Psychedelic Therapy

What does the future of psychiatry look like when psychedelics, functional medicine, and trauma therapy converge?

In this episode of The Evolution of Medicine, James Maskell and Will Van Derveer, MD explore how psychedelic-assisted therapy is reshaping mental health care.

You’ll learn how MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine, and emerging compounds may be used for different clinical needs, why integration is essential for lasting change, and how functional medicine can support deeper healing of both body and mind.

This conversation goes beyond treatment, it explores meaning, trauma, and the future of human transformation in medicine.

About the Guest:
Will Van Derveer, MD is a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute. He is a leading educator in integrative and psychedelic-assisted therapy, training thousands of clinicians worldwide in functional medicine and psychedelic treatment approaches.

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About the Host:
James Maskell is a healthcare entrepreneur and founder of The Evolution of Medicine. For over 20 years, he has worked to scale functional medicine through community-driven models, group visits, and practitioner infrastructure. His work focuses on moving medicine upstream – toward prevention, lifestyle intervention, and systems-based care.

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Transcript:
One of the sort of hidden fears that I carry in myself is that because I see so many incredibly gifted functional medicine practitioners having these experiences with psychedelic medicines and turning towards psychedelics now and. In some cases hanging up the, the white coat and the, you know, the functional testing and the, the deep work that’s so important.

So, I, I, I sincerely hope that that’s not where we’re headed is that, um, you know, people find functional medicine too difficult, too detailed oriented, too long, too much of a slog. I mean, psychedelics aren’t gonna fix the inflammation in your gut from having a fast food diet. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast.

This week we feature Dr. Will Vandeveer, who is a innovator on a cross section of integrated medicine, psychedelic medicine, and psychiatry. He has a new book, which is called Psychedelic Therapy. And in this episode we’re gonna doing a deep dive into all things psychedelic, which psychedelics could be used for which conditions.

We’re gonna talk about some of my own experiences, his experiences, and we’re gonna talk about the biggest thing that I think we need to think about in functional medicine, which is how do we get people who don’t wanna participate in their own health but want to get better? How do we change that internal circuitry?

So I think this is a critical conversation. Enjoy. So a warm welcome back to The Evolution of Medicine Platform, Dr. Will Vanderveer. Welcome doc. Hi, James. Great to be here again. Excited to, to have this conversation. You know, it was almost 10 years ago when we did this actually incredible, uh, event in retrospect called the Evolution of Psychiatry.

Um, you and Dr. Janet Settle were speaking about the sort of work that you were doing on the cutting edge of integrating psychiatry and some of the early phases of psychedelics as well as integrating medicine. And then, um, Isabella Wentz gave a great talk, uh, on their, on thyroid and mental health and that talk.

That she gave is actually like the most watched talk on our YouTube channel by like 10 x. Oh wow. I think like half a million people, no half a million people have watched that talk. And so, um, yeah, it was a very special night. eTown is a very special place. You know, Boulder has a lot of talent and, um, really excited to, to check back in.

I know that you’ve been on a journey, um, essentially following all of those threads, right? Since then. So the integrated psychiatry thread and the psychedelic thread, which we’re gonna talk a lot more. Today. So give us the, give us the sort of the journey since then, I guess. Wow. Well, I think it’s, it’s timely to be talking about this because Wow, that’s changed in 10 years and I have a book, uh, psychedelic therapy coming out tomorrow.

We’re, we’re recording, uh, here on, uh, March 30th. So what, what has happened is the, the blossoming of psychedelic medicine, um, we, my, my. Partner Keith, uh, Lander and I who wrote the book together. We started this institute, integrative Psychiatry Institute just after that, uh, time together at, um, the Future of psychiatry 10 years ago.

And, uh, we started out by training. People in, uh, prescribers, you know, licensed physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs, therapists in integrative medicine for mental health. And then we, uh, proceeded from there to start a psychedelic therapy training. We, we trained roughly 3000 people now in that modality. And what, what I’m really excited about is how to, uh, bridge these two kind of newer traditions in the field of mental health and how they can help each other be more effective for patients.

It’s funny you say new traditions because you could probably go back into looking at other cultures and see that this is ancient medicine. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. And, uh, I’ve, you know, we could talk, get into that work. I, I’ve had the privilege to sit in a, a number of indigenous traditional settings, in particular with Ayahuasca and South America has been an, um, a significant healing path for me in the past.

Those settings have their own sets of, you know, intentions, outcomes, views about what illness and what wellness are. And they’re different in some ways from the clinical work that we do, uh, in, uh, one-on-one work and even group work in a western psychiatric framework. Yeah. Interesting. Well, look, I’m excited to jump into all of this because, you know, we did actually one of our most popular forums we did on, um, medical cannabis in 2017, but for the last few years have really not talked about this topic at all.

And I’m excited to talk a lot more about it because I, I feel like it’s, it’s an important part of my journey. And I wanna start by just sharing something maybe I never shared with you, but like, my whole career was turned upside down through psychedelics. So 2004, 2005. Living in London. I’m in an investment banking program.

I grew up in this community, but like I thought my parents were insane and I’m doing investment banking and there’s a number of psychedelic experiences, mainly psilocybin, but also MDMA, where I really just was sort of drawn back to a voice inside of me that was like, Hey, I’m not sure if you’re this investment banker guy.

I think you might be this like community guy. ’cause you grew up in community and you had an insight. Into something that very few people had had. And part of that actually was holistic medicine too, like having a homeopath and having a chiropractor at a time when no one else knew what that was. And it was those sort of nudges from the universe that were like, I.

I make the change and I made the change and I listened. And in 2005 I moved to America, started working in a, in an integrative clinic. And you know, the rest of the journey is history. But I don’t know if it wasn’t for those moments whether I wouldn’t, whether I would’ve been pushed over the edge. And I’ve, you know, I’ve.

I actually told that story when I did the keynote at the Integrative and Personalized Medicine Conference in London and I heard someone say for the crowd, well that was illegal. And yes, it was illegal and I was doing illegal things in fabric nightclub in 2004, but look at the gift that this has, you know, provided for the rest of my life.

So I just, I don’t dunno if I’ve ever told you that story, but it’s been, it’s been here since the beginning. Thank you for sharing that. You know, it’s, it’s remarkable how. Effective these tools can be to show you a deeper truth about yourself, and I think it takes courage and strength to listen to the call and respond.

Some people might have heard what you heard and gone back to the trading desk and suffered in silence or resentment for decades, right? But you listened and look what you’ve created in the world. It’s very beautiful. Thank you. Well, look, I wanna share a couple of observations so you, you know, this has been in my mind ever since I saw you guys speak there, and I think for a long time there was this huge gap between integrated medicine and, and psychedelic medicine.

Even though Andy Weill, like was at the, sort of the middle of both of them at a, at a long time ago, but like. Certainly there wasn’t a lot of crossover. The integrated medicine for mental health conference, you know, has been the first time that I’ve seen those two things come together. And I saw you there.

Yeah. Rick Dublin there. Um, and I’ve, I’ve enjoyed that there’s that place to come together. But I was, I was invited to speak at the Mexican Association of Lifestyle Medicine, which is really an integrated medicine conference. They do more than lifestyle medicine there, but. Amongst those doctors, they really saw no gap between these things.

They saw that this was just a different elements of, what would you say this is? This is different elements of health creation, right? This is different elements of Saluto Genesis, and so I’d love to get your thoughts on that because I think you have been. Pioneering the sort of bringing together of two areas that I think are very aligned but have not really been aligned, I think in the minds of clinicians necessarily.

Just wanted to take a moment to thank our mission partners for helping bring this podcast to you. As you know, we are in the business of building a network of clinics that can reverse cognitive decline and our partners in that are organizations. You can find out more if you go to goevomed.com and look.

At the Mission Partners, but first and foremost, Truneura. If you go to truneura.com, you can get a demo. Um, this is the underlying software that will connect this network of clinics. And we have an incredible mastermind session. A lot of cool stuff coming out of that company. Um, you can see here, uh, Fullscript , thanks to Fullscript with fullscript where we’re gonna help you take advantage of the tools that they have, um, to compete with things like Chat, BT, and Function Health.

It’s gonna be awesome. Go to goevomed.com/fullscript.. Uh, bigboost.marketing. If you need patients for your clinic, uh, or if you have any marketing needs, goevomed.com/bigboost is a premier, uh, supporter in that world. And then please, uh, also check out Freedom Practice Coaching Built and Scale, a very successful brain health practice and has been instrumental in helping practitioners with the nonclinical aspects of running a practice doing this.

These are our mission partners. These are people that I know well. These are people. The top of their sphere and really excited to bring you, uh, the rest of the podcast. Enjoy. Right. Well it’s, it’s great to hear that there is a group of doctors who’s already thinking that way, and I assume that they’re maybe not American doctors ’cause it’s.

Not as common here. Yeah. Yeah. So we have some work to do in North America, I think to, to bridge the gap. I, one of the things that, I guess the, the place where the conversation starts for me is looking at root causes in, in the practice of medicine. And of course you’ve been championing that IFM champions, that P Key and IMMH have championed that.

And what I. Started to notice in my practice in the early two thousands was that the conventional tools left too many people lacking, you know, and that was clear. Prescribing medications, doing talk therapy, it wasn’t enough for enough people. For me, the first stop on the train of evolving, transcending and including those tools was functional medicine.

So I started learning about gut brain connection because of a. An interaction with a patient who was tested for celiac disease by a naturopathic doctor, stopped eating weight, and all of his panic and anxiety melted away, and then he tapered off the medicines. I was prescribing him for those conditions and he still had no anxiety.

And so it was first the gut brain and then it was hormones and environmental toxins and detoxification pathways and all the things that we think of, nutritional deficiencies in functional medicine. Yet still there were people who didn’t get well, even with the functional medicine handled then I trained with Peter Levine in Somatic experiencing and also in EMDR.

And these things are wonderful tools for, um, I would say more simple trauma car accident fall from a ladder assault. So on these tools I found didn’t get to deeper developmental trauma. Or the kind of trauma that starts early enough that it impacts who you know yourself to be and how you understand the possibilities for your life.

And so, when I got involved in clinical research of MDMA therapy back in 2012, I started to see the power of psychedelic therapy. I also saw, and this is very true, uh, you know, in circles of, you know, people who. Use psychedelics for spiritual purposes is that oftentimes people have, uh, a state change. They have a big change in the ceremony or in the psychedelic session, and there’s not enough attention to converting the state change into a trait change.

We’re all after long-term changes, and that’s part of the beauty of what the promises of psychedelic medicine, if it’s done the right way, but what. Where the missing piece is often is that the integration isn’t attended to in a deep enough way. And for integration, I think functional medicine is ideal because we can go into the assessment of a client who has a treatment resistant condition, and we can map out targets for functional medicine in the preparation and the screening process.

Then we can have psychedelic medicine sessions to handle the trauma and get, get somebody back on the road, and then we can do the functional medicine that they couldn’t do prior to the psychedelic session. So that’s one big piece is the, the bucket, the root cause bucket. In my, in my view, has two sections to it.

One is, uh, the body and the other is mostly psychology or trauma. And if we don’t address both buckets, then we’re gonna leave people empty handed at the end of the day. Yeah, I think that’s really well said. Yeah. I’d love to get your thoughts on, on this too, because I had a little bit of experience with, in the Heal Community Project, where we actually did six month integration circles with a ketamine clinic in uh.

I think we realized that we were way out of our depth at that point. Because you know so much of, obviously my psychedelic experience is like as a healthy, attuned, you know, healthy person, just like looking for deeper truth and understanding of myself. I wouldn’t say that’s the average person who’s showing up and for treatment resistant depression in Utah.

Right. And so it was actually quite like the coaches would come back a little bit like Harold. As to what had just happened. And you know, ultimately there is, uh, uh, a lot of safety and connection and that needs to happen for patients who are looking for this because nothing else has worked compared to the sort of like, um, well healed, should we say.

Right. The betterment of well people is a different avatar to be working with For sure. Um, and, and the folks who have deeper dysregulation in their system can become that person over time with the right support. But you’re right that the what gets uncovered for people is often very surprising and bigger and more difficult to work with in the beginning.

Um, well, there’s, there’s all kinds of studies going on and, and there’s a future. I know we could talk a little bit about, you know, what happened and as far as the M-D-M-E-A becoming legal and, and being able to be used and sort of the, the roadblocks that exist with that. But I’d rather have a different conversation, which is for everything that you’ve experienced thus far.

Let’s imagine it’s five years time and it’s Portugal and everything’s legal, and you have the ability as a psychiatrist to use any tool. I’d just love to get your thoughts as to like how you see the different psychedelic tools and what they can be most useful for from your current experience. And also drawing from what you’ve seen in the literature.

Sure. To look like what does an evolved, you know, psychiatric toolkit look like and. How would you fit them into the range of psychiatric illnesses that you’re, you’re treating or even any chronic illness? Because I, I believe that if you want to get someone to radically change the way them, they see themselves, that could be part of, um, of, of any physical, for sure.

Absolutely. Well, you know, to some degree it depends on going back to the. The question about who is the avatar, right? So if we’re looking at a person who is acutely suicidal, who has a lot of suicidal thinking, ketamine is clearly highly effective in reducing those thoughts, and that can be more of an urgent intervention.

I think that the use of ketamine across the board for treatment resistant depression will decrease significantly. In five to 10 years when we have availability of things like psilocybin, N 5:00 AM meo, DMT, and Ibogaine, and you know, all the other things. So I think ketamine will come into more of a narrow use in the acute kind of emergent setting to prevent loss of life and hospitalization.

So that’s one thing. The ongoing treatment of treatment resistant depression, I would much rather use a tool like psilocybin where one to two sessions can provide six to 12 months of relief. And so the person is not facing a question a lot of ketamine patients face, which is, am I gonna go on maintenance?

Ketamine, as an integrative practitioner, my goal is to move people through the acute interventional aspect of any pharmaceutical. And help them move more into lifestyle modification afterward. As far as trauma goes, I still see MDMA as the drug of choice if we can, if the person is medically appropriate for that treatment.

And there are people who don’t meet those criteria based on cardiovascular risk or maybe maybe they have an untreated bipolar illness and that needs to be handled first and so on. Um, some of it is obviously the right kind of screening, but I think if we’re looking to. Have the biggest bang for the buck.

I think we’re gonna look for tools like MDMA and psilocybin that are showing out in clinical trials to provide, uh, if not lifelong change, uh, you know, 6, 12, 18, 24 months of change. Yeah, I think that’s really, really powerful. And I guess one of the things that I heard from, from Rick Doblin when I heard him speak at at IMMH was this sort of gap that’s exists.

On one hand you have a lot of therapists who are working. In building very structured protocols to try and get the medicine moved forward. But that ultimately, if you’ve been doing this for any time, you realize, okay, that was cutting edge like 15 years ago or 10 years ago, and now you know, you, you know that there are these other tools.

He said during that conference that he thought the sort of combination of MDMA and five M-E-O-D-M-T would be the future of psychiatry. And, uh, I was very interested in that because I, I’ve experienced those tools and I’d love to get your thoughts on whether you think he’s right and, and. What you think those two tools can do in combination that you, you can’t do with a single, uh, single.

Well, it’s interesting. Biome, E-O-D-M-T is something that I’ve been relatively conservative about because I have a couple of very close friends who are, who are themselves, very experienced with psychedelics and practice psychedelic therapy as practitioners who are not new to the work, you know, decades into the work.

So very experienced psychs who had. Major blowout experiences with immuno DMT that lasted about a year each to sort of land the plane. And, uh, you know, we don’t say that there are bad trips. We say they’re difficult trips and there’s difficult journeys that require more intervention, more more integration.

But you know, if you’re in your mid sixties and you’re. You have a very stable life and family and career and you know, you have a fm o experience and it takes you a year to integrate that. It, it does raise questions about did it need to be that difficult or, you know, was, was it too much? Uh, so I, I’ve just, and it’s only because I’ve had those two close in, uh, friends have those experiences that I’ve, I’ve been wondering, you know, it, how far.

You know, when you put the pedal to the metal, um, you know, how, how, how far, how fast is too fast. You know what I mean? Uh, on the other hand, I certainly talk to people who have incredible experiences with the combination of the two, and yet we still also don’t have much research to that I know of, to, to talk about what, what groups of people are seeing with regard to that combination.

Well, I’ve, uh, you know, I could share my own experiences, you know, in the, after the passing of my father last year, I had the, uh, ceremony about a week after with a, a close friend. And I guess all I could say from my experience is that I have felt. Whatever grief, you know, was living within me is not within me.

I had an amazing opportunity to feel my father’s love in every cell of my body, which was a, mm-hmm. Unique, amazing experience. I actually felt like it was the best hour of my life while I was going through it and right after it. There’s always been some tension between my father and my eldest daughter.

Never really like landed the relationship. I mean, lived on the other side of the world, so that was difficult, but also just. I think, you know, my, my father certainly would like to have had a closer relationship, uh, with her in the time that he was alive. But that didn’t happen. And I felt like as the pivot between both of them, I was able to really, um, sort of clear that out of, of my psyche and, and create, uh, a more, more energetic harmony.

And as I said, I, I really felt. As I sort of emerged from that experience that it was the best hour of my life because it was so meaningful to, you know, two people that are the most meaningful in my life, my father and my eldest daughter. And so that, that was an experience that I’ll never forget, and it’s really powerful.

And as I’ve sort of talked to other people about it, I guess I’m, I’m consistently reminded of the fact that like the clarity of my slate gives me an ability to. Go after these things and go maybe a bit more aggressive than, you know, people who haven’t had that, that clarity and what, uh, you know, what luck that is for me and what, uh, privilege that is really, and I see that.

Yeah, I, I hear you. I mean, I, I’ll share my own experience, not with five ami, but with, uh, with Ayahuasca that, uh, is kind of a similar story where in 2017, I was nearing the 20 year mark on my first marriage. The marriage was in deep trouble and I was, my now ex-wife and I were trying everything there was to try.

And I had been studying with, um, a, uh, shabo trained, um, ayahuasca shaman for almost 10 years at that time. And I had planned this retreat for a while. So it wasn’t sort of a hail Mary for the relationship, but it was something that was on my schedule for that summer. When I’m trying to keep this succinct, I was in an isolation diet where I was working with a master plant and drinking water and consuming the master plant for a week, fasting.

And, uh, there was an ayahuasca ceremony at the end of the week and, uh, I had been entertaining the poss. This was sort of the third or fourth time that I was about to quit psychiatry again, because I was in the deep despair about the possibilities. And the new idea was, I’m gonna be a. Apprentice to my teacher and become an Iowa guero over time apprenticeship.

And I knew that was a hard path, but I felt like it had more possibility in it at the time than returning back to psychiatry and with the things I wanted to use on schedule one, and so forth and so on. And what ended up happening was I went back to the, the ceremony again. I say again because I had asked this question many times to Ayahuasca, what is this path of apprenticeship right for me?

And the message was. Your, your bridge, uh, ayahuasca is not really any different in its essence from other psychedelic medicines. They’re all about consciousness. They’re about helping people contact what you just described, cleaning the slate. Moving forward with their lives, having the capacity, that is a privilege to have and not many people have.

And I need a, I need help with bridges into the conventional medical world. And you could be, you could help me with that. And it’s hard to put the feeling into words. It was such a powerful, basically edict from consciousness of, look, this is what you can do. This is where you’re positioned, and this is where you can be of most service.

And so. From there, I went and started this institute with Keith, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. And it, there, there are hard days, but the hard days are in the service of the execution of, of the mission of, of helping to deliver that gift. It’s funny that you, you speak about it as though you’re speaking to another person.

Is that how you experienced it? Yeah, yeah. I experienced it the same way. Uh, it’s very interesting. I remember now that it felt like a conversation, obviously, even though it’s only going on within my own head. Or maybe it’s not. So who knows what’s actually happening? Like the physiology, you know, the, the level of, um, you know, now that I’ve sort of got on on this feeling of network and network sufficiency as sort of like a way of thinking about functional medicines.

And thinking about the psycho-emotional elements, psychosocial elements of what the, my last book was about. And then even looking at sort of institutional network sufficiency, oh, there’s not enough doctors. Everyone’s, you know, all of those things. And how they layer together, the layer in there, which is this like network sufficiency in like.

We interact with each other as humans and like extra sensory perception and connection with each other. And it’s the one that I have the least experience of, but I know that it’s there. I just haven’t, you know, I’m just not in it all the time. Like I’m in it with functional medicine. I’m in it with network insufficiency as it relates to reversing Alzheimer’s or whatever that might be.

But I know that there’s, there’s a, it’s like my favorite quote on this one is, uh, Russell Brandt, he says. My cat, you know, when my cat looks at my cat doesn’t know the internet exists, but the internet exists. It’s a really funny way of distracting, like, you know what it is? Like we just, ’cause we can’t see it and we don’t experience it doesn’t mean it’s not a hundred percent.

Yeah. It is such a, such a huge limitation of western medicine. Right. And, and the traditional sort of scientific method, the double-blind placebo controlled phase three trial, uh, it leaves so much out of the equation. So what are your hopes with this book? Right? You’ve been doing the, the institute, you’ve got no, yeah.

Limiting factor there. I mean, the number of health professionals that want to be in this space, the number of health professionals that like the story forever in functional medicine is someone gets sick, the tools don’t really work. They find some other tools, they get better and go, that’s been. The baseline for the growth of functional medicine forever.

Now with psychedelic medicine, it just happens. A hundred X is fast. It’s a hundred X is easy. You don’t even have to work that hard to get it. You don’t have to like change your diet, go anti-inflammatory for nine months. You can literally suck on the end of the pen, go heaven and back in 15 minutes and be like, I’m killed.

You know? Right. So surely there’s like, no, there’s no end in sight here for practitioners to, you know, who want to find out about this. And I think you can. You could see when it has such a, um, rapid transformational experience on your own psyche, in your own consciousness, that you start to see it in every patient that you’re working with.

They’re stuck there. This is what’s holding them back. I bet. You know, a little bit of psilocybin would be good for, you know, Heather, right? Right. I mean, one of the sort of hidden fears that I carry in myself is that because I see so many incredibly gifted functional medicine practitioners having these experiences with psychedelic medicines and turning towards psychedelics now, and in some cases hanging up the, the white coat and the, you know, the functional testing and the, the deep work that’s so important.

So I, I, I sincerely hope that that’s not where we’re headed is that, um, you know, people find functional medicine to. Too difficult, too detail oriented. Too long, too much of a slog. Psychedelics aren’t gonna fix the inflammation in your gut from having a fast food diet. I, I guess think I was thinking more of just sort of like the awakening of potential.

Right? Right. Like you said before, it’s one thing to become awakened, it’s another thing to facilitate the consistent awakening in others. Right. And you, you hit the nail on the head earlier where it’s like, can the psychedelics be a bridge to the patient wanting salu agenesis? Like one of the things that we face, if you look at.

I’m just familiar with the Alzheimer’s piece, right? What percentage of people want a cure for Alzheimer’s that revolves around them completely transforming their life, their relationship with food, their relationship with sleep, their relationship with alcohol. It’s not a high percentage, right? Sure.

Everyone else would just love to go to some, you know, hospital have their blood transfusion done, and then the other side they come out with it. Well, sorry, that doesn’t exist. The only way that we can do it today is to do, is to heal the human. Like ultimately. So then the question is either, A, we have to find some miracle cure that’s gonna do it because 80% of people won’t do it, or we have to find a way for those 80% of people to want to do it.

And my feeling is that this is what this is for. This is what, this is what this psychedelic is for this to switch that around. So that middle of the bell curve is now like I’m ready to learn about and experience my own potential as it relates to health first and then really, yeah, a hundred percent agree.

It’s sort of like we talk in the mental health circle. It’s, it, it’s the conversation about post-traumatic growth where, you know, if you’re gonna face, here’s sort of the metaphors. Like I could, I could give you complete resolution of your symptoms of depression with, let’s say psilocybin, right? Chances are good that if we do it the right way, you’re gonna have a really positive impact from that.

But then the question really, I think ultimately is like what for? Like, what, what is your life for? Like, it’s not as one spiritual, one Buddhist teacher I worked with liked to say, it’s not freedom from X, Y, and Z. It’s freedom for A, B, and C. Like, what? Why do you need to not be depressed? What? What are you gonna do with your life?

What’s going to make your life meaningful? What’s gonna make your suffering meaningful, you know, to Viktor Frankl, right? Yeah. And so I think what is beautiful about psychedelics as, as you just described it, is it’s a catalyst that gives you a sense of meaning or divinity, something worthy. Of changing your diet for, otherwise, we’re just playing this whack-a-mole egoic game of going for more pleasure and avoiding more pain.

It’s very interesting ’cause now there’s this, there’s this other element coming in which is like, Hey, in 15 years we may not need to work. Right. And work right has given us so much meaning over the years. Yeah. That’s what’s given most people, their meaning is going and doing work. What happens? When your Tesla robot can clean your house and like, you know, you have, and there’s just like unlimited abundance because all of the constraints have been taken away.

That’s being talked about as sort of like an edge future. And one of the things that’s come up is like, well, you know, if I’m on universal basic income and I don’t have any reason to like, to work, like what am I gonna care about? And ultimately there’s a million things you could care about. You know, I don’t have, I don’t have any deficit here, so I’m like, it’s not, it doesn’t register for me.

But for, I know for many people, you know, if, if they didn’t have their work, if they didn’t have meaning through that way, they would struggle to find meaning. But I also feel like I’ll see what people do when those constraints are actually taken away rather than just being able to conceive of them.

Because if you’ve always had to work for every day in your life just to put food on the table, you know, to keep yourself alive, you can’t really imagine what you do if those constraints were taken away. And I think one of the reasons why it’s gonna be like a psychosocial, it’s gonna be a huge moment for humanity, is to think about like, well, what, what do, what actually is meaning a purpose about where does it come from and how could we bring it back?

And it seems like that’s one of the sort of side effects for many people is, is really finding that for themselves typically with that in, in a conversation. Right. I agree. You know, it’s sort of like chapter two. If, if chapter one was nietzche declaring that God is dead. In other words, religion is not where you can go anymore for directions about your life, and now it’s up to you to create existential meaning, right?

AI and, and UBI create an even more dramatic challenge to the individual of, okay, well I can’t take refuge in or hide out. My job anymore as my reason why I spend eight hours a day, you know, under fluorescent lights and, and doing the thing that isn’t really necessarily all that meaningful, but it’s more meaningful than sitting at home and scrolling through social media.

What am I gonna do? But I, I believe that human beings throughout time have been very adaptable species. Maybe there are, there are obviously circumstances that we can’t survive in, you know, like a, a post-apocalyptic, you know, pro-nuclear situation’s probably not gonna be a great environment for us. But, you know, we, we know how to colonize incredibly difficult environments and, and be resourceful and figure things out else.

I agree with you. I think it’s, um. It’s a, it’s a salutogenic challenge. It’s a hormesis for, for us to have to face that question of what do we do now if we don’t have to work? What are some of the, what are some of the, the stories or things that you talk about in your book that you think, um, you know, might inspire practitioners who are on the fence of it?

Maybe they’ve seen bad outcomes in some place or others. What do you see as are some things that you feel might attract. A practitioner to think I want to be involved in this movement. Sure. Well, we have a lot of patient stories in the book. People who participated in clinical trials, people we’ve treated in our clinic with.

Ketamine or psilocybin. So I think those stories convey a lot of the, the depth of the work. There are stories of people who had to go into the underground to get the, the healing that they needed. Uh, and, and those are, I think those inspire a different crowd that, you know, bring this forward into the mainstream and, and bring it out of the shadows.

Uh, obviously healing’s been happening, you know, in outside of the regulatory market for, you know, eons. Um, and. You know, I, I, it, it’s interesting. It’s sort of like, be careful what you ask for because the reg, the regulated market and, and that situation has proven to be really challenging to work with and, uh, expensive.

And I know, you know, we, we have people who’ve graduated from our program providing MDMA above board in Australia, and it’s, you know, $20,000 to get through that protocol in Australia. So our work is cut out for us, but I, I, I think, um. In terms of the book and what you know, the book is, I would say that the, um, the practitioner reader is, is kind of the secondary reader for this book.

The, the, the main audience is we’re hoping that it will be popular for everyday people who are dealing with trauma or dealing with intractable treatment resistant conditions, firefighters, law enforcement, people who need help, and they might not even be aware that these options exist. Yeah. All right.

Well, I guess the, the final question I wanna just ask you is, is, well, is, is just around the legalization of it because you, you’ve talked it there, and I know there was some, some big roadblocks in the journey and I know everyone that’s involved in it is frustrated with. The path that has taken. Um, I know there’s so, at least in theory, support, uh, within the administration, and you’ve got people like Rick Perry sort of on the, on the front lines.

What are your thoughts of the pathway to legalization, uh, from here and, and what are some of the green shoots that you see in the world today? Well, I certainly hope that the, um, I’m trying to remember the name, the new name of the lycos. Pharmaceutical company. I don’t remember the name of the new one, but it has a new name.

I hope that they make their way through, uh, this final push to try to revitalize the NDA for MDMA and not have to do another phase three trial. I don’t, I don’t know where they’re at in that, in that process, but hopefully they’re closer in than a full additional redo of a phase three trial. Uh, I’m really excited about the Compass Pathways product Comp 360.

Um, the, uh, the. Product, uh, red Asilin that, uh, was developed by Gilgamesh that was acquired by AbbVie. Uh, last fall is really exciting. That’s a, a vim eeo, um, kind of cousin or analog that, um, takes a a 10 minute experience and turns it into a two a two hour experience. So. I’m, I’m imagining that that’s gonna play really well with the, uh, logistics of providing mental health care and, and having a bigger window of opportunity to, to remodel beliefs and get into that, uh, critical learning pathway.

So there are 300 different individual psychedelic compounds in the FDA process right now at various stages. So. Going back to the five and 10 year plan, I, I think we’ll have a massive range of, of different tools in the near future. It’s, it’s hard to say how, how soon, but you were alluding to the administration, you know, RFK, junior, uh, mark Hyman.

I mean, there, there are, even Marty Macy has spoken very positively, uh, head of FDA. So I’m really hoping that something moves before the midterm elections because things can change dramatically if there’s a shift there. So we’ll see. Yeah. Well, look, I, I guess I’m gonna share my appreciation well for, you know, for the journey that you’ve taken and, and stepping in and, and coming back to psychiatry and coming back to playing this role because ultimately I do think.

You could be a very powerful bridge. And I know that there’s many others who are, who are playing various different roles in this. And I think that there’s a lot, um, there’s a lot that needs to happen and I, I’m feeling called towards it as well. You know, I feel like, uh, one of the things that that I see is, is sort of what I.

What you shared here at the beginning is that, uh, for, for functional medicine to really become the standard of care, everyone wants to, needs to want it. And I do think that, uh, the psychedelic, uh, tools are the most powerful for shifting what people want. And ultimately, you know, if people, if everyone wanted to be healthy, the world would look very different really quickly.

And if that was a hundred percent priority, and I think that could, that could happen. So if you’re listening to this. And you’re interested in, um, you know, in this topic, check out Will’s book, uh, psychedelic Therapy. Also, feel free to, you know, write back to me at the evolution of medicine ’cause we will have some upcoming events.

I’m putting on an event in, uh, in May called Funkadelic. And it’s really around this sort of cross section of these two areas because I do believe that in order for an standard of care to emerge, that is participatory. We do need some accelerants in that phase. And this is the best that I’ve seen. So, uh, thank you for your, for your work and I look forward to more work together in the future.

I think it’s turning out that we’re, you know, on a similar path and thinking about things in the same way. Not surprised at all. And, uh, thanks so much for being who you are and doing what you’re doing. Well, thanks James for, for that. Thanks for having me. And thanks for, uh, attending to the networks. It’s so critical to, to help.

Nourish these networks, these kind of mycelial connections between practitioners and payers and environments. It’s, it’s really powerful what you’re doing. So thank you for that. Well, thank you. That reminds me, uh, yeah, this will come out before then, so April 22nd, if you’re in the Colorado area, uh, we’re putting on a special event there, really about building networks of practitioners around reversal of cognitive decline.

You know, ultimately, um, I’m, I’m excited to see what’s gonna come from it. I. I’ve, uh, got some inside knowledge from friends and colleagues about what it takes to bring holistic medicine, uh, and, and, uh, bring it into places where other people can pay for it. And, uh, a network is much more powerful than individual practitioners for so many reasons.

And that’s where we’re headed. So I’ll see you there, if not before. Yeah, I look forward to that. Yeah. Thanks everyone for tuning in. This has been the Evolution of Medicine Podcast. Have any questions, please feel to reach out. And, uh, thanks so much for tuning in and we’ll see you next time. So that was the podcast.

What an epic session. And just a reminder that coming up in April, we will have version two of our Reversing Alzheimer’s Summit, and we’re gonna have updates on some of the new studies from Dr. Bresson and, uh, be charting a path forward for the reversal of Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Evolution of Madison Podcast.

We’ll be back again next week and thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.

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