freaked out and gone, oh, there's no way I'm doing ayahuasca. But it was the way that it was done was actually, it was like that. And I think that because Peter and I had never had any drugs in our life at all, you know, we were completely new to this, but we were also, you know, type A people.

1:03:11You don't say. Right. And so, you know, I mean, you know, I was a bit of a control freak then. I'm still one, but I'm not as much one now as I was then. I will say that. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this was I wanted to let go of some of the control, right? So, I really wanted to see what that would be like. What would Tanya be like without all of that holding on? Good for you. A lot of type A people will not, you know, will not choose to release the way in that claim. Right. So, it was like this, this Syrian rule, it relaxed us firstly, but then

1:03:48the goal, which I found out later was that, I didn't know this at the time, but that it was expanded the visuals and the whole experience between two to ten times. So, it amplified our experience and what we would have seen, heard, everything experienced by two to ten times. And subsequently, I think that is accurate. I think it extended the experience. It created more visuals than what I had seen, say, without using Pagan and Pamala, you know, subsequently. But the first

1:04:19two experiences Peter and I had both were with Siri and Roo. And I thought it was an extraordinary way of relaxing us and then helping us to just let go of our bodies and just to be able to travel. And at one stage, the guide said, oh, you guys are really having a lot of trouble stepping out of your bodies. I could hear him say that in the room. It was like your body's just fining you.

1:04:49So, I'm curious, what dose, do you recall how many grams of, I'm assuming it was dried psilocybin mushroom of some type? Yes. With lemon, with a kick of lemon juice, yeah. Yeah. Did he let it marinate in the lemon for a while? Not so long. Like, did he grind it up and then marinate it? Okay. Well, I don't know how long he'd marinated it for. I was too petrified to really watch that. How quickly did you feel the onset? That'll probably tell me how long it marinated. I started feeling tingling through some of my feet and hands probably within about 30 minutes.

1:05:24My husband kept saying there's nothing happening. And then all of a sudden, it was like, oh my God, yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, he was on the floor on a mattress. I was on the bed. We were not talking to one another. Like, that was part of the sort of protocol. And it probably took about half an hour and I could feel like there was so much tingling. I called the guide over and I said, hey, I'm really afraid. Can you hold my hand? Because I thought, what's happening? You know, I hadn't felt my body do these sorts of strange things before. And it was like, I could feel myself sort of, it was like I was filling up and I didn't quite know what that meant.

1:05:59And then all of a sudden I started to see the colors and the shapes and it was like this kaleidoscope that I was looking through and it was incredible. I mean, I'd be curious if this matches your experience because I do have some experience with psilocybin plus Syrian rue. Also just a footnote for folks on the lemon. So my understanding, I'm not a biochemist, but if you marinate the psilocybin mushroom, especially if it's ground up,

1:06:30say a coffee grinder, in lemon, that it basically pre-metabolizes it, breaks it down or converts it into psilocin. And your body is converting psilocybin into psilocin as the active metabolite to begin with. And in doing so, like for me, it would typically take, in some cases, it really depends on a lot of factors. When did I last eat, et cetera, et cetera, but 45 minutes to an hour maybe for effects to really set in with eating mushrooms. If they're ground and put in lemon, and it depends

1:07:05on the strain of mushrooms, some can be more obviously potent than others, but 10 to 15 minutes, I mean, I am off to the races, like what normally would have taken like 60 to 90 minutes, which is actually quite nice because the waiting game can be the most torturous part for a lot of people. Similarly with the Syrian rue, my experience is, let's just say if my workspace functional dose is 4.5 grams, let's just say, keep it over like 3.5 to 4 these days, let's just say, although I've taken

1:07:42the foot off the gas a lot with this stuff. But if Syrian rue is involved, then all of a sudden, like 1.5 is plenty and you can use much less, which I think one advantage of that is that you're less likely to have a headache the next day. Some people at higher dose psilocybin can really get a crusher of a headache depending on their sort of individual pharmacology. So have you continued to work with the Syrian rue or have you moved to a different toolkit? Sometimes, yeah. And I'm sort of curious

1:08:16again to actually, I have this hankering at the moment to perhaps go and have a session with Syrian rue again. I think that it's more powerful for me still. But subsequent to the second dose, so when we had the second dose with the guide, and yeah, it was probably about two to probably 2.53 grams of dried mushroom that we were having to your earlier question. And I guess the next one we had after that was probably with a guide somewhere in the US who didn't use the Syrian. And

1:08:54for me, that was not as powerful. Like it was still good. I was still traveling quite a lot. And I think, you know, Aldous Huxley famously said, you know, once the doors of perception are open, you can never shut them again. And I really have found that to be the case. You know, what I saw, I can never unsee what I experienced. I experienced, and it's always going to be there with me. And I consider that the greatest gift that I had that and enables me to get into other transcendental states with meditation and singing and other things much more quickly and easily as well. I can access those

1:09:29states more easily. Would I prefer to do Syrian rue from time to time? Yes, I think so. It is a good thing. Some people find it a bit nauseating. So there are some people who might find that it can make them a bit nauseating. So I don't get a headache from psilocybin, generally speaking. In fact, a lot of people I know use psilocybin to microdose to remove their cluster headaches and their migraines. So it's interesting that you said about the headache. So everyone's different, of course.

1:10:01Yeah, I think this is a paracelsus. The dose makes the poison situation in the sense that microdosing, certainly there's research being done with LSD or analogs of LSD looking at cluster headaches very specifically. And a lot of the data I think are compelling. When I'm talking about headaches, generally what I'm talking about is someone who is relatively naive to psilocybin, who is, and this is most people in the beginning innings, who are subconsciously or consciously trying

1:10:34to remain in control. And so they have three grams. They also don't know what to expect. So when the facilitator shuffles over and puts a hand on the shoulder and says, Tanya, how are you feeling? Are you feeling anything? You're like, I have no fucking idea. That's what 99% are going to be like. I don't know if I'm feeling anything. I have no idea if this is the right thing or if I'm just making things up. Okay. And then depending also on how seasoned the facilitator is, but they'll say, well, if you're going to boost, this is time to boost.

1:11:06And again, 99% of newbies are going to be like, I have no idea if I should boost. But if they're not clearly feeling something and they imagine it's supposed to be this explosive 17th dimension experience, they're like, sure, I'll have more. So they have three, then they have six. And then I've seen people have nine. And then some people go 12. And in a case like that, the likelihood of having headache is non-zero. When you start getting up into like the brute force

1:11:37flood doses, which happens a lot. I mean, moms also frequently need higher doses than some folks because they're so used to taking care of everybody else. And sometimes a good reason for people to do sessions separately, as opposed to as a couple. No, that's true. Someone is like a primary caretaker. Sometimes they can be so preoccupied that they don't respond to what is already a saturating dose. That's true. But there is also something very much to be said for doing this in groups. Yeah, I agree with that. Especially with the, just the experience, but also then the integration,

1:12:11like just sitting in circle together in sacred circles and sharing these experiences with others. It's just, you can't bottle it. I mean, everyone's experience is so different and it really helps you to understand just how different we really are. But then we're getting the same sort of messages coming back. So even though the material is so different that we're seeing and hearing and feeling, but then our insights coming back can be very similar. And it's amazing how many people, for example, that I've met who've literally stone cold stopped alcohol after having

1:12:43psilocybin experiences and never had it again. The group dynamic, I think, is where a lot of gold is. And I think it was either 2014 or 15, where I funded a study at UCSF in Northern California, looking at long-term demoralization, effectively a variant of depression in AIDS survivors. And the reason that I funded that study, I mean, there are a number of reasons that I helped fund it, and I'm not sure if I funded the entire thing or part of it. That's beside the point. The point is

1:13:17that the reason it most grabbed my interest is it was the first time I had seen group integration in the study of design. And I could foresee, or I would bet at least at that point, I still bet that not only will it be much more cost-effective to deliver some of these medications in group environments because you're splitting the cost of one or two therapists slash babysitters slash nurses, across multiple people, four, six, whatever the number might be. I actually think, and this is

1:13:49certainly borne out in the data from a number of the better Ibogaine clinics, the outcomes are better. It's not just that the cost is lower, the outcomes are better. And certainly I think the experience is much more nuanced and deeper for the participants. So I do think there's a lot there. Let me come back to MMA. And every time I say it, I think of mixed martial arts, but I know it's not mixed martial arts. Or Magic Mushrooms Australia. Like that was sort of the secret name behind the real name.

1:14:20Got it. Okay. You're right. So Mind Medicine Australia, what are some of the mistakes that you made? Because if someone's listening to this and they're like, we want to take a playbook, we want to try this in Croatia, we want to try this in Japan, we want to try this in fill in the blank. What are some of the cautionary notes or the things on the do not repeat list where you're like, you know what? If I were to do this all over again, I would probably not do X or I would do Y a little

Overcoming institutional resistance

1:14:50differently. What are things that come to mind for you? There's so many things, really. It was really challenging. I mean, though my husband has set up so many charities and very successfully, this was very difficult because it's a very nuanced area. The whole area of mental health care there's a lot of people that have a lot of views and there's a lot of vested interests in the space that we hadn't fully appreciated. So there was vested interest from researchers that we were not aware of where researchers were wanting to just keep researching for many, many more years. We had

1:15:23people literally confront us and we had a lot of conflict with researchers saying, well, you know, we need to research for another five or 10 or more years. And we're arguing, but there's patients out there who are going to take their own lives if they don't get other solutions for their mental health conditions. So there was that sort of thing. Can you say more about that? When you say vested interest, because they are researchers and in the business of conducting science, did they simply feel that the burden of proof had not been addressed, therefore we need more data? Or was it, hey, we are receiving funding from, I don't know what the

1:15:58equivalent of the NIH is in Australia, but we want to continue to receive funding to research these things. Therefore, the longer the runway we have, the more my job security is assured and therefore dot, dot, dot. I mean, what, when you say vested interest, what do you mean? That was the main reason. I mean, that was, and we've actually invested ourselves as we know you have in trials that are for innovative new uses for psilocybin, for example. So we've just, for example,

1:16:28part funded a trial that was for eating disorders and another one, I think, for obsessive compulsive disorder and other things like that. And we very much believe in supporting new research, novel research, but we were not fans of replicating trials that had already been undertaken at least five to 10 or more times in other markets overseas. For example, end of life anxiety and stress. Or there was a particular researcher who did a trial with MDMA just for four patients and it took,

1:17:00I don't know, more than five years to complete. You know, things like that, we just thought, well, that's statistically insignificant. And one of those researchers was one of the people that really attacked us really strongly. Like it was very, very vicious and personal. And because Peter and I were not clinicians, that was another reason that people thought, well, who are these people? How dare they come into our space as non-medical people and start thinking that they could actually change the regulations? And how dare they think that? And there was a lot of that pushing back, like,

1:17:35go back into your box, please. You know, you don't belong here. So mistakes though, mistakes. I mean, maybe that was a mistake, you know, but we had a lot of clinicians around us so that we were also constantly having clinicians presenting with us on webinars and things like that. And we did that deliberately because we didn't want people to say, well, they don't know what they're talking about. And so that we had clinicians always appearing with us when we're presenting, especially if we're presenting to clinicians, governments, and things like that. I think other mistakes we made

1:18:07was that we had a lot of people wanting to work for us who had lived experience of mental illness. And look, we all carry trauma and I'm no stranger to trauma. I'm the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. And we all are carrying some kind of trauma, whether it's our own, our families, our lineage, collective trauma, we're carrying that. But we were attracting a lot of people to work with us who didn't fully disclose all their conditions up front. So all of a sudden, there might be somebody who was taking alcohol or would turn up to work in a completely drunk state.

1:18:44And this was something we'd never seen before in other charities. And I think people were coming to us because they wanted to heal their condition. And to begin with, we wanted to be as inclusive as possible with the people we had working with us. And we still believe in that. But we did have some very difficult experiences early on where I guess we were attracting people who still needed to do more work on themselves rather than working in a high powered, high stress environment.

1:19:16You know, when you're trying to change the law, you need people around you that are very strong and who are resilient. Because we got knocked down over and over. So I would say you just have to be so resilient. And you can't let it all affect you. And even the personal attacks, you know, I found them very hurtful. And I'm quite a sensitive person. And there were times where I was literally lying on the carpet crying because it was just too personal. It was just too much. And I thought I was

1:19:48tough and had a thick skin before this, enough of a thick skin, but I didn't. And so I had to bring in all the resilience of my forefathers. You know, my maternal grandmother who'd fled the Holocaust and all of that started to become very useful when this was all going on. You can sort of see that anyone who's a pioneer who's trying to drive change is going to be attacked. And I hadn't really appreciated that fully before. Does anything else come to mind? So I will underscore what you just said. Very common in

1:20:21the broadly speaking psychedelic space, which is incredibly understandable, but it is like the last or viewed as the last hope for a lot of people for whom every other intervention has failed. And for that reason, a lot of people who want to help are in fact, and this is again, understandable, interested in trying to mitigate some of their own suffering, but are not in a

1:20:52position where they can sustain the type of intensity or stress or volatility in some of the work that is being done, right? It's just, it's just not the right timing for them, not the right circumstance. And I would also say that for those who haven't been exposed to the science, it's another reason why the effect sizes of these drugs on even a small cohort, say 12 people, 15, whatever it might

1:21:26be. When you see these dramatic reductions in Hamdi or whatever assessment might be used for depression or PTSD, what makes it all the more mind boggling is when you consider how long people have had these diagnoses and how resistant they have been to, in some cases, dozens of interventions. And when you look at some of this data, I think it was the phase two data from maps looking at complex PTSD, but the

1:22:01average, and again, I might be misspeaking, but I'm directionally right. The average length of diagnosis of severe complex PTSD was something like 16 years, 17 years, right? And then you see for a subset of that group complete remission after two or three sessions. It's 68%. Yeah. Which also, and this is, I'm pulling from memory, so this is a dangerous business, but when I did the maps, I kind of audited, I didn't do

1:22:33it for any type of practice myself, but I sat in on the maps international therapist training in Israel, which was the first time actually that any, to my knowledge, any federal government had paid for or supported at least financially supported this type of training. And my recollection is, this was quite a few years ago, that after the last administered medicine, the remission rate was something like 54. And then six

1:23:04months later, it climbed to 68. Like it went up. And again, we're painting with kind of a rough brush here. Maybe it was 65%, who knows? But the point is that people who no longer met the clinical diagnosis of PTSD, right? They went from like blind shut, can't work a job to asymptomatic, grew over time. It did not go down. Yes, that's remarkable. That is a remarkable feature. It's just crazy to think about like the durability is so wild. And also it's not a panacea, right? To your point, it's like,

1:23:41if you go back into the same circumstances with the same temptations and the same problems and the same abuse or the same fill in the blank, it's not a magic bullet. And, you know, I really agree. I'm taking this a little, I'm sorry, off on a tangent, but with say Gould Dolan, who's now at UC Berkeley, used to be at Hopkins. And I'm paraphrasing. She can certainly speak for herself. I've had her on my podcast, but I believe these psychedelics open a critical window within which you can change

1:24:12longstanding beliefs and behaviors. So I think the integration, and I mean, I'm working on a bunch of stuff related to this right now, actually outside of psychedelics, but when you induce neuroplasticity, so suddenly you've warmed up the clay and you can shape it in a new way. The question is, how do you do that? And it becomes a, a lot of the questions relate to behavioral change. How do you set up the systems? How do you set up the nudges? How do you create the incentives? How do you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Because it's not a foregone conclusion that you take these things and you turn out better. It just isn't. No, no, it's not. Though it is to your point about the

1:24:49increased remissions. You know, when I started presenting on this and I saw that was like New York, I think it was New York Uni or Johns Hopkins trial that showed these increasing remissions over time, you know, that is not something that would ever happen with an antidepressant. Usually what happens with an antidepressant is you get an original improvement, perhaps then it plateaus, then the doctor says, well, we might have to try a different antidepressant or increase the dose. Whereas in this case, you have those two or three doses maximum, then you're having the psychotherapy and your remission is increasing if you engage well with the integration sessions.

1:25:25And that means making those changes in your life that you've just talked about that are really important, whether that means exercise, nutrition, connecting with people who are important for you to connect with that are not going to bring you back into the old patterns that you were in before. All sorts of stuff about community and social connection, I think is really important at that stage as well. Yeah, for sure. What do you think contributed to the TGA agreeing to the offer to have David Nutt speak to their employees? Like, why would they say yes?

1:25:58Because sitting here in the US, if I were just to like ring up the 800 number, the FDA and be like, you know what, I got a pitch for you. I don't think it would go. I don't think it would go anywhere. Now, sure, I wouldn't call the 800 number, but even still, it would not be easy for me to get a yes to create a webinar. Look, I had the mobile number of the head of the TGA. I was lucky to have that. Somehow I got that. Sure, he or she loved that. I don't think he loved me having his number. You know, like I didn't bug him too much, but if things started to get roadblocked and we

1:26:34could see they were getting roadblocked, we might give him a call and say, what's going on here now? Or there was all sorts of governance things that would happen. Like it was really important, for example, that they publish all the submissions, but it took them a while to do so. At the moment, by the way, we have a new submission in. You can see our submission for end of life stress and anxiety with psilocybin. We're trying to extend the psilocybin to end of life stress and anxiety because, you know, virtual assisted dying is legal in Australia. So if people can do that, then why can't they find peace through psilocybin in Australia? So that's part of our

1:27:10argument. You can see our argument on the TGA page. And in fact, on our website on Mind Medicine Australia, you can see all our submissions for these medicines to the TGA. But I think really we were speaking to him. It was getting to the really pointy end of the final, really probably what would have been the final chance to get there. And we'd put in the opposing submission to the interim decision. So the interim decision said, no, we'd put it in. We asked him if we could

1:27:40present that we were bringing David Nutt to Australia. So he said, yeah. And then as I said, 10 to 15 people he thought would turn up. And then it was 140 and not a dry eye in the room after Vanessa spoke. Like literally everyone was in tears. And I think it was really her. I mean, David was brilliant. Of course he was brilliant, but I think it was her. I think it was the fact that people could see a real life example. Well, this is what's going to happen. If we keep denying people access to these treatments, then we could have many more Franco's occur. And of course,

1:28:14there's many people who are taking their own lives because they've given up hope. And we want to give people hope and we want to give them their lives back. That's the most important thing in the world we could have ever achieved. What are some of the biggest challenges still now in current day or that you foresee in the next year or two? I just don't know what the picture currently looks like. So it seems like there's a grand kind of real world experiment afoot in Australia, which is like, okay, we've allowed

1:28:45these authorized psychiatrists and medical professionals to prescribe and supervise sessions with MDMA and psilocybin. And is the jury still out in the sense that the government's like after X period of time, we're going to review all this data and determine whether we want to continue this or not? Or is that not the case? Is it open-ended? I believe it's open-ended. So we do still keep having an ongoing dialogue with the TGA. So we write periodically to the TGA about some of the

1:29:18bureaucratic roadblocks. So there are some bureaucratic roadblocks. For example, for quite a while until a few months ago, there was a rule in place that only clinical psychologists could be the lead therapist. So you know, there's two therapists that usually sit in the dosing with a patient. Well, there was this criteria that it could only be a clinical psychologist. So we then put in a letter saying all the reasons why it shouldn't just be a clinical psychologist, why it should be other psychologists, but also other practitioners. And so then that did get

1:29:50widened. And every time there's a roadblock, we write letters to the TGA showing the evidence and research why that should not be the case. And if necessary, we'll have a call and we'll keep just trying to open the door, not to open it fully. That's not our goal at all. We believe that these treatments should be done in very careful ways because some of the patients going in for these treatments, in fact, the majority going in for these treatments above ground in clinical environments are very sick and they need to be very well cared for. And so they need to have proper

1:30:26screening. They need to have the top, most well-trained clinicians sitting with them. And they need to have extremely good integration processes and tools to go back into their lives and to get real remissions. But we don't believe that there should be overly onerous constraints. So now we've also got a situation in Australia where all of the clinics are videoing the sessions. So there could be an argument in the future that says that one clinician with a patient, if there's a video there

1:31:00as well, might be sufficient. There's also group therapy that we're looking at. We've already started to look and I think some authorised prescribers might have put in protocols that might have group integration in their protocol. So we're very supportive of that. Other roadblocks, of course, is the cost. So there's still a lot of patients who can't afford the upfront costs. So we need to let them know about our patient support fund. We need to let them know that Medibank is providing their gold

1:31:31members who qualify for these treatments with pretty much the full cost of the treatment, which is really significant. How much is the cost kind of off the rack at the moment?

The costs of clinical therapy

1:31:41So we've started a clinic too with another listed company called Inconnex. And our clinic is called Mind Medicine Australia. Listed meaning publicly traded company? Yeah. So we, as a charity, have a half share in this clinic with a publicly traded company. And it's called Mind Medicine Australia Clinic. And it's in Abbotsford, a suburb of Melbourne. And we're using that as a real test case to see how to build a best practice clinic. What do we need to do? How much supervision needs to be supplied? We also use it as a wonderful resource where some of our clinicians

1:32:15that we've graduated through our training course can go and gain supervision and experience, as well as in the other 20 clinics around Australia. So it's like we're developing this sort of clinic-in-a-box protocol, I guess. How much does that cost per person, depending on the compound, maybe? So we actually, at our clinic, only start with people at one dose. So if a person decides after one dose that it's really not for them, they can withdraw. Because in speaking with our authorized prescribers, they preferred that protocol. And we don't want to force

1:32:47people through it if they really don't want to do it. And money is an issue. So it starts at about $8,000 Australian dollars, which is about $5,000, let's say, US dollars for one treatment, including the screening. Then the next one, yeah, probably up to about $15,000 US dollars for three doses and integration. And that's the same for either compound? Yeah, I think MDMA might be slightly more because it may be up to three doses where psilocybin's up to two. And that includes the three to four months of integration following the medicine treatments as

1:33:24well. So it's about a three to four month course that is costing maybe up to about $25,000 Australian dollars, about say $15,000 US dollars, something like that. It's expensive, but it's not insane, right? And I know it's out of reach of a lot of people, but if people view it, if they think of it as a pill, I'm taking one pill and it costs me $5,000 and it's like, okay, their reference point is walking into a pharmacy. Let's just say here in the US, they have their insurance and the copay is five bucks or 10 bucks and they get their 30 day supply. So they're like, wait a minute,

1:33:57how is it possible? But when you realize if it were to be framed, I'm not saying this is the way to frame it, but it's like, this is three to four months of very well-designed therapy. And by the way, you also happen to get a few powerful drugs along the way, then people be like, yeah, okay, great. But when they think of the drug first, they're anchored to a reference they understand, which is probably some very low cost prescription that they get 90 days at a time. No, well, I mean, it is really important to say that the majority of that cost is therapeutic time,

1:34:31like the medicine. So we've enabled the medicines to come into Australia at the cheapest possible price. Like the medicine is like a tiny little percentage of the cost that I've just mentioned. It's all about therapeutic time. And because there's two therapists involved for some periods of that time, that's even more, which is why one of the reasons that we, and not only we, others around the world also say, well, if there's a video in the room, does it always have to be two therapists? I mean, but it is a long treatment time as we know. So a dosing session can take five to

1:35:03six hours. So maybe there needs to be some overlap there. Is there anything in process or have you guys thought about methadone? Transcend Therapeutics was recently acquired. I don't know what the parent company is now planning with methadone, but methadone is, for lack of a better descriptor, it's like the softer, gentler cousin of MDMA who just comes in for a quick hello, as opposed to sitting down for dinner, right? It's like a 45 to 60 minute

1:35:34hello, as opposed to four to six hours for it. And as you mentioned, it's like the cost of my opinion, right? I mean, the cost of synthesizing and purchasing these things should not be exorbitantly high. It's not, not at all. And depending where you are in the world, there are some companies that would like to make that as expensive as possible, but that's a whole separate conversation. Absolutely. But putting that aside, putting kind of pharma shenanigans to the side, like the pills shouldn't be expensive, the materials. Not at all. But the therapist's time is expensive. So if you

1:36:08could look at comparing, say, methadone and its effects, which have been quite impressive, I mean, looking at non-psychotherapy coupled dosing, because MAPS, LICOS at the time, got itself into all sorts of tangles because the FDA on our side does not know how to think about standardizing or regulating psychotherapy. So if the drug is inextricably tied to psychotherapy, the FDA is

1:36:41kind of on some level forced to respond with, we don't know how to deal with this, so we're going to say no. I mean, there's much more story. Because that's not their expertise. They're a medicine scheduling bureau. Right. So then Transcend said, well, let's just look at what happens with the dosing of the medication. And even if you had, though, a therapist in the room, which is not a bad idea, then you have something that is possible within a 60-minute, or let's just call it 60 to 120-minute window, right? Which should ostensibly lower the cost really substantially. And I know

1:37:17this probably wouldn't convince the TGA, but my perspective too is like, look, you're not tripping your balls off when you're on methadone or MDMA, frankly. Most people could have a conversation. They're probably not going to want to work on a computer, but there's not as much distortion as you would experience on something like psilocybin. So when you have, let's just say, six people in a room plus one therapist or two therapists, you also, for each patient, have five other witnesses.

1:37:48Yes, they're in an altered state, but it's not like they're seeing goblins doing jumping jacks all over the room. It's like, it's not that kind of perceptual distortion. I'm all for that. So one of the things that I, I think I recently mentioned to you that I, I went to Dave Asprey's Beyond event in Austin, Texas, and there happened to be a stand there for canna. And I don't know if you're familiar with canna. Canna, African, I believe. Yeah, it's an African medicine. It's not cannabis, but it's another, it's like an African leaf or something.

1:38:18Anyway, and I came across through a friend of mine who was there, a substance called canna lift. I think it's called lift and it's like MDMA, but it's shorter lasting. It only lasts a couple of hours, maybe 90 minutes to two hours. And I just thought actually, and it's natural as well, which I really like. And I thought to myself, wow, this is really good. I agree with you. I mean, obviously ketamine is being used a lot and people go in and have a ketamine session,

1:38:52certainly in the US. It's not as common in Australia, but a lot of therapists in the US are using ketamine for depression. But the problem about ketamine is that it needs to be used over and over in most cases. Yeah, there are even bigger problems. It has very, very high addiction potential. I have seen a lot of lives unravel because of ketamine. It has its place. If there's acute suicidality, I do think that IV or intramuscular ketamine has a place, but it is very easy to abuse. Very, very easy to abuse.

1:39:25Ken I'll check out. I took a look at it quite a few years ago. The synthetic all-natural thing is an interesting conversation just because I am interested in all-natural to the extent that you might be throwing some of the baby out with the bathwater when you move to say Ibogaine from Iboga, right? And I certainly know a number of researchers and certainly plenty of practitioners who'd take that side of things. Simultaneously, part of the reason scientists and pharma like to isolate

1:40:00is because you have a less, in some instances, a less muddied picture of things. You have fewer variables. But in the US, for instance, I don't know what the status is, in Australia, Kratom or Kratom, depending on who you ask, was viewed as this savior of the people who want to get off of opioids and prescription drugs. But mitraginine or mitraginine, which is found in Kratom, lo and behold, if you use it chronically, can put you into a dependent state where you need rehab to get

1:40:34off of Kratom. Crazy, right? Right. And I know people who run rehabilitation clinics and so on. And if there were, maybe there is a chart, I don't know where you would find it. But anecdotally, talking to people who run these type of clinics or people who run clinics offering different services, part of which is detoxing from various types of drug dependencies, like Kratom is up and to the right. It's like AI stocks. They are matched. And I would tell people all natural can be very powerful. And it also can be,

1:41:08in some cases, poorly understood because there aren't as many financial incentives if there isn't something that can be patented. We get into very slippery territory here. But I would also say in the case of Kratom, I'm not a doctor. I'm not giving medical advice. But if you look at, say, Johnson & Johnson and Spravato, sure, it's S-ketamine. But they've created a maintenance model with this drug. But I would say if you suffer from a serious diagnosed mental illness, then obviously follow the advice of your doctor. But if you are considering different options and you happen to be in the U.S.

1:41:44And one of the few legal options available is ketamine. I would encourage, with the input of your doctor, to look at less chronic use as an option. And you've got Phil Wolfson and others who have certainly written a lot about this. You have John Crystal at Yale who's looked also at IV and intramuscular use of ketamine where you may just need a few rounds. You may just need one round. Well, you might just need to have psilocybin therapy instead.

1:42:15Well, there's that too. We have some legal checks to make. Oh, no, I get that. I get that at the moment. Yeah, at the moment, for sure. I mean, look, ketamine would not be in my top five list. Nor mine. However, there are two huge caveats there. It is one of, I believe it's still on the World Health Organization's most essential medicines list. This is a very useful drug. As an anesthetic, I mean, it's a dissociative anesthetic. So for instance, if you have any history of using alcohol, even to take the edge off, certainly if you have alcoholism or alcoholism

1:42:46in your family, ketamine is like the dissociative turning off of feelings you don't want that you get from alcohol times a hundred. Like ketamine, that is part of the reason why it can be so addictive. However, if you have chronic pain, this is, I know, not within the sphere of mental health, but for certain types of chronic pain, ketamine is incredible in terms of very few rounds with very durable benefits. In fact, I really dislike ketamine in general, subjectively.

1:43:18Personally, it's just not, it's not really my thing, but I was getting so many questions about ketamine. This is probably 10 years ago. And I decided, well, look, I'm going to follow basically the Yale protocol and I'll get the, whatever it is, 0.5 milligrams per kilogram or whatever the magic doses that everybody took as gospel, even though it was like an informed kind of guess on the part of John Crystal and his colleagues, whatever became the dogma. I was like, all right, I'll do at least one, probably two, two week sequences of infusions. So at least I can speak

1:43:53firsthand to the subjective effects and the experience, right? Like the phenomenology of the experience, I'll be able to answer some questions about it. And went in and the clinicians were good. And this was in Austin and you have to be careful. There are a lot of fly by night operations, but I did my homework. I kind of know how to vet this stuff. And the clinicians were so baffled by me because I went in and I had no anxiety, no depression. And each time I went in, which was

1:44:25multiple times a week, they would ask me to fill out this assessment to determine my current state, how they would score me for anxiety and depression. And I just kept getting more anxious, not really depressed, but more and more anxious and maybe mildly more depressed. And the reason was I had a really, really busy two weeks. So it's like, I'm preparing for a podcast with LeBron James, but then I have ketamine and then I forget my backpack and like my short-term memory's fucked. And I'm like misplacing all this shit and then have constipation. So it's like hard to sleep. And

1:45:01I'm like, this stuff is terrible, right? So every time I went in, I was getting more anxious and they're like, this is very confusing for us. We really don't know how to make any sense of this. And I got to the end of it and I was like, God, that stuff is weird. And it is not for me. I was just like, look, I can handle it. I pushed it with a lot of clinical supervision. The IV allows you to do some very interesting things that you can't do with intramuscular. Intramuscular, like you hit the golf ball and the golf balls hit, like you're gone. But with the IV, you can dial it up and down and experiment with things like interacting with the therapist at different dosages.

Reflecting on aggressive advocacy

1:45:36Have you heard about IV5-MeO? I know quite a bit about IV NNDMT, where they extend it out to about an hour. There's been some research at Imperial College London. You know, would I do it? I think I'd be open to it. I don't think that's automatically a free lunch. I mean, that's going to be pretty intense, but you'd, I'd be open to it. On the ketamine side, though, the reason I brought up this whole story, preparing for podcasts and getting anxious and being kind of annoyed that I had to go in and do this thing because I'd committed to this experiment, is I finished my first series of infusions and I was

1:46:10like, all right, never doing that again. That was a total waste of time. And then I noticed about a week later, I was, I had this really horrible pain in the middle of like my thoracic musculature in my kind of mid back. And this had been from a horrible injury 15 years ago, something like that. And where I basically almost tore my lat off my back, really bad accident. And it had plagued me ever since. And I would sit there and I'd be like, oh, oh, oh. And sometimes I couldn't turn.

1:46:42Sometimes I couldn't cough. Sometimes it would hurt to breathe deeply. I mean, it was really this chronic plaguing injury. And after I had that, whatever it was, week or two weeks of infusions, that went away, never came back. And that is one of the indications for ketamine is certain types of chronic pain. And I was like, holy shit. Amazing. I was like, okay, there's a place for it. That was worth it. I really didn't like that experience, but it was worth it. And I do know multiple people

1:47:15who are like, I'm going to blow my head off tomorrow. And they go in and they have an infusion or intramuscular injection. And at the end of the session, they're like, I don't know what I was so upset about. They're able to look at it in a dispassionate, more dissociated, obviously capacity, right? They're almost an observer of their own state and the stories they were telling themselves. So for that also, I think it's useful. But yeah, personally, it wouldn't be on my top five.

1:47:46No, no. Well, it's not being used much in Australia, but I feel there's going to be huge shifts globally over the next few months and that there's going to be psilocybin probably through compass pathways and USONA will be registered. I think, is it resilience? What's the name of maps now? I can't remember. They keep changing names. I think it's resilient. I think that's going to come through as well, especially given that the president's given that executive order. I think that potentially by mid next year, who knows what's going to be registered and the whole landscape's

1:48:17probably going to change and a lot more countries hopefully are going to be following Australia and hopefully Australia will be, there'll be less bureaucracy and we can have way more people being traded. You know, a lot of people may not realize that Australia is very fascinating landscape when it comes to conducting a certain types of science and globally, a lot of clinical trials from companies around the world have gone to Australia and China. Those are kind of like the

1:48:53two places you want to do it. That's kind of fun for people to check out if they, if they weren't aware, like there is a global market for conducting clinical trials and Australia is one of the best places. I wanted to come back to advice for advocates in other countries and things you might do differently. And you're mentioning that you're very persistent, which you are, you and your husband. And here's another quote from, this is abc.net.au. And I think you'll get a good chuckle out of this.

1:49:28All right. Here's the quote. I actually had to on several occasions say to staff, look, I know they're driving you crazy. Put their, put their approaches in the way they work to one side. Think about the medical criteria and the scientific criteria and the regulatory issues only. And I also counseled mind medicine at some stages that they were perhaps working against their own case by frankly being so aggressive. I lost count of the number of emails that would have sent staff here. I think this is professor Skerritt told background briefing that he did provide MMA with the names and public phone numbers of the chief health officers in each state. Hilarious. The committee of experts and state

1:50:02regulators that advised TGA were similarly displeased by MMA's outreach, according to a TGA insider. So you're a force of nature. You guys have, have accomplished some amazing things. Were there any cases of pushing too hard? Because there are cases when people like push with me, if they hit me from like 17 different directions, I'm like, don't like it. Too brute force. And I'm like, I won't engage, which is not to say that you should have done anything differently, but I am curious. Like, are there cases where you're like, I should have waited an extra week. I should have approached that slightly differently. How do you think about that?

1:50:34I think in this case, I mean, certainly I know that me personally can be too pushy at times and I've had to really scale that back. And one of the things that the medicine has taught me is to just be more accepting and I have become more accepting, you know? So if a door or something doesn't seem as open as I first thought it was, or if it really feels really shut, I just don't go back and knock on the door as much anymore. And I just go, okay, there's other opportunities. I'll go to them instead. And I'm going to go for the lower hanging fruit. That's just me personally. Nowadays, I'm much less

1:51:12driven about that than I was. And I think it's better. But in terms of this particular campaign, I don't really think that anything less would have been enough. And I feel that we had to keep pushing. And even my husband, who's less pushy than me, he's English. You know, whereas I'm Jewish, I've got a lot of chutzpah. You know, I was brought up with a grandmother who invented the first foldable umbrella. You know, she was a woman in the 1920s doing stuff that was way ahead of, you know, her

1:51:43time. But even he says that we had to do what we had to do. We had to just keep pushing and moving forwards. And we did have to knock on every door and we had to use every bit of the networks that we developed over decades to achieve what we achieved. But it was all done because of the data and science. It wasn't done because we pulled some favour. That was not the case at all. We all have this in our lives. We all have people in our lives who are suffering immensely.

1:52:14And we owe it to them to push for the most safe and effective options available. And a lot of safe and effective medical options are not available. They're being withheld from the public. And this is only one example of that. And so we all have to push, as I say, we all have to become our own chief medical officers. You know, we have to work out what's going to work for us, what's going to make us whole and healed so that we can live our best lives possible.

1:52:45And for me, that's the reason why I'm here. You know, like I saw an article by you. I read it. I immediately felt inspired. And that has led to everything else that we've created. So, you know, we blame you entirely for all this. And all the shit that we, you know, the flack that we cough. You know, I can say this now because... Part of the journey. It's just extraordinary, you know. And we receive these letters now where people are just like, you gave us our lives back. We've given people their lives back, Tim. And that's something that

1:53:18you should be so proud of. Because if it were not for you, I wouldn't have even known about this. Certainly not at that time. I would have probably discovered it at some point. But there's always a thing about timing. And that was really important timing. And if we really believe that something has to be done, then we just have to go for it. And we can't let anything stop us. Because I've told you the story in my TED Talk, how singing together changes the brain. I was told as a 14-year-old girl never to bother having singing lessons by my best friend. I talk about

1:53:51in my TED Talk. And one of the great things I learned was to never let anyone snatch your dreams away. And you can't. It's too important. Yeah. Thank you for saying that, everything you just said. And man, we are here for such a short time. Right. It's like, you got to get after it. Or not. But you got to do your thing, I suppose.

1:54:16Tanya, so nice to spend time with you. Thank you for making the time. Where would you like people to find you and Mind Medicine Australia? And do you have any asks of the audience? Is there anything you're trying to accomplish at the moment where maybe there's someone listening who may actually be able to help or hold the keys to something?

Closing advice and resources

1:54:39Well, I have a couple of asks. So one of them is that we have our patient support fund. And we're a registered charity. So all donations to us, depending on what tax vehicle you're giving through, can be tax deductible. So we have full deductible if recipient status, certainly in Australia. We also have people from overseas who donate to us regularly. And our goal is to raise at the moment $2.5 million so that we can really enable a lot more patients to have access to these

1:55:11treatments who otherwise couldn't afford the upfront cost. So we're talking here about helping support veterans, first responders, single mums, people who demonstrably can't afford the upfront costs of these treatments. That's my first ask. Would people find, if they're interested in considering that, is that mindmedicinaustralia.org.au? Is that the place to go? Yes. Yeah. Mindmedicinaustralia.org.au. And then the second thing is, if you're a clinician or therapist out there and you really would like to work in this field and you want to learn from the

1:55:47world's best, well, we have the most extraordinary global faculty that is teaching our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapy. So people like Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Mate, who I know is a great friend of yours, Tim and mine as well. People like Bill Richards and David Nutt and Rick Doblin and all those people are on our faculty. And Tim Wolfson, lots and lots of people that you know. And Wade Davis. So these people you can study with through our world leading certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies. And our next intakes are in February and July of 2027. Our current

1:56:22intakes fall. All our intakes get booked out, but we really welcome you. And we have people coming from all over the world to study with us. So we've got people from Switzerland, you know, Europe, the US, Canada, even from the United Arab Emirates and Asia. Now we feel there's huge markets potentially opening up in Asia and the UAE. And so we're seeing quite a few clinicians coming into our training from those regions. And just look us up. We've got an amazing website. It's an amazing learn section. Everything

1:56:53you could ever want to learn about psychedelic assisted therapies is on our website. Tim, I've got an ask for you, but you don't have to say yes. And that is, we'd love you to join our advisory panel, but we can talk about that offline. Yeah. And we also have an extraordinary webinar series and it's free. And the next one's on eating disorders. We just had Dr. Peter Levine. And before that we had Dr. Gabor Mate. So Peter Levine, Walking the Tiger, Peter Levine. Yeah, that one. And later in the year, we've got Bessel van der Kolk. And I think we've got a Dick Schwartz one coming up as well. So we

1:57:28have this extraordinary faculty. We have extraordinary people working with us and just reach out. We're really friendly. We have a huge community and we're building a movement that's building this massive other movement that we just need a massive movement globally that is saying we all need to have access to treatments that can heal us. But bigger than that, our bigger reason for being here was to make sure that the worried well that people like you and I, Tim, could get access to these treatments to

1:58:01raise our consciousness and to expand our beings and for us to really learn and become curious. Because I think one of your questions is commonly, what would you put on a billboard? And I would put be curious. And these medicines really help us to be curious. And if we can awaken people's curiosity in a world that is so dominated by AI, we just need to go back and be curious and start to ask our own questions, not just to AI, but to ourselves and to what's here. So I would say to everyone,

1:58:38let's just keep asking questions and not outsourcing ourselves to all of the chatbots and all of the robots. Yeah. Well, sometimes it's a good idea to take a break from going outside for entertainment, go inside for entertainment. Entertainment, entertainment. There's a lot to be curious about. There's so much inside, so much inside. And that was probably the greatest gift of the medicines was

1:59:10it really taught me to explore my inner terrain. I was very introverted as a child, but then I was pretty extroverted as a performer and I still, you know, I'm pretty extroverted person. But for me to be able to go inside and to actually explore every single night I lie in bed and I just explore what's going on inside, I couldn't have done that without these medicines. They gave me that. Yeah. It's a category of catalysts that is very interesting. Many people who listeners would

1:59:43associate with meditation actually never took up meditation until they had their mind, the cosmic egg cracked open by psychedelics, which is not to say you have to start with psychedelics. You don't, but many of them have been greatly informed by psychedelics. You know, Ram Dass certainly being one primary example that you mentioned, and there are many, many others. Well, one of the great things that he said to us when we were with him was, we're all walking each other home. And I think that's one of the really most important things that

2:00:16these medicines teach you, that we're all here together. You know, we've come from whatever that place is. We're going back to whatever that place is. And we're here for a really short time, to your point. And so why can't we all just reach out a hand, get out from behind our boxes and screens and start walking each other home? And so I write songs about that. That's amazing. It's too bad. I never got to meet him. I did watch the documentary about sort of the last chapters in his life. What an incredible human.

2:00:47Amazing. Becoming nobody. Have a look at that. Becoming nobody. Exactly. Tanya, thank you so much for the time and thank you for doing what you do. Please say the same to your husband for me. And the website, I'd like you to add anything else that you'd like to, but mindmedicinaustralia.org.au. That's for the trainings, for the resources. If you want to consider donating and supporting this nonprofit, you can find everything, my understanding is, at that website.

2:01:19I have a personal website too. So that's Tanya DeJong, T-A-N-I-A-D-E-J-O-N-G.com. It's my personal website. Please feel free to reach out on any platform. I like LinkedIn, but there's lots of others. And I just want to just really say to you, Tim, that I just want to say a huge shout out to you for everything that you've done, not in just in this field, but for your willingness to try to question, to be curious and to really try to hack yourself and to

2:01:53find things that you can share with others that are going to work for everybody. And honestly, if it were not for you, and you can see this in multiple interviews that I've had, probably we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. Australia probably would not be leading the world in this field. And I just want to thank you for all the resources that you give to people every single week. I love your five bullet. It's the first thing I open each week. And just a huge testament to you. And you just, as you said, when we first met,

2:02:26you never know where these things are going to end up. But I want you to know that your work helped change a whole nation. And not only a whole nation, but because our nation has changed, that has changed the whole world. There's a real possibility now. There's a real hope for everyone that we can actually heal some of the immense suffering in our world. And that brings tears to my eyes, just even saying it. Because we've seen the suffering. And we have seen, as you would all the time, the most devastating letters and emails from people who've, they just deserve a chance.

2:03:02And that was the reason we did this. And I think in spite of us being pushy, our hearts were always in it for the right reasons. And I think people realize that. Well, thank you, Tanya. Thank you for saying that. And you're right that oftentimes, I mean, the Bible of Friday, right? I've been writing this newsletter for, God, I don't know, 10, 15 years. I do it every week. And sometimes I'm just like, is anybody reading this? I'm not sure. It just gets fired off. And because of the format,

2:03:33I'm just kind of like, I really have no idea what is resonating, what is landing. So I have to just follow my own curiosity. And it's like, if I find it compelling, if for whatever reason, even if I can't justify it, it's tugging on me in some way. I'm like, all right, look, maybe there's at least one other person out there who might resonate in the same way. Let me give it a shot. I'm in there, eight, nine billion, whatever the number is, people on this planet. There has to be one other person who speaks English. This might get to. And thank you for saying all of that.

2:04:06Really admire you and what you've done with your husband and everybody associated with MMA and the people who also said yes at the TGA and everybody involved. It's just such a beautiful story. And the fact that you were an outsider, that you weren't steeped in this from day one, and you were able to just experiment and test and call the email and offer to sing and fly to freaking Wisconsin, the land of cheese. Most people are like, Wisconsin isn't that where people eat a lot

2:04:39of cheese? And to move mountains bit by bit by picking the right place to stick that Archimedes lever. It's a really inspiring story. And part of the reason I wanted to, and I've already said this in one way, but have you on this podcast was because I think there are many people out there who underestimate how much they can do if they just kind of grease the elbows and get after it. And it's like, yeah, you're going to make tons of mistakes. Yeah, I'm sure you'll piss somebody off. Yes,

2:05:12yes, yes. And, but you might also just make a huge thing happen. Exactly. And do you know what? You never know until you ask. And most people never ask. And you know what? All you have to do is ask. And it's amazing how many people say yes. Like literally just about no one has said no to us to join our advisory panel. Literally just about no one we've ever asked to do a webinar has said no. People want to support good causes and good pioneering efforts. We so need this. We are living in a world that is becoming more and more boxed in.

2:05:45So we need all of you out there to just grab your dreams, ask for help, and then set them on fire. Like just not in a bad way, sorry. Set them on fire in a really good way. I think you get it. Yeah, yeah. No arson endorsement. I'm not very good. I always mix my metaphors like that.

2:06:04So TLDR, get after it, folks. We're all going to be dead in dust, no time flat. Exactly. What have you got to lose? Seriously, what have you got to lose? Ask, ask for it. People can find you at mindmedicineaustralian.org.au and your personal website, which you've mentioned, yourname.com. And to everybody listening, we will have show notes as per usual at tim.blogs slash podcast. Just search Tanya, I believe you are the only Tanya that I've had on the podcast, T-A-N-I-A. And you'll be able to

2:06:35find everything we talked about, all the people, all the documentaries, all the organizations, et cetera. We'll put it all in the show notes. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary. Just try to be a little bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. That voice that you put out should echo if you're being compassionate, the voice that goes in. Do your best. I know it's hard. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet

2:07:08Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech

2:07:41tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. One name that has come up on this podcast more than once

2:08:16is Dr. Walter Longo, USC professor with decades of peer reviewed research on fasting, nutrition and aging. And as some of you long term listeners know, or readers, I regularly fast. I've done a lot of experiments with fasting over more than a decade, including intermittent fasting, extended water only fasts up to 10 days. And I've looked at the before and after. Frankly, the fasting has been one of the most incredible unlocks that I have found before and after looking at glucose control, oral glucose tolerance tests, hemoglobin A1C, et cetera. All of these things that really do matter

2:08:50for the long term for mental health, for physical health have had dramatic, dramatic shifts. And I've talked about that before. But the sad truth, the truth about fasting is that it can be really hard. And that is why Walter is interesting. He's best known for something called the fasting mimicking diet, FMD, which is essentially a way of eating that produces many of the benefits of fasting while still allowing you to eat food. So if we look at that a little more closely, he took what he learned in these randomized control trials and so on and packaged

2:09:22it into a five-day program called Prolon, P-R-O-L-O-N. It's five days. So for five days, you restrict your food a bit. And what Prolon does is makes it idiot-proof. It comes in one box. Everything is laid out. There's no guesswork. You just follow the packages. And in scientific studies, five-day cycles of the fasting mimicking diet improve markers tied to metabolic health and aging, help people drop fat while holding on to lean muscle, and even associated with measurable drops in biological age. And to put some numbers to it, with glycemic management, blood sugar

2:09:55management, we're able to see one RCT improvements in 53% of FMD participants versus 8% of controls. So it does make a difference. You get the benefits of fasting, including autophagy, your body's cellular self-cleanup process, while still eating real structured plant-based meals. So you don't have to negotiate with yourself. You don't have to struggle. It all comes in one box. And it's right there, laid out, simple to follow. And there are other people who recognize friends of mine like

2:10:26Rich Roll who also have used Prolon. For a limited time, Prolon is offering my listeners 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five-day program. Just visit prolonlife.com slash Tim. That's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E dot com slash Tim to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Now, guess what I did just before breakfast? I did what I do every morning. I took some creatine. Today, I took five grams. If I'm sleep deprived, I might take 10 or 15. And I have used Momentus

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