[00:00:00]

John Moe: There was a story in the news. Maybe you caught it. The new American Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been on the record claiming that SSRIs—selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors—are more addictive than heroin.

SSRIs are among the most common forms of prescription antidepressant on the market. Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro—those are all SSRIs. About 13% of Americans take SSRIs. Maybe you do too. They’re not always effective for everyone, of course. Nothing is. But they help a lot of people.

And I just want to say: no. No, to that being more addictive than heroin thing. Although getting off of prescription meds should be done under a doctor’s supervision—they’ll help you chart a course for how gradually to go off it—there are very few cases of people even claiming to be addicted to SSRIs. Heroin is one of the most addictive, if not the most addictive, substance on the planet. There is evidence that the use of SSRIs saves many lives by preventing suicides.

Kennedy has also said, during a 2023 conversation with Elon Musk, that SSRIs contribute to school shootings. There is no evidence pointing to any connection between the use of SSRIs and school shootings. It’s distressing, to say the least, that the highest-ranking public health official in the country would say these incorrect things.

Depresh Mode is not a political program, but it is a program that didn’t wish to let such statements stand. Depresh Mode supports the availability of doctor-prescribed SSRIs for patients who can benefit from them. Depresh Mode cannot believe that it has to say such things, but here we are.

It’s Depresh Mode. I’m John Moe. I’m glad you’re here.

Transition: Spirited acoustic guitar.

John Moe: Okay, well, let’s talk about microdosing, because we haven’t much on this show. And I believe in talking about treatments that might help someone dealing with things like depression and anxiety. Microdosing is the practice of taking small amounts of psychedelic substances—like, 10% of a regular dose. So, you don’t get the full psychedelic journey. You don’t trip out, so to speak. But according to some, you can experience benefits for mental health issues and other concerns.

James Fadiman has been studying the microdosing of psilocybin and LSD since 2010, collecting information on scientific studies as well as anecdotal reports from people who have tried it. He’s been called the father of microdosing, but his interest in activism in the field of psychedelics goes back to the 1960s. He holds a doctorate in psychology from Stanford in 1965.

James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber are co-authors of a new book, Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. The book uses anecdotal information from people who microdose as well as scientific findings to offer answers to hundreds of questions about microdosing. The authors stipulate that the book is not meant to provide medical or legal advice. They say people should speak to their doctor before engaging in any course of microdosing. Keep in mind, LSD is illegal. Psilocybin is mostly illegal in the US, but decriminalized in several cities, legal in Colorado.

As I say in this interview, you can’t just go to Target and pick up some of this stuff. And therefore, to acquire the material to microdose will often mean going outside the law and outside of strict regulations on what you’re getting. But laws change, and societal attitudes about some substances change, and people are likely to be talking about microdosing more in the future. So, I thought it was a good idea to know more about this stuff.

Depresh Mode doesn’t endorse microdosing. We’re not saying you should go out and do this stuff. Talk to your doctor. We do endorse getting more information on stuff that people are saying worked for them. Getting more information is always good.

Transition: Spirited acoustic guitar.

John Moe: James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber, welcome to Depresh Mode.

James Fadiman: Thank you. We’re glad to be here.

John Moe: What results will people with depression be noting in your book and telling friends? What are the takeaways that people are gonna be most excited about, do you think?

James Fadiman: The most common response when we ask people to report on what’s happened when they’re microdosing for depression?   Quote, “I’m back.”

[00:05:00]

The other is, “Oh, I feel the way I did before I became depressed.”

So, what we’re seeing is not a lessening of depression. We see that too, but we see people saying more and more often, “I’m no longer depressed.” And that is so striking to them that, you know, they can’t wait to share it with friends. So, what we get is people telling us about how they’re turning on all their depressed friends.

John Moe: And these results that you’re seeing, are these scientific studies? Or is this anecdotal evidence in your book?

James Fadiman: Both. What we’ve found is that science only does research once somebody, or people, have said, “There’s something here to study.” And so, what we found is, really, reports from—our data is like 51 countries—people reporting in their experiences. That then is fed to our friends in science, who have to do something which they don’t mention much, which is get a grant first before they can study anything. And lots of the high dose studies on depression pretty much have the same level of success that we’re finding in the microdose world.

John Moe: And are these lasting effects of people being free of depression and staying that way? Or is it—because I know for some treatments there’s an alleviation, and then it sometimes comes back.

James Fadiman: Most of the high dose studies have a—people don’t do very long-term follow-ups. But for the high dose studies, the longest that I’ve seen is for a few people in one of the studies, the people were out of their depression for a year. Most of them only measure out to six weeks. So, we don’t really have much information. What we have— Let me give you an example. This woman artist wrote, asked how to do this, will it help her depression, maybe? Maybe treatment-resistant depression. She microdoses; she feels much better. She has a lot of depressed friends, and about a month later she writes me.

And she said, “I have a question, which is: a number of my friends have microdosed, and their depression has alleviated, and they stopped. But I have another bunch of friends who microdosed, and it alleviated, and a couple weeks later they said their depression was returning.”

And my first thought was, “That’s terrific science.” And then I did what you would do, which is—since I had no idea—I said, “What do you think? What’s the difference between the two groups?”

And so, we talked for a while. What she said is when she thought about it and looked at them, the people stopped microdosing and did not return to depression, their lives were basically working. The ones who returned to being depressed, their lives were not working well. So, that’s the kind of information that’s very hard to get in a traditional scientific study, but it makes perfect sense. So, they simply did another round of microdosing.

John Moe: Well, let’s get some clarity on terms for people who might not be as familiar with this, who certainly haven’t spent as many years in this field as the two of you have. When we say a microdose, what constitutes a microdose? What is the amount? What is the substance that we are referring to?

Jordan Gruber: So, 95% of the people that we know about are microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms or with LSD. So, we’re just gonna talk about those right now. And generally what we say is it’s between 1/10th and 1/20th of a full recreational dose.

So, in the old days, acid would usually have 100 micrograms on it. And so 1/10th of that would be 10 micrograms. So, for LSD, the range that we give is to try between 7 and 12 micrograms to start. And psilocybin mushrooms, it’s more like 50 to 300 milligrams. So, up to 3/10ths of a gram. And that’s where you wanna start. But you always want to start low. You always want to go slow. Microdosing is working so well because people are sticking to these very low doses that are what we’re now calling subthreshold. So, you’re not at the point where we begin to have any psychedelic visions or mentations or strong changes of consciousness.

Jim came up with the word subperceptual earlier, which stuck and almost everybody uses it, but it’s not really true. Most people who are on a microdose will know, just like you know when you’re on (inaudible).

John Moe: (Chuckling.) We’re not laying out a little tab of treated paper here and using an X-Acto knife to cut these things up into very small pieces.

[00:10:00]

How are people ingesting this stuff? How does this work?

Jordan Gruber: You can do that. People do that, but not for long. The better solution is called the volumetric method, and you know how much you’re putting into either water or alcohol—strong alcohol might even be better. And then you can do the math and see how much you know you’re getting.

James Fadiman: So, very simply, if you have 100 micrograms of LSD, and you add 100 drops of water, each drop will have 1 microgram. And it’s very easy to measure drops.

John Moe: Alright, so then people are taking this—I’m taking the drops. I’m taking the prescribed amount of—or recommended number of drops. What’s happening in my brain when I’m doing stuff? What is the neuroscience, in terms that I can understand?

James Fadiman: The neuroscience in terms that you can understand is that they don’t know very much.

(John affirms with a chuckle.)

We’re actually results-oriented, not theoretically-oriented. So, there’s a couple of theories, and they apply better to pain than depression.

But let’s go back a step. Because depression—people assume that we know something about depression. Now what we know about depression is it is the most common mental illness in the world. We also don’t have any physiological, scientific, western medicine way to measure it. The way you measure depression, if you’re—and this is why experiences are just as good as science, which is the way it’s measured is someone says to you, “How depressed are you on a scale of 1 to 10?” And then after they give you—say—SSRIs or microdosing or whatever, exercise, they say, “How depressed are you on a scale of 1 to 10?”

John Moe: We’ve all filled out those worksheets before, yes.

James Fadiman: And what anyone knows is my 1 to 10 and your 1 to 10 may have nothing to do with each other. So, that’s one problem. There’s nobody—there’s no measurement. There’s also no real definition, except when—the only— There’s about seven terrific worksheets—they’re all different—that, quote, “give you a number” about your depression. Now, you’ve probably filled out a few different ones. There’s seven that are popular. They have one question in common. There’s only one question that are the same. You ready?

(John confirms.)

“Are you sad?”

(John laughs.)

And so, the working definition of depression is only from human beings; really hard to measure in animals. And the question is, “Are you depressed?” Yes. “How depressed are you?” Et cetera.

So, that’s where we’re starting from. We have no measurements, and we really don’t have a very working definition. And the one thing we do have is the very limited effectiveness of antidepressants, and even the manufacturers admit that about 30% of people have no beneficial effects whatsoever. And just to add one little more piece of science—which a lot of your people know—the, quote, “serotonin hypothesis”, which is that depression is too much, too little, too fast, too slow, serotonin. According to our latest research report, which is in our book and referenced, there is no good evidence for that notion.

And the wonderful—here’s the image. If you have a headache, and an aspirin alleviates the headache, the headache is not caused by not having enough aspirin. So, if an SSRI works—which it sometimes does—that doesn’t demonstrate that you had a lack or an excessive serotonin. So, we’re right back to relying on human experience, which is, “Here’s something which might help depression. Does it help you?”

John Moe: Well, you mentioned an SSRI or an antidepressant that would be—for 30% of people, it doesn’t have an effect. But then you talked about microdosing, which you said had an 80% effectiveness rate. We’re talking about a difference of 10%. It seems like they’re both kind of in the same ballpark then.

[00:15:00]

James Fadiman: Well, the question of effectiveness is actually an interesting one, which is: when SSRIs work, what they do is they make you less sad. You are better able to cope with negative situations and feelings and so forth, as you know.

John Moe: You get to the baseline that other people can get to without them.

James Fadiman: Yeah. But what you also know is a lot of people say the problem with SSRIs is “I feel like a zombie.” Now what they’re saying is—and it’s measurable—not only are negative feelings dampened, but so are positive feelings. So, you end up with just less feelings. The other term that I see a lot is “numb”. Okay?

So, when people take a microdose—and this was some research we did some years ago with a group; we were measuring the difference between English depressives and German depressives. And what we found is that, for the first couple of weeks where we were measuring the microdose, sad feelings were reduced, as they were with SSRIs. The difference, however, is that positive feelings increased. So, the way we make it very simple is “less sad, more glad”. And that’s a totally different response than an SSRI.

The other thing, of course, is if you wanna stop taking a microdose, there’s no side effects. And if you want to get off of an SSRI, it has to be done under medical supervision.

Transition: Spirited acoustic guitar.

John Moe: More with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber in a moment.

(ADVERTISEMENT)

Transition: Gentle acoustic guitar.

John Moe: Back with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber talking about their new book about microdosing.

I should point out that the National Institutes of Health website cautions that there are potential side effects to microdosing psilocybin. They say it can lead to, quote, “insomnia, increased anxiety and depression, poor mood, low energy, physical discomfort—e.g. gastrointestinal symptoms—headache, disrupted senses, temperature dysfunction, poor focus and cognitive functioning, and impaired social skills,” unquote.

I asked what the neuroscience was in terms of things that are happening in my brain when I’m taking this stuff. Do we just not know what’s happening?

Jordan Gruber: What we do know—Jim was being too modest. We do know something. We do know that microdosing increases neuroplasticity, which really means the ability of neurons to—and populations of neurons to—quote/unquote, “wire and unwire” with each other. And one of the things we know is that studies of microdosing with blood flow and with fancy machines that look at which parts of the brain light up, they show the same rough signal but at a lower magnitude than macrodosing does.

So, we know that there is neuroplasticity that’s going on. We also know that microdosing tends to have system-wide and anti-inflammatory effects. Psychedelics generally—and so does microdosing. So, people tend to feel better overall. And while this is a bit vaguer, microdosing seems to bring people back to equilibrium, both physically and emotionally. So, when Jim was saying like “I’m back”, is they’re coming back to a place that they remembered and that they have within them. And now they have sort of the neurological freedom to do that.

[00:20:00]

You also see a lot about the Default Mode Network in studies on psychedelics. And that’s sort of the configuration you’re in, your ordinary sense of self, especially when you’re not focused on anything. That’s where you are. Well, that gets dampened down when you’re on psychedelics, so you have more freedom to explore different parts of who you are and see things from different perspectives.

So, all of that—the neuroplasticity, the anti-inflammatory, the return to equilibrium, that all just helps people feel better and make better decisions. And you know, for example, people will often be microdosing for, let’s say, one thing, like depression. And they’ll find that they’re just making better food decisions spontaneously, or that they don’t wanna really drink much alcohol anymore. So, it’s an overall sort of systemic response.

John Moe: And then for a lot of people, I think, faced with the idea of, “I think I’m going to take a little bit of LSD,” that can be a kind of daunting proposition. Because we’re aware, at least through popular culture, of what an acid trip is and what can happen in it. How is this different than a macrodose—than a regular dose of a psychedelic in the traditional sense? How is the experience different for the person?

James Fadiman: So, let me do it with an image first. Which is, imagine that you have been warned about alcohol and drunkenness and vomiting and being sick. And someone says, “Here’s a quarter ounce of rum. Here is a bottle of rum.” A quarter ounce will have none of those effects. Don’t worry about it. What we have is that the one definition of microdosing that seems to be holding is it has none of the classic high dose psychedelic effects. No visions, no distortions of space and time, no realizing that God is speaking to you alone, no giant anacondas eating you. None of that exciting stuff.

And one of the researchers, Conor Murray at UCLA, has done brainwave research which has suggested that the correct dose for psychedelics—and this is true in a lot of indigenous cultures—is the microdose. That’s the safest, most health-giving supportive dose. The high dose—which is used, again, indigenously for rituals and big events—is a high dose. Not the—it’s not a normal dose. So, it’s like we stumbled in— You know, it’s like we stumbled into drinking alcohol only at the full bottle level, and people who said, “Yeah, I just like a drink after I come home from work to loosen up a little bit.” “Oh! I never heard of that use.”

Jordan Gruber: Another way of putting it is that the broad swath of benefits that microdosing gives—both for physical and mental health systems and enhanced performance and flow and creativity—that’s so big and broad and safe that the higher doses that people use to have psychedelic trips are really a kind of an overdose. So, at these different levels, they’re entirely different substances.

And that’s one of the reasons why, for the first 45 of years of his career, Jim was not interested in tiny doses, and neither was anyone else he knew. It just wasn’t on the radar as being a real thing. But now that we know what microdosing is capable of, it may be the real heavy hitter here.

John Moe: What got you interested in microdosing, Jim?

James Fadiman: (Chortles.) I had lunch with someone named Robert Forte, F-O-R-T-E, who’s kind of a secret force behind a lot of interesting things in psychedelics. And he said Albert Hofmann, who created LSD, invented it, said he used to take very low doses and go walk in the woods and think. And I thought, “Who cares? I’m only interested in something that makes you find out that you’re a divinely realized being and that time and space are illusion.”

However, when you’re in Santa Cruz, and you say to people, “Would you like to try a different way of using psychedelics?”, there’s a lot of people that say, “Sure man.”

So, I just mentioned it to a few people to try this 10 micrograms. And they all came back and said, “That was really terrific.” A number of them came back and said, “You know, the second day I’m feeling just as good as I did before.” So, I just kind of turned my career around and started investigating what on earth was going on that made this, with healthy people, just pleasant and (inaudible). And then gradually, we found conditions—and depression is just one of them—where it seemed to be as good or better as anything else in medicine.

[00:25:00]

John Moe: What are the other conditions?

James Fadiman: Well, the other major condition— There are two reasons why people go to physicians. One, mental condition, and depression is the most prevalent. The physical is pain, because there’s so many different ways one ends up with pain. Microdosing is very helpful in alleviating pain. Not eliminating it, but making it far more bearable—particularly what’s called chronic pain. Chronic pain is when your injury has been repaired, your body is back in shape, and you still have pain.

And the kind of farthest out version of that is phantom pain, where when you’ve lost an arm, your arm that you don’t have still itches or hurts. And obviously there’s nothing to do about it. But what we’ve found is that microdosing either lowers pain—very common across a lot of conditions, or— And for many people with chronic pain, they say, “My pain actually is the same, but it is now just where it hurts.” Meaning I am not in pain; my ankle is painful. That’s a very big difference in how one treats one’s life. So, that’s another area.

One that’s a little less known, long COVID. Long COVID effects, unfortunately, millions of people, and it’s the not-full recovery from COVID, and it can be a huge number of conditions. Any organ of the body could have been harmed.

The part of the federal government, they have a very poor record of doing—of anything that does much good. But we have some people, a number of people, who have indicated that long COVID is alleviated—symptoms reduced—by microdosing. Particularly, the most common is brain fog and depression. So, we’re looking at things where the medical system just hasn’t caught up yet.

And so, that’s part of it.  And there’s a lot— In our book—it’s kind of embarrassing, but we have 35 physical conditions that people have reported levels of improvement, alleviation, or total remission from microdosing alone.

Jordan Gruber: Yeah, we have a list of 35 mental and physical health conditions. And then we have this one section in the beginning where we call out especially big things including pain, including depression, including ADHD, including helping people taper off of pharmaceuticals. So, it’s as Jim said, it’s a little embarrassing. And we have a fellow from England who we quote, Dr. David Nutt, who at one point says, you know, “I was getting really interested. But when I saw it was like applicable to 15 different things, I thought it’s too good to be true.”

Well, now we’re up to about 35. But we have something to say! We’re not saying it’s gonna work for everybody and all of these things. But we’re saying we have interesting stories. We have interesting anecdotes. We have interesting participatory citizen scientists bringing back reports. So, if you, for example, have shingles—which we wanna report on, we could do report on—then you might wanna know what we have to say.

James Fadiman: And David Nutt, by the way, gave us a nice endorsement for the book, (chuckles) so.

John Moe: That’s nice.

James Fadiman: We figure we won over one of our most interesting critics.

John Moe: Well, let me be another critic. Let me be a devil’s advocate here for a second. If you’re gathering this anecdotal evidence—you know, so-and-so says that it helped with shingles; so-and-so says that it helped with an anxiety disorder. You know, couldn’t there be other people out there who found that it didn’t help at all?

James Fadiman: Oh, absolutely!

John Moe: Are you—what about the idea that you’re cherry picking the anecdotes that help your cause and ignoring the other ones?

James Fadiman: Oh, absolutely. Let’s imagine that it only helps 15% of people. Let’s say long COVID, where there’s—that’s 15%, versus 1 or 2%. That’s not bad! The idea that something helps everyone for any condition is likely nonsense. And there’s— You know, what you look at when you look at research is they always tell you—they tell you two things. One is how many people in the study it didn’t help. And then usually it’s even a footnote, they say, “How many people just quit the study, and we didn’t even get to measure them ’cause they lost interest?”

So, it’s very unusual that any medication, herb, exercise, prayer system, et cetera, is 100%.

[00:30:00]

And we’re not—so, we’re excited, obviously, by that if it helps people. We’re also excited by that, if it doesn’t help people, there are such minimal side effects that the usual way of dealing with a situation where it doesn’t help is you stop. It’s a little bit like when you go to a restaurant that your friends have all said is terrific, and you have a terrible meal. You don’t keep going back to the restaurant.

Jordan Gruber: And also, keep in mind that there are studies like by Microdose.me, where there’s 8,000 people filling out surveys after several months of working with it. And you know, there is research done. The problem, as you know, is that certain kind of very strict science—the double-blind placebo-controlled randomized test—doesn’t really work really well with microdosing or psychedelics generally.

So, we quote Jeff Bezos who says, “If your data and your anecdotes disagree, your anecdotes are usually right.” And it’s not so much that you’ve miscollected the data, it’s that you’re measuring the wrong thing. So, there’s this long history in the west, in science, of working with substances of people taking them, and talking about it, and discussing them—going back to the 1670s—about what is and what isn’t so about certain substances.

And so, we are trying to approach it with all of the best science that we have available, but also looking at the heart of these stories where people are having remarkable recoveries and remarkable experience in enhancement performance, you know, across the board.

James Fadiman: We actually hope to get negative reports now and then, so we can find out is there anything special about that person if it’s something that seems to be generally more beneficial. And also we’re not talking, you know, total remissions, and you throw away your crutches and dance.

Migraine headaches, for example—one of the other very, very common things. What we’ve found with migraine headaches is people will not cure their migraines, but they will have a diminishment in how many, how often, and at what intensity. So, they’re getting improvements, but whatever causes the migraine—which, again, there’s no real science; there were some good theories, but they flew away a couple years ago. So, all we’re saying to people is if you have a migraine, this may help you, but it will not prevent you ever having a migraine again. It’s not silly about that.

Transition: Spirited acoustic guitar.

John Moe: More with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber in a moment.

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Transition: Gentle acoustic guitar.

John Moe: We are back with authors James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber.

Who does this work well for, and who does it not work well for?

James Fadiman: How does this book (inaudible) microdosing?

John Moe: No, microdosing itself. Who should avoid it and who—you know, who has it worked out well for?

James Fadiman: Well, there’s what we call a risk/reward ratio, which is how much danger to how much benefit. Microdosing, for most people, when it isn’t helping, they get—there’s almost no reaction.

[00:35:00]

If they’re using mushrooms, for some people, they get a little nauseous from the physical mushroom itself, not from the psilocybin. And there’s a method where you actually put it in lemon juice for a half hour, and it predigests. Most people can handle it. So, the problem for us is it has very little effect. So, the people who— We do have some discussion in the book about people with various serious mental conditions. And what we know is all the literature will say you can’t give high doses, and then there’s a list of mental conditions—bipolar, schizophrenia, and so on.

I checked that out, because a lot of my friends are the researchers. And I said, “Is there any data on that?” And I got a bunch of papers, all of which said just what I said, and none of which had any measurement at all that it was a bad idea. So, I did what normal scientists do these days. I went on Facebook, and I found a bipolar group, and I asked the moderator, “Can I ask your group if they have any experience with psychedelics, since there’s nothing in the science literature?”

And the report was pretty much agreed by a lot of people in the group, that for bipolar—which used to be called manic depressive, because that is the major symptoms; you’re very high and happy and excited, and you’re not getting enough sleep, or you’re pretty much clinically depressed. And they said definitely you don’t use psychedelics of any sort in your manic phase. You’re already just at the edge. And it’s very beneficial, they said, in the depressive phase. Which fits our general notion of how much we’ve seen in depression.

So, when you don’t have science, and all you have is that they’re afraid to have people like that in their research—for good reasons—we go to the next level, which is people with experience, and find out what has been reported in what we call real world evidence. Which we think is actually—it’s the end point of all research.

When you research, say, an SSRI, you’re doing it in a very tight, controlled, beautiful setting and with lots of staff and so forth. But the only test of an antidepressant is when a physician says to you, “Well, you tell me you’re depressed. Why don’t you try these? They just came in from XX company, and they might help.” So, that’s what we’re looking at. We’re much more concerned with real life effects. We’re interested in when science catches up. And it is catching up. Over—I think over half the microdosing research that’s been published is within the last year and a half.

John Moe: So, I can’t go to Target and buy this stuff legally. (Chuckles.) So, if I’m buying it illegally, how can I trust what I’m getting?

Jordan Gruber: You can’t, necessarily. You can—if you’re talking about psilocybin mushrooms, you can. It is legal to buy grow kits, and it’s legal to buy the spores, and you can grow them at home. That’s been made vastly easier since the ‘70s, when the McKenna brothers published a paper on it.

There are some substances that work pretty well. Ayahuasca you’ve probably heard of. It has two components, one of which is DMT-containing and illegal. The other is the main vine, the banisteriopsis caapi. That’s legal, and that seems to work for microdosing purposes. We also, in the book talk about amanita muscaria—which is legal in the United States everywhere but Louisiana—that’s the red with white fleck mushroom that you see in Mario Brothers and Alice in Wonderland. And you know, it’s still early, but very small amounts of amanita properly cured also seem to be a good microdosing agent.

But you know, in the end you either have to have somebody who you know, who you really trust, or you can decide you’re gonna get one of these legal things or grow your own mushrooms. It’s the only way to. And there are—they’re testing. There’s more and more testing. There’s there’s tests you can buy. And there are recent tests that you can buy, and there are tests that say what’s in it. There are also tests—recent tests—that tells you how much is in it.

John Moe: Is it legality—? Are the legal issues changing? Is this—? Would there be a scenario where I can go to a doctor and get something like this? Or get—you know, like how ketamine is done these days?

James Fadiman: Well, remember ketamine snuck in, and it is still not approved for any use in depression, just so you know. It snuck in because it was around, and we have a funny rule in America that says if we’ve made it available for any single use, any substance, physicians can use it for anything else they choose.

[00:40:00]

Okay? So—well, at the moment, psychedelics are about as illegal and hard to get as alcohol was during prohibition. So, yes, it’s a problem. And to make something that benefits people’s health illegal has never been a very sensible piece of legislature. And the legislature that banned psychedelics 40 years ago was based on zero science and zero medicine, but was based on Nixon’s desire to find some way to attack his enemies. And making psychedelics illegal allowed him to basically attack any hippies that were against the war.

Jordan Gruber: But also, John, things are moving in good directions in other countries. In Canada right now, they’re fairly far along in their system of drug approval with an at-home LSD microdosing thing that’s going on. So, you know, they’re gonna get there. And I think that might be in Australia as well. And hopefully we’ll get to that point where people will see that giving microdoses of psilocybin to three-year-olds is better to start off than giving them Ritalin for ADHD, which is prescribed often for three-year-olds now. It’s just, you know, very scary.

John Moe: What protocol—? And I know you’re reluctant in the book to make suggestions of what people should do, but when we talk about how people approach microdosing for—let’s say for mental health reasons—is it a matter of doing it once and forgetting it? Is it a matter of taking it every day like a pill, or what?

James Fadiman: Okay, well, we don’t recommend, but we do report on what hundreds of thousands of people have done. Which is our way of kind of saying, “Here’s what everyone else is doing. Maybe they know something.” And what we say is start low, which means start with a dose that you feel is below what you will even notice, so you’re maximizing safety in case you’re one of the very, very rare people for whom it’s just difficult. Go slow, meaning raise your dose slowly—not as much as you can, as fast as you can; but as little as you can, as slow as you can.

And the protocol, which is a classic word for schedule—at least, the two most popular schedules are one called the Fadiman protocol, which is you take it on day one; you then do not take it on day two; you do not take it on day three. Notice this is not like a pharmaceutical. And then you take it again on day four. That’s a maximum space between doses that allows what we think—the body to take over whatever has been put into motion by the dose itself.

The other popular protocol is called the Stamets protocol, ’cause Paul Stamets developed it, the mycologist. And that’s either four days of doses and three days off; or five days doses and two days off. And I said to Paul once, “Hey, which is it?”

He said, “It can’t be too rigid.”

So, people are finding ways that work independently. And this is groups from Peru and Australia and from Europe that, after three or four weeks or maybe up to six weeks, you stop. And you take a few weeks with no dose. And independently, people came up with that. Certainly I didn’t. And that now is kind of the way it is prescribed. Take it, and then go slow. And the other part of it is start low, go slow, and take time off.

That’s the simplest way of remembering to deal with all of the issues about taking it. And also, to get clear, there’s a reason why you take pharmaceuticals every day. Most of them are what’s called symptom suppressing. And the symptom, whatever it is, is only suppressed as long as the substance is in the body. So, when the substance is left, the symptom comes back, and you need another one. Microdoses are a very different. Microdoses increase the body’s ability to heal the condition.

Jordan Gruber: There’s other protocols too. You know, there’s an every-other-day protocol, and then there’s an intuitive protocol, when you feel like you need it. So, most people start out with one of the protocols, and then eventually just kind of do their own thing. We like to recommend Jim’s protocol, because it is the most conservative, and it does give your body and brain the most time to feel and see what’s going on and really learn how to best use it and take advantage of it.

John Moe: Do both of you microdose?

Jordan Gruber: And have we microdosed?

John Moe: No, are you currently doing one of these protocols?

James Fadiman: Nothing this morning. Not today!

John Moe: Not today.

[00:45:00]

James Fadiman: Basically, we are avoiding your question, because I’m over 80. I am not your typical microdose user, and it’s pretty honestly unimportant. Yes. I’ve obviously—over the past 12 years when I’ve been working on this, I’ve tried a lot of different things. And in this—like the people in depression who don’t see a need for it, there are large times in my life when microdosing has nothing to do with my life.

Jordan Gruber: And I like microdosing. I learned about it—we were already good friends. We’ve been good friends since 1990. So, when Jim learned about microdosing, and he told me about it. I started experimenting. I had an office in downtown Palo Alto, and I rigorously followed his protocol, and that was really good. But things have shifted now, and what I like now for is more on the enhanced performance side of things. I actually definitely have better workouts at the gym if I’m doing it on a microdosing day, I know.

James Fadiman: And we have a lot of reports of different sports where people simply say, “Gee, on the days that I—”

Well, one I liked ’cause he is a middle-aged runner but kept very accurate records and half-marathons, and he ran five/eight miles a day. And what he said is, you know, “I noticed when I microdosed, on those days I ran faster, and it felt easier.” And so, we wrote back and forth, and he said, “Hey, I’m doing a race. I don’t do many, but I’m doing a race in a couple of weeks. I’ll microdose during it.”

So, I waited, and I got this report that said—and for those of you who are listening who are runners, you’ll know what I’m just saying—he said, “On my half marathon I cut 20 minutes off of my usual time. I have not run that fast in 10 years.” So, that’s what we’re looking at when we talk about enhanced performance.

Jordan Gruber: But also, in art and creativity and music and poetry and physical relationships with people. I mean, there don’t seem to be a lot of limits to where microdosing is capable of enhancing performance.

Music: “Building Wings” by Rhett Miller, an up-tempo acoustic guitar song. The music continues quietly under the dialogue.

John Moe: The book is Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance.

We’ve been talking with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber. Guys, thanks.

Jordan Gruber: Thanks a lot.

James Fadiman: Thank you so much.

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Hi, credits listeners. To have hope is to be defiant.

Depresh Mode is made possible by your contributions. Our production team includes Ragu Manavalan, Kevin Ferguson, and me. We get booking help from Mara Davis. Rhett Miller wrote and performed our theme song, “Building Wings”. Depresh Mode is a production of Maximum Fun and Poputchik. I’m John Moe. Bye now.

 

Music: “Building Wings” by Rhett Miller.

I’m always falling off of cliffs, now

Building wings on the way down

I am figuring things out

Building wings, building wings, building wings

 

No one knows the reason

Maybe there’s no reason

I just keep believing

No one knows the answer

Maybe there’s no answer

I just keep on dancing

 

Hannah: Hey, this is Hannah from Minneapolis, and I promise you’re not the only one who feels this way.

(Music fades out.)

[00:50:00]

Transition: Cheerful ukulele chord.

Speaker 1: Maximum Fun.

Speaker 2: A worker-owned network.

Speaker 3: Of artist owned shows.

Speaker 4: Supported—

Speaker 5: —directly—

Speaker 6: —by you!

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