The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show, James Fadiman, or Jordan Gruber. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guests are James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber. James is former director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and is a professor of psychology. He has written textbooks, trade books, and novels. He is one of the foremost researchers in microdosing studies. He is also the author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and he is a cofounder of Sofia University, which is rooted in transforming the transpersonal. Jordan Gruber has had a part in writing books and essays on forensic law, financial services, and self-development. And in full disclosure, I have worked with Jordan in the past on some of my own writing projects. He is great. He founded the Enlightenment.com website. James and Jordan previously cowrote Our Symphony of Selves, which we discussed back in episode 126. Welcome back, guys.
James: Great to be here.
Jim: Yeah. This should be fun. This is a very interesting and timely conversation. Today, we’re going to talk about their relatively recent book, Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. So let’s start out. What’s microdosing?
Jordan: Microdosing is taking a very small amount of a couple of substances, which are psychedelics, over a period of time to benefit a lot of different conditions that high doses of psychedelics ignore or are not good for.
James: So the key about microdosing is that you stay below the threshold of a psychedelic trip. So you’re not having any psychedelic visuals, no mental ideations that are very different than normal. You can have your ordinary day and have no qualms about having your ordinary day. Nobody else knows you’re doing it, but you are usually a little bit aware that you might be on something, and a lot of things end up being better for people. And we like to distinguish between mental and physical health conditions that are improved. And we have a long list of a few dozen in the book. And also there’s the enhanced performance part, which is art, creativity, sports, long-distance running, martial arts, volleyball, and on and on it goes. Pretty much anybody who pokes around in their own expertise and tries microdosing, most people are experiencing benefits.
Jim: Now there was a bit of controversy, a little history around the term subperceptual. Maybe James could talk about that.
Jordan: I used that term early on, and I regret it forever, but I couldn’t bear the idea of saying subhallucinogenic, which is just terrible in every rich way. So we now have a different term called subthreshold, which means it is below the threshold of any of the well-known psychedelic effects. So there’s no visions, God doesn’t speak to you personally, you don’t relive your past lives, and you don’t have enormous breakthroughs that are necessarily enlightening and psychotherapeutic. It’s quite different. And if these weren’t psychedelics, they would be much more in use because people would just take it for what they are, not that they’re the small version, the kind of little baby sister of big, glowing, exciting, frightening, etcetera, psychedelics.
Jim: Now, I had a few experiences with psychedelics in my misspent youth, and I never did microdosing, but a couple of times I did intentional, what we thought at the time, modest doses of about 50 micrograms. And that was strong enough to have a very noticeable effect, but no hallucinations, no God speaking to you, no figuring out you figured out how to square the circle or any of that kind of stuff. It was more like a reasonably powerful methamphetamine dose, but without the negatives of speed. You know, it didn’t feel jangly. You didn’t feel like you want to go beat anybody up or have sex with a cow or something. Right? So I would say it was subpsychedelic, but it was certainly very perceptual.
Jordan: What we would say for a dose, a microdose of LSD is about seven to twelve micrograms. So you were way over the top from what we’ve now learned works best.
Jim: But I wasn’t actually tripping, so I was sort of in a middle zone between the two, it sounds like.
James: Exactly right. They talk about concert doses or museum doses, and that’s kind of in the zone you were in, or even what’s the psycholytic therapy they were using? Yeah, mid that low dose.
Jim: Yeah. Okay. Good. And so microdose seven to twelve, something like that. Okay. That’s good. Who’s doing this stuff these days? I did a little research and tried to find big names that would fess up. I did find a few like Bill Gates, Mike Tyson, and somebody called Diplo, whoever the hell that is.
James: What we learned from the RAND Corporation from their 2023 study that eight million Americans did psilocybin in 2023, and half of those were microdosing. So a lot of people, it’s not really a fringe sort of thing.
Jordan: That’s only in the United States.
Jim: And probably places with looser legal situations, maybe the percentages are higher.
Jordan: We have reports from 51 countries in our research, and someone else’s research has it from 80 countries. So microdosing is a world phenomena at this point.
Jim: So let’s talk just briefly about the legal situation in the United States.
James: What we learned from the RAND Corporation from their 2023 study is that eight million Americans did psilocybin in 2023, and half of those were microdosing. So a lot of people—it’s not really a fringe sort of thing.
Jordan: That’s only in the United States.
Jim: And probably places with looser legal situations, maybe the percentages are higher.
Jordan: The current administration, which is doing a lot of very unusual things in the health area, is very positive about the use of psychedelics. Their VA administration is pushing to have it rescheduled so they can work more easily and give it to VA patients. That’s on one side. On the other side, remember those eight million people who took psilocybin in 2023 were perfectly aware that it is not legal. There are laws in this country that say we can make anything illegal without evidence, and psychedelics is like the lead case. When psychedelics was made Schedule One, which means it’s with heroin and other drugs like that, Schedule One says “no known medical uses, high possibility for abuse.” At the time, LSD was the most researched psychiatric drug in the world. There were, in the United States alone, forty thousand people who had taken it in clinical trials, and it had proved to be extremely helpful for a number of conditions. So making it illegal had nothing to do with science or medicine. And at the same time, there are also a couple of substances that we mention in the book, but that I won’t mention here, that are legal, and people are able to microdose in different ways with those substances.
James: You know, there are different local areas like Oakland and parts of Portland where there are sanctuary zones and churches that are able to get these substances to people. People always ask us about, “Well, I’m interested, how do I source it and how do I find it?” And what we usually tell people is find a local meetup psychedelic group nearby you and find someone you trust, and pretty much everybody who really wants to find it finds a way to get access.
Jordan: And mushrooms have become very easy to grow. There are 200 species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms. They grow wild on every continent, and they grow very easily in what are called grow kits, which are also easily available. So it’s illegal because it’s illegal. It is not illegal because anyone seems to harm themselves or other people.
Jim: What do they call that in the legal world? Malum or something versus—
James: Right.
Jim: Evil is in the heart—
Jordan: In the mind of the person who wants to arrest you.
Jim: Yeah. There’s a legal beagle term for illegal because it’s bad and illegal because we said so. That’s the summary I should have started with.
Jordan: Also, a Supreme Court case ruled that that particular church in Santa Cruz could use ayahuasca.
Jim: Yeah. Fortunately, they had a very rich dude who was the head guy there, and he funded all those lawsuits.
Jordan: Funded the lawyers. At one point, in one of the cases, the government had 50 lawyers, and the other side had one lawyer and won. In fact, the judge looked at the feds and said, “Why are you bringing this case?” The churches that are using primarily psilocybin are simply requesting to have a religious exemption for their use, and they’re in a number of states that are otherwise fairly tough. So it seems to be a growing method of dealing with a problem of how do you get something that seems to be primarily beneficial, available. Maybe a church should start a doctrine that microdosing equals prayer.
James: Oh, it does.
Jim: Yeah. As opposed to a sacrament. Because the Santa Fe guys was a sacrament, you know, heavy duty doses, et cetera. But prayer might be a closer analogy to microdosing.
Jordan: I’ll pass that on to a couple of lawyers I know who help the churches set up. It’s a very nice idea. I think what we’re saying is that the illegality seems to not bother people because people are basically not being arrested for use, and they’re not being arrested if they use in public, if they’re at a concert, certainly not in a church and so forth. So we’re really—I think as unknown to most people, Prohibition increased the number of drinking places in the United States. And my favorite area is Times Square, where the number of drinking places before Prohibition was x amount. The number of places where you could get a drink in the Times Square area during Prohibition was five times that.
Jim: I have to throw this as fun—a statistic that I’d created to rate American cities, Rutt’s City Index, which is the number of bars divided by the number of churches. And guess what big city scored number one?
James: New York?
Jim: San Francisco. Right. Now in the book, you mostly talk about LSD and psilocybin. Are those the most researched, most used, or just what you happen to know about them?
Jordan: The book is basically looking at the thousands of reports of people who’ve used it in various ways around the world, and basically the reports we get are about ninety-five percent either LSD or psilocybin. So we’re trying in the book not to speculate and not to theorize, but just to report what people have found successful.
James: And there’s always people wanting to push it into new substances, some of which we’re clear are not appropriate for microdosing, like MDMA or ketamine, and others which probably are in the long run. There’s people working out with ibogaine, and there’s people working with DMT, although that’s kind of questionable too. But it’s mainly LSD and psilocybin that we know about.
Jim: Yeah. I also noticed that you guys were quite strong against considering cannabis as a microdosing candidate. In fact, probably the exact opposite of what you wanted.
Jordan: Well, we’re not against it. It’s just that the data and the experimental evidence says it works entirely differently.
James: It has a totally different neuroplasticity profile. If anything, cannabis doesn’t make people smarter, and we know that from a lot of studies. And also, as you know, the latest types of cannabis are all about the THC, and so now they’re talking about cannabis withdrawal syndrome and cannabis-caused psychosis. And so you really have to watch cannabis at this point.
Jim: Yeah. I recommend people now not do that stuff, certainly not regularly. I used to enjoy doing it about once every six weeks, and I don’t even do that anymore.
Jordan: Cannabis has unfortunately become so commercialized and modified. Of all places, National Geographic did about a ten-page story in the latest issue on the new cannabis. Basically, it’s different than the plant. It’s used differently, and its effects are much more negative as well as the ones that people like. So it’s edging up on alcohol. It’s not close, but it’s moving into that group rather than into the kind of healthful plant medicine spiritual side.
James: Essentially, they made it a monocrop that’s just focused on the THC. So all the other stuff that’s good, like CBD and CBN, all these things, you’re not getting it anymore and you’re just getting the THC and it’s really just too much.
Jim: Yeah. Back in the old days, back when I was a warrior in the college days, we used to say the only known case of somebody being harmed by marijuana was when a smuggling tramp steamer’s wall of bales fell over and crushed a sailor. But I think that’s not the case anymore. I’m going to jump ahead to what I have later in the outline, and that was Jordan’s mention of neuroplasticity. One of the strong hypotheses you guys present of the underlying mechanism by which some of these benefits occur from microdosing is neuronal plasticity upregulation. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
James: Well, first we’re aware that the experiments on neuronal plasticity show that high doses and low doses produce similar signatures, but at a much lower amplitude for the low doses. Neuroplasticity refers to neurons and populations of neurons connecting to each other. We talk about how they’re wired to each other. What happens is that the normal ways that you’re thinking and the ways that everything is wired are relaxed. Some people talk about that in terms of toning down the default mode network. Some people talk about there being more entropy in the brain literally, or there’s greater desynchronization so that new parts of the brain, new populations of neurons both in the brain and throughout the body can talk to each other. So whatever happens exactly, you have more options to wire and to let go of patterns that aren’t working for you and to create new patterns that are going to work for you over time.
Jim: Now those are really two different things, neuroplasticity and changing brain rhythms. They don’t have—you know, transient changing of brain rhythms.
Jordan: When you are using one of these substances, there are changes in brain waves. If you’re using a high dose, there are large changes in certain brain waves. If you’re using a microdose, the same areas show the same movement but at a much lower amplitude. So that’s, in that way, you’re clear that you’re dealing with the same substance working on the body at that level. Now it turns out that there are effects only that appear at lower levels, and that’s where microdosing seems to be quite different from what higher doses do.
Jim: Now those are really two different things, neuroplasticity and changing brain rhythms. They don’t have, you know, transient changing of brain rhythms.
Jordan: When you are using one of these substances, there are changes in brain waves. If you’re using a high dose, there are large changes in certain brain waves. If you’re using a microdose, the same areas show the same movement but at a much lower amplitude. So that’s, in that way, you’re clear that you’re dealing with the same substance working on the body at that level. Now it turns out that there are effects only that appear at lower levels, and that’s where microdosing seems to be quite different from what higher doses do. In fact—
James: One of the people we know is a neuroscientist named Conor Murray, and in a full-on double-blind, within-subject brain-weight-based study, he showed that there are certain benefits that occur only in this sort of sweet spot, this peak efficacy zone. If you don’t get enough, you don’t get these brainwave-based cognitive flexibility benefits that he can demonstrate. And if you go above that amount, then the benefits disappear. And this is really important because once again, we’re talking about the idea that less is enough and that less is more runs counter to what we think of science in the West. So a few months ago, there was a study on ADHD and they used twenty micrograms of LSD for people with ADHD. Well, we could have told them before they did the study that that was way too much and it wasn’t going to work. And in fact, they got disappointing results because the people in the study were some were dropping out, some had visuals, some it was just too much. So we know that you have to be in this sort of middle zone, which is individual to people in order to get these kind of benefits. Makes sense.
Jim: Let’s get back to the neuroplasticity. One of the things we know about neuroplasticity is that it upregulates learning.
Jordan: It improves the brain’s ability to do what the brain does well.
Jim: Well, there’s a reason it’s tuned to where it is too, though. Right? Three and a half billion years of evolution, probably five hundred million years of evolution of neurons have tuned the level of plasticity to what it is.
Jordan: So well, remember, plasticity for survival is not the same as plasticity for writing a concerto.
Jim: Well said.
Jordan: What we find, again, what the reports say, and I’m remembering a wonderful young man who said to a group of other people that I was talking to, he said, “I only microdose when I have a coding problem.” So what he was saying is, I’m smart. I’m hired. I do coding. But microdosing improves my own skill set just enough to make a difference.
James: And another way to think about this, and this brings us back to the previous book that you interviewed us about, Your Symphony of Selves, is that when you are microdosing, it’s easier to shift into the part of you that can stay in long focus or the part of you that moves into flow or the part of you that really enjoys being you again. So a lot of people in the medical condition say, “I’m back. I feel like me again.” So the metaphor is that they move into that different attractive basin of personality, and they’re in a different self because things are a little bit more flexible. They’re not just bound into, you know, I’m worried and all upset and I can’t focus there. They have more flexibility to kind of direct which part of them they’re going to be in.
Jordan: One of the uses that’s common is people in the academic world who want to be doing better in school, and what they report at the first level until you ask a little deeper, is how they’re doing it. They say, “Well, my grades are better.” Well, why are grades better? And I remember one girl writing, “I can now look at a PowerPoint and then I can continue paying attention and making notes instead of having to look up three or four times.” Simply better retention and better focus. It would also suggest perhaps memory improvement. The one that I kind of enjoyed is this is an Ivy League kid who says, “I’m a math major, and it’s really hard, and I’m not doing that well. So I microdosed, and I decided to take the hardest math course available in the catalog.” Then his next sentence is, “Several of my friends in math are now microdosing.”
That’s the kind of reports we’re looking at, which is what is the effectiveness in the direction that people intend? That’s the first level. The second level, which is from a research point of view kind of more interesting, is do other things happen that they hadn’t intended? Because one of our studies said, basically, take a little teeny two-minute kind of emotional mood test every day and write that down. At the end of thirty days, look back and see what else happened for you.
And we began to get these reports that said, “Well, I took it to get better grades,” or “I took it to overcome social anxiety, and I notice I’m sleeping better. I notice that my diet has moved in a healthy direction. I notice that I’ve gone back to meditating. I notice that I’m now exercising again, which I had dropped some years ago.” So what we’re seeing is something is happening in the system that is in the direction of the body being healthier and more functional. More global effects that the people weren’t necessarily looking for.
And that’s why there are so many different reports of uses because if you think about it, if there’s something that helps the body-mind system work better, that will show up in all kinds of ways. And it’ll show up particularly in the areas in which the body-mind is not doing well. Say, another huge area is depression. And we know that depression is—it’s a wrong word, but it’s the most popular illness on the planet. And we also know that SSRIs aren’t terribly good. Even the manufacturers will say about thirty percent of people get no effect. And there’s a group which end up in research all the time called treatment-resistant depression. Treatment resistant means the stuff that was out there didn’t work. I don’t like the term because it’s like it blames the person. But what we get then, because we wouldn’t see people with depression if their SSRIs work. So we only see the people for whom it’s a failure.
James: And this brings us to the fact that pharmaceuticals are targeted at one symptom and will stop it however they have to no matter what. So for the SSRI reuptake inhibitors, it’s kind of like putting a wrench in the system that would normally keep serotonin from coming in and being disposed of, but that’s not as good. So the people who are using microdosing, they find themselves less sad, but they’re not less glad. They’re also feeling better about things while people taking SSRIs often report that they kind of feel like zombies.
Jim: Or at least flattened. Right? The highs aren’t as high. I’ve heard that from people taking those things as well, that and that some of them then go off their meds for that reason essentially.
Jordan: Right. Exactly. Because they, you know, whatever improvement I’m getting isn’t worth the lack of feeling about everything.
Jim: Makes sense. And you’re not seeing that presumably with the—
Jordan: Oh, we’re seeing the exact opposite. What we’re seeing is you are better able to handle things that are unhappy, and you are feeling better and happier yourself. And the most popular words we get when people talk about microdosing for depression is not “I’m less depressed.” It’s “I’m back.” What do you mean I’m back? I feel the way I did before I became depressed. And as, I have an old friend who was on three antidepressants when he wrote me, and I suggested that he might look into microdosing, and he and his physician worked out a way to taper off some of these. And he said, “I have all of my emotions back.” He said, “It’s like I have the full deck again, and I actually don’t quite know how to behave because I’ve been on antidepressants for thirty-one years.” And he said, “I cry more, but mostly for happiness.”
Jim: That’s a great story.
James: It’s just also important to remember, it’s not just neuroplasticity. It’s also that the classic psychedelics at least are anti-inflammatories, so it has a positive impact on the body over time. And we’re beginning to think that mitochondria are probably positively affected. So in this way, it’s almost like a magic vitamin pill that works to make the whole system better. So when you’re feeling better, you can perform better and you’re less unhappy. And so it all kind of works with itself.
Jim: Yeah. With respect to depression in the book, and it also makes sense from what I know from other neuroscience studies of psychedelics, it appears—correct me if I’m wrong with what you guys wrote—that it helps calm down the default mode network, which we know is involved with depression overactive default mode networks. And we also know that it depresses short-term connections relative to long-term connections in the brain. Do you think that’s the mechanism by which it’s having its effect in depression?
James: We’re a little uncomfortable theorizing when there’s no evidence. It’s a nice theory. If I say to the people who say to me, “I’m back,” what do you think is the mechanism? They say, “I couldn’t care less.”
Jim: Well, they don’t care, but I do.
James: But we’re not neuroscientists. We don’t kill rats. We observe what actually happens in the world, and it’s how science actually runs. You start not from research. You start from something that gets your attention that you want to research. So when we say, here’s a couple hundred cases of people microdosing for depression successfully who have been unsuccessful with everything else, that gets the attention of the depression researchers. It also gets the attention of all the friends of these people. And therefore, what we’re looking at is what we call real-world evidence, and it should be the endpoint of science, which is it really doesn’t matter if it helps the amygdala or the hypothalamus if it doesn’t improve anybody’s life. If it improves somebody’s life, then it’s worth doing some other levels of exploration, which we’re not really equipped to do.
Jim: Gotcha. I will say from a philosophy of science perspective, I do like to combine both data and theory. Right? Data by itself is useful. Theory by itself is useful, but the two together are more powerful than either in terms—
James: Well, unfortunately, as I begin to read the literature, there’s a lot of theory that precedes anything.
Jim: Yep. That’s true. That could be dangerous.
James: And that’s to me, kind of an art form because a lot of the theories don’t work out. For instance, there is a theory that SSRIs meet. The theory is called the serotonin hypothesis. And notice the word hypothesis, which means they don’t know whether it’s true, but they have a multibillion-dollar business based on it. What we’ve found in looking at the latest round of serious serotonin researchers, and this is their conclusion, not ours, there is no evidence to verify and validate the hypothesis. So when people say to us, “Well, how does this affect serotonin?” The answer is, since it turns out that SSRIs do—but you’re going in the wrong direction. One of the researchers did it beautifully. He said, “If you take an aspirin for a headache, it does and it works. That does not mean that you had a deficit of aspirin.” So what we’re looking at, and we’re really limited only by results. We’re not limited by theory.
Jim: Gotcha. Now let’s go on to the next part of some of the results-based work that you and others—I presume you, because one of them is called the Fadiman protocol, but then you must have had something to do with that.
James: I can’t help it. I didn’t do it.
Jim: The idea of these different protocols, you know, the schedule on which people should think about taking these and what are the various theories about these protocols and such.
Jordan: I can help with that.
Jim: The idea of these different protocols—you know, the schedule on which people should think about taking these and what are the various theories about these protocols and such.
James: Again, while the word “theory” appeals to you clearly more than it appeals to me, the fact is that when I was first discovering microdosing, I was living in Santa Cruz, California, and I would say to people, “Would you be interested in trying?” And they’d say yes. It’s a nice thing about Santa Cruz and anything that goes into your mind and body.
A number of people were trying a microdose of ten micrograms of LSD, and they would tell me what happened. One of the things they said is, “Yeah, it feels good. I like this. This feels really nice.” They would then say the second day, it also feels just as nice. Now that’s information. That’s not true with high doses. Obviously, nobody feels the same way the next day or we’d really be in serious trouble.
So I say to people, “Well, don’t take it the next day because you don’t need to.” And then I would be asking them not to take it a third day because my goal was to get them down a little so I could have a new round of information when they took it. That’s how the Fadiman protocol developed—to find out how it worked. We now know that taking days off, which is one of the ways you distinguish it from pharmaceuticals, is because we’re not suppressing symptoms, we’re improving functioning. And what the body does really well is benefit from the improvement.
James: When you’re improving functioning on day one, the body is still making use of that and making new dendrite connections with the neurons and so forth. The various protocols all have that, and independently came to it, of taking time off. Unlike pharmaceuticals, with microdosing, it’s generally agreed upon that people take it for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then they take one to two weeks off. I never came up with that. But independently, from places in South America, places in Europe, and other places in the United States, people independently seem to think that was a good idea. So it has now become part of world microdosing.
Jordan: The reason that the protocol that was named after James is so interesting, and we recommend it, is it’s the most conservative of the protocols. You’ve heard of Paul Stamets. He has two different versions of protocols. On one of them, you take nineteen doses a month. On another one, you take twenty-three. On James’s protocol, you take eleven doses.
Someone proposed a thought experiment. He said, imagine someone takes a hundred micrograms, a standard recreational dose on day one of a month versus someone who takes ten micrograms ten times over the course of the month. Which person is going to remember and learn how to use more of what they’re experiencing? We’ve been saying that the standard psychedelic experience people have been having in the West since the forties is really an overdose of a kind. It’s really a different substance entirely. The person who is taking it slowly but surely, their body’s going to adapt to it, learn how to use it. James came up with the analogy of a potter’s wheel—you kick the potter’s wheel once, and then you kind of work on it for a while, then you kick it again. Microdosing in this conservative way of less is more and less is enough, maybe every other day, but with James’s protocol it’s every third day to start, gives people time to adapt to it and to really learn how to use what they’re experiencing.
Jim: You know, an analogy that just struck me when you were saying this is when you’re involved with the heavier end of weight lifting, which I did a while back, you definitely don’t want to do it every day. You want the body to essentially use what you did. In fact, we—
Jordan: Now know it’s micro tears that heal up and build new muscle mass. There’s an interesting analogy there, right? It’s exactly the analogy, which is if you’re doing something that leads to a change in the body’s capacity, you have to also give the body the opportunity to do it itself because that’s your goal. Your goal is not to need to do heavy weights every day for the rest of your life, but to have a better muscled body to make yourself healthier and be able to lift whatever you want.
Jim: Let’s briefly touch on two of the other leading protocols, the Stamets Protocol and the Microdosing Institute Protocol.
James: Microdosing Institute Protocol in Holland and basically across Europe, because you can sell to Europe, is every other day. That’s easier to remember. It’s simpler. And they work it pretty much from the people who come through who tell them how it works. As I say, the Fadiman protocol wasn’t originally designed clinically—that’s why I always kind of wince a little bit when I hear that name. But what it does suggest is what happened with that little group in Santa Cruz. They’re taking it one day on, two days off. And by the end of ten cycles, about a month, they’re saying, “I really can’t tell the difference much between any day.” What they’re saying is my system now is one notch up or two notches up, and that’s enough. Also, people started taking those weeks off because it made sense to them.
Jim: And then Stamets is four days on and three days off. Is that right?
James: He’s also got a five and two, but he’s now back to four and three.
Jordan: I asked him once about that, “Why do you have these two?” He says, “You can’t be too rigid.” And I thought, yeah. You’re not really playing hard science where you get credit when you’re rigid.
Jim: That would seem to be a different pattern. You know, four on, three off is quite different than one on, two off.
Jordan: Right. No, it is. And what we found is some people have said, “I’m on the Stamets protocol, but I get anxious or I can’t sleep well or something. What do you recommend?” And we recommend taking it less often. And I’m assuming that Paul gets letters that say, “I’m on the Fadiman protocol, and it doesn’t seem to be helping. What do you recommend?” He would say, “Oh, you might try the Stamets Protocol.” So what we’re also aware is that human beings have different needs and different levels at different times, and that one of the nice things about the couple of weeks off is people then, when they return, if they do, to microdosing, they often return to a lower dose. And that’s, again, only observation. I leave the theorizing to people who are really good at it, but we like to give them enough data so that they don’t waste their time.
James: It’s just really counterintuitive that less is more. For example, I like to go to the gym sometimes and work out with a microdose. If I take even a little bit too much—and I know exactly what my range is—the first fifteen minutes are great, and then I get distracted and tired and don’t want to keep doing it. So you really have to keep it in whatever your parameters are for you. But we’re also finding out because we have the book’s website, microdosingbook.com—one word—and we invite people to send us their stories and ask questions. We’ve, for example, got a guy who had terrible pain his whole life, has had forty-four major operations, and he’s actually taking a microdose every day. And for him now, pain is finally gone. So we never heard of anything like that, but people keep discovering their own ways. And we also find that different specific conditions, not surprisingly, take a different protocol. What we find in shingles, which is—if you know about them—their major symptom is pain. And it turns out that if you microdose, the pain almost always goes away, but not for three days, maybe for twelve hours. And so people who are microdosing for shingles will be taking it more often.
Jordan: So not surprising that it would be really kind of bizarre if the same dose was good for anyone with any condition. That’s really pushing it.
James: And people change their dose as, again, as they find it appropriate. But most people do seem to go down. They seem to ratchet down over time, which also points to how psychedelics are—you know, they’re not addictive in this kind of sense.
Jim: Yeah. Back in the good old days, our rule of thumb was it probably wouldn’t do much good for you more than once a week.
Jordan: That would be—yes. Well, there are still people who are following the good old days, but they don’t show up in the microdose world.
Jim: You know, we were definitely not doing microdoses in general. We’ve heard about all these good things. Like any intervention, there’s at least some level of risk and some conditions for which might be contraindications for trying microdose. What are your thoughts on that?
Jordan: Well, again, we’re dealing with people who report to us, and probably people—the most common negative effect is people take it and they don’t feel much, and they stop. And early on, I had this wonderful kind of nasty letter from someone that said, “Well, I’ve been microdosing. It isn’t worth a goddamn. And I’m an artist.” And I thought, well, okay. And I wrote back and said, “Well, then stop.” He wrote back a few days later and said, “You know, I do notice that the days I’ve been using it, I get twice as much done,” and there was no more correspondence. That’s interesting and curious. And what he was looking for was it didn’t get him high. He wasn’t paying attention to what it was benefiting. Now these days, people know enough to know that if they’re feeling high, that’s by definition an overdose.
James: So there are some people who have, especially with mushrooms, digestive symptoms, and there’s ways of handling that. Even on a microdose level, you can soak it in lemon juice for twenty-five minutes, which is called lemon teching, and that seems to take away all of that. Occasionally, but not very often, people might have problems going to sleep, especially if they take it too late in the day, but now we’re seeing less of that. And if anything, it’s helping people sleep. And then you have sort of a whole bunch of possible criticisms that people are afraid of, but we don’t have any real evidence of. And this includes things for which people are excluded from even being in experiments and studies and, you know, things like schizophrenia and things like bipolar. Jim has a good story about the bipolar. Right. I was wondering, because I read the literature, and a lot of—
James: So there are some people who have, especially with mushrooms, digestive symptoms, and there are ways of handling that. Even on a microdose level, you can soak it in lemon juice for twenty-five minutes, which is called lemon teching, and that seems to take away all of that. Occasionally, but not very often, people might have problems going to sleep, especially if they take it too late in the day, but now we’re seeing less of that. And if anything, it’s helping people sleep. And then you have sort of a whole bunch of possible criticisms that people are afraid of, but we don’t have any real evidence of. And this includes things for which people are excluded from even being in experiments and studies—things like schizophrenia and bipolar. Jim has a good story about bipolar.
I was wondering, because I read the literature, and a lot of it is written by my friends, that all the studies say you can’t get into our study if you’re bipolar. And I thought, okay, why that? Well, because you might go crazy, which, since you’re bipolar, that’s an interesting comment. So I actually wrote and said, is there any evidence since you don’t take people into your studies that it’s bad for them? And I would get their papers back sometimes underlined, which said “we don’t take them, and we’re sure if we did take them, it wouldn’t be good.” And I thought, well, that’s called theory.
So I went to the next thing we can now do in the culture—I went to Facebook and found a nice website for manic depressive, which is the old name for it. And I said to the moderator, can I ask your online group if they have any psychedelic experience and any advice? Oh yes, they had experience and they had advice, and the advice was very sensible. The advice was don’t do psychedelics during your manic phase. You are high enough, and you’re just trying to hold on to reality. And similarly, they said it’s very nice during your depressive phase because you’ll be less depressed.
This is how kind of reality testing is an alternative to either theory or clinical work. The problem with clinical work is, correctly, you want only like twelve people. You’re going to be working with them for six months. It’s expensive. You want it to prove your hypothesis. So you’re careful with who you have. And also you don’t want anyone in your study who six or eight months later has a mental breakdown, and you’re totally sure you’re going to get blamed. So you have as clean a group as possible, and one of the terrible things is there’s an awful lot of psychedelic research, also with microdosing, where they say, “Well, we didn’t see any effects.” Well, who did you use? “We used healthy young males with no pathology.”
So it’s almost like going to the gym and saying to the most buff people there, “I want to give you a supplement and see how it works.” When you are limited to only what people actually do, you get a different group, but you also get groups who can’t possibly be in a clinical study. And we have one other group—it’s curious because I was looking at it and thought, well, how does this affect women who are pregnant? I thought somebody’s going to have to look at this. We’ve had forty million Americans who’ve taken LSD since it became illegal. Some of them got pregnant, and some of them were using psychedelics. So I went to the literature, and there was nothing. There were no studies, no double-blind studies, no surveys. And I thought, what’s going on? Then we were very blessed with someone I worked with who said, “You know, I’m a doula, and more and more of my clients who are pregnant are using microdoses.” So we worked out a little research protocol, a little questionnaire, and since Jordan then worked with the major researchers, take it from there.
James: That’s one of the exciting parts of the book. It’s called the Mothers of the Mushroom Survey, and her name is Michela de la Maiko, and there were other people who helped her. Women who are pregnant, women who are breastfeeding, women who had young children. And if you read those ten pages in the book, the power of story compared to power of just numbers and studies comes across really clearly. Yes, some of these women had a little anxiety about it being illegal, some had a couple of digestive or sleep issues, but overall, they were overwhelmingly positive about the impact this had on their experiences of being pregnant, on breastfeeding, on coming back after postpartum depression.
And of course, this has also been something in the indigenous cultures. Let’s keep in mind that Jim really was a developer of modern microdosing, but people have been using small amounts of substances like peyote and others for thousands of years. In some of the traditions, we know that it’s not unusual for them to give the mother a little tiny sip or even the kids. So this abject fear we have of exposing pregnant women or children is really preventing the research from going forward.
There’s another story in the book where a dad with an autistic child asked Jim, “What do you think about giving my young child this? He’s got the really bad kind of autism. He’s hitting his head against things, and he has no language and no social skills.” And Jim said, “Of course, I can’t tell you to do that.” Well, dad went ahead anyway, and the kid got much better. Now we know, I think he’s about nine, that once every thirty days or so, this dad gives this kid a microdose and it resets his social skills and his language skills, and he’s a lot happier.
You have to think about that in the context of the fact that the United States government says that it’s perfectly fine to give children Ritalin and stimulants as long as they’re three. You can give them these pharmaceuticals. So there are tens of thousands of small children in this country on these stimulants. And that brings us back to one of the things about microdosing that’s most prominent—there’s a very large reward to risk ratio. If it’s not going to work, it’s not going to terribly mess somebody up, but often it does work. So there’s such a huge potential reward in so many situations, and that’s, again, we’re basing this on the reports we’ve got.
Jordan: And in terms of things that can go wrong, and anything can, we got early on a letter that said, “I’ve been microdosing, and then I have a list of really awful things like heavy headaches and nausea and bad sleep,” and I wrote back or emailed and said, “I would stop.” And he emailed back, I don’t know where he is or who he was, and he says, “You can’t make me.”
Jim: I thought about it. Okay.
Jordan: Very strange situation. I said, “No, I can’t make you, but as somebody who’s a researcher in this area, that’s my advice.” Three or four days later, I get a note that says, “I cut my dose in half and all the symptoms went away.” And what we did with that is we realized that would be a good piece of advice for people who are having trouble. So now our general advice is, if it feels like it isn’t working or it’s too much, first goal, cut it in half. If you’re still having trouble, cut it in half again. If it’s still having trouble, either go way, way down or stop.
And it turns out, again, I’m looking at one of my resources, Reddit has about 290,000 people on its microdose subreddit. So we’re talking about a lot of people who help each other. And someone wrote and said, “I don’t know if anybody on this list knows anything, but I find that if I take the lowest that the Fadiman people suggest, a tenth of a gram, it’s way too much. I’m taking a hundredth of a gram, and I’m seeming to get the same effects that you guys talk about.” What happened was about twenty people said, so we now know that there’s a whole group of people who are hypersensitives who need a much lower dose so that the doses that we publish are in general for most people.
We also know there’s a group that says, “Well, I don’t get any effects at ten micrograms. I don’t get any effects till about fifty micrograms.” So again, we started to look at who are they? Well, they’re people who almost always are what we call high-functioning autism, and their particular brain structure is somehow different enough so that they need a much larger dose. And again, they report what is really quite beautiful because high-functioning autism tends to have terrible social relationships because they really cannot see all of the subtle cues that we use to tell each other what is behind our words. It’s like those movies where everybody’s in black and white, and then there’s something in the plot and somebody suddenly is in color, and then other people are in color. What they report is they are able to see what everybody else sees and that their life changes not because they’re smarter—they’re already very smart—but because they’re now able to function with the same normal perceptions that we have without the psychedelic. So we’re learning a great deal that is different. As you notice, none of this appears in any of the high-dose literature because they can’t do that kind of study. It’s just not possible.
Jim: I don’t know if it’s an epidemic of autism or at least a much higher rate of diagnosis. What’s it now? Up to three percent, something like that? I think it was one in five thousand when I was a kid, something like that. This is a major and big deal if true. Right? Are there large-scale trials going on?
Jim: I don’t know if it’s an epidemic of autism or at least a much higher rate of diagnosis. What’s it now? Up to three percent, something like that? I think it was one in five thousand when I was a kid, something like that. This is a major and big deal if true. Right? Are there large-scale trials going on?
Jordan: You know, one of the things that people do is get medicated. Curiously enough, the giant pharmaceutical companies are not eager to show that there’s a way to not use their products. Very curious there. But we are getting—see, autism is very interesting. There was this wonderful guy who wanted to be a psychedelic therapist, and I went back and forth with him until I found out that he knew absolutely everything in the literature. And then I said, “Oh, wait a moment. Are you high-functioning autism?” And he did a beautiful book called “Autism on Acid,” which is the most beautiful description of what it’s like to be high-functioning autistic and not understand what people are saying or meaning. He cleaned up his life. He started to—he now has a website. He has groups, but he also ended up at Queen’s College in London setting up research projects with their smart PhDs, MDs, etc., on studying the effects of psychedelics on autism. So yes, we are getting those studies, and we will be very surprised if they’re different than all the reports we already have.
Jim: Yeah. That’d be a big deal if it turned out to be true.
Jordan: Yeah. It’s a very big deal.
Jim: Yeah. And, you know, it’s now a major factor in American life, not on the good side of things necessarily. Well, let’s dig in a little bit into some of these other areas of enhancement. You give quite the almost nineteenth-century snake oil list of things that—
James: Absolutely.
Jim: That are wonderful about this. Now I’m just going to read the list off, then you guys pick and choose about the ones you’d like to talk about because we probably don’t have time to talk about them all. I got focus, food choices, grades and academic, happiness, language learning—I’m good at learning anything except language. My brain just refuses to learn foreign languages—longevity, math and coding, music, sexual enhancement, that’s always a good seller, sleep quality, social microdosing, sports and athletics, vision improvement, and work quality improvement. Don’t do the work quality improvement. I find that to be a boring kind of thing. But, you know, pick a few of those other ones to talk about.
Jordan: Well, language learning is kind of fun because some people are naturally better at it. The report that I recall most vividly is a woman who had married—I think she’s English—married a Norwegian, small town, and she’s trying to learn Norwegian, and it isn’t easy. And then she starts microdosing, and she says it’s much easier. Not a great, lengthy description, but if you’re learning a language, you can tell when it’s easier. That’s general across the board in academics because the same skills are often for, you know, across academics. Learning history and learning physics is not as different as they would make you think if you’re looking at brain function.
The longevity, I think we need to make a little correction here. Right now through the psychedelic information world, there’s a hot topic which is, mice given psilocybin once a month lived longer than mice who didn’t get it. At the end of the experiment, eighty percent of the psychedelic mice were alive. At the end of the study—these were old mice—fifty percent of the nonpsychedelic mice. We all got very excited because it suggested that one of the side effects of psychedelics is living longer, which we think would be popular. And then somebody said, “Let me read the paper a little more carefully.” Oh, the mice were given a dose once a month, which in human terms would be forty times the amount of a high dose. And with that super dose, they lived on. Now what kind of visionary experiences they had and whether they looked forward to their monthly high, we don’t know, but we doubt that this will be replicated in humans. We do know that it’s likely that people who use psychedelics, especially microdosing, will live longer because they’re functioning better, they’re healthier, just as people who are depressed have a lower lifespan possibility than people who are not.
James: Let’s go to athletics. We did an interview with Ben Greenfield, who is a well-known health guy and supplement guy and journalist. And he let us know, and we’ve had this confirmed by other people, that for long-distance runners, super marathon times three kind of people, the word is out and many of them have figured this out. And psychedelics reduce pain and increase energy, and they’re just doing better with that. We’ve also heard from martial artists that they’re able just to sort of see and gestalt what’s about to happen next.
Jordan: My favorite is the guy who was giving a newspaper article—how I found him—and he said, basically, before microdosing, I got silvers in contests. Now I get golds. And what’s nice is everyone in the martial arts world just knew what he was talking about, that this was a measurement which is very hard to replicate in a laboratory, but very easy to replicate on the mat.
Jordan: The story—my favorite is the guy who was giving a newspaper article. How I found him, and he said, basically, “Before microdosing, I got silvers in contests. Now I get golds.” And what’s nice is everyone in the martial arts world just knew what he was talking about. That was a measurement which is very hard to replicate in a laboratory but very easy to replicate on the mat.
James: There is one bit of research that Paul Stamets did in the study involving tapping—how many times you can tap on something in a certain amount of time. And sure enough, the folks who did the Stamets protocol and the Stamets stack, which involves adding in a couple of other things like niacin, they were better. They could measurably, objectively do more tapping when they were taking his stuff.
Jordan: There’s a lot of different curious little measures out there, but the measure that we’re kind of fixated on is people reporting, “I took it for this, and it helped.” Now let me give you one that isn’t in the book so that not all of your listeners will have to buy the book. This came in from our microdosingbook.com, and it’s someone who has Tourette’s syndrome. And Tourette’s syndrome, which is fairly dreadful, has little tics that happen and also verbal tics that happen, meaning you say something you didn’t intend, often swear words, and there’s no treatment. There are treatments because he talked about them—none of them had any effect. This is from age eight. And he was told that it would probably go away in his twenties, and it didn’t.
So he’s now in his thirties, and it’s maybe thirty times an hour. And it goes away for the first time since age eight. He can look forward to hours of not having these symptoms. And it’s a little more complicated because he told us, you know, this is how research actually works in the real world. He did it every day. Now notice that. And then he felt that it needed to be done even a little more often than every day, and he was getting so he only had two hours between doses, and then it stopped working. There’s a technical term for that—it’s called tolerance.
So he stopped, and he wrote us in this stopped period. And he said, “Now that I’ve read your book, I can see that I was probably overdosing. I will start again.” And I wrote back and said, you know, let us know. And he wrote recently and said, “It’s working, and I’m adjusting the dose, but I’m taking originally, I took the Fadiman protocol.” And I wrote them back as probably because he said by the third day, it wasn’t working as well, so I said go every other day, because we have variability.
But notice we have a condition for which there is no treatment that has been helped entirely by microdosing. Now I know some of my research friends will say, “Well, we have to deal with twelve people and so forth.” I said, fine. I hope you’re now interested. Because if it helped one person, they genetically look a lot like everyone else. And if you go to the causes of Tourette’s, this is a little clue, it’s a phrase I read a lot of places: “The causes are environmental and genetic.” Translation: we—
James: —have the faintest idea what causes it.
Jim: I was gonna say, find viral or genetic? Yes. One or the other or both probably. Right?
Jordan: I mean, I’ve seen it enough places where I know it’s code for “we don’t have any idea,” but you’re not allowed to put that in a journal.
Jim: Yeah. Exactly.
Jordan: Well, that’s what happens with that is anyone who is interested in researching Tourette’s who reads that is going to pay attention. And we may be able to make a difference in a condition for which there is no treatment.
James: And there’s other treatments like that too. Post-menstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, people are having a lot of success, there’s pretty much nothing else that treats it. Headaches, both migraine and cluster headaches, sometimes it has to be more than a microdose, but there’s this great organization, Clusterbusters. And when they started out, even the people on the board were taking five grams because that was the only way to deal with these cluster headaches, which are also called suicide headaches. But now when you see their recommendations, they start with 0.25 grams of psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Now start with the micros and some of them that does it. And so, you know, it keeps evolving where the kind of the sweet spot is to the most benefit.
Jordan: And it’s not unusual with anything that benefits you. As we learn more about it, the dose goes down. If you look at the history of lots of pharmaceuticals, say birth control pills, they originally were at a much higher dose than they are today because we’ve learned. So this is—and we didn’t necessarily learn through research, we learned through women, you know, dropping their dose because they were having side effects. So we’re part of what we consider traditional science, which is you start with experiences that are surprising or unusual or unexpected, and you go from there. And the reason that, quote, “double blind, etcetera,” is called the gold standard is it’s very good for determining the difference, say, between two antidepressants. To say, is there, here’s a new antidepressant that’ll cost five times as much. Is it better than the old kind? And so you can do a double-blind experiment very easily and determine that. What we noticed is nobody does that in the pharmaceutical world. They all do a double blind, not using a competitor, but using a placebo. Now, why would you do that from a marketing standpoint? Because the chances of yours being better than placebo are much higher than you’re being better than the competition. So there is a certain amount of capitalism in the research world that is—that is, I haven’t seen anyone discuss it.
Jim: We’ll get to the citizen science and alternative methods of science a little bit later, but there’s one that I’m particularly interested in because one of my big concerns about our society are these reports you hear about kids today not socializing much face to face. I call it a conviviality recession. And you guys talk a bit about social microdosing, and anything that would help turn around the conviviality recession, I think, is important.
James: I’ve been back and forth with a reporter in Denver, and she sends me articles now and then, and she sent one about the use of microdosing in social settings. We really don’t suggest that because we think people should be taking it periodically for either general health or conditions, but this was at parties. As you go to a party, what you see as you enter on the little table is a bunch of chocolates. And what you’re told is these are microdosed chocolates, and we’re not serving any liquor. What is reported is people feel a lot better, certainly at the end of the evening and certainly the morning after, and they feel they have had the same kind of social opening that you get from when you take the right amount of alcohol, which isn’t that much.
The other place we’re seeing it, which makes total sense, is in a social situation where very often somebody gets too drunk—it’s called weddings. You do whole movies about it. But it turns out that we now have, and this is a report from Los Angeles some years ago, chocolates at the wedding. No alcohol. The thing that kind of blew me away, because who knows whether this is a rare and funny event, but the end of the article said one of the people they interviewed who makes chocolates sells 5,000 chocolates a month for weddings. That was a couple of years ago. So we’re seeing people wanting to improve their social openness, their acuity, literally their vision improves and so forth. They’re more aware of interrelationships, and here we have this new use. Now we won’t talk about sex, but we will talk about relationships, and relationships would improve if people were more aware of each other. Microdosing seems to help.
Jordan: Early on, people wrote in and said, when word gets out about what this does for your libido and your sex life, you guys are gonna have a huge bestseller. And so then the question comes back, is it because people are more energized or there’s something about the mechanics of blood flow? Or is it really just that they’re more tuned into their partners and they’re more present and they’re liking themselves better and that’s what leads to more conviviality?
Jim: And as you say, if that works, is there much of that in your database of people reporting sex enhancements, libido enhancements, that kind of stuff?
James: What they’re reporting is relationship enhancements, and if they’re in a sexual relationship, as Jordan said, it’s very hard to distinguish if you’re getting better sex. Are you having basically more energy? Are you hotter? Are you more attuned to your partner? And probably both. Nobody really cares in the relationship which it is, but that’s what we get. That’s the report. And I would say being hyper nonscientific that it’s a consensus that if your microdosing is working for you, your sex life is better, just like your physical workouts are better. People just kind of get that and agree to it.
Jim: A general upregulation of all kinds of good things.
James: Exactly. Exactly.
Jim: Now let’s go to the other side, fixing broken stuff. One that’s of interest to me because a few of my friends are afflicted with this: Long COVID, a very mysterious and debilitating condition for many people.
James: Are you having basically more energy? Are you hotter? Are you more attuned to your partner? And probably both. Nobody really cares in the relationship which it is, but that’s what we get. That’s the report. And I would say, being hyper nonscientific, that it’s a consensus that if your microdosing is working for you, your sex life is better, just like your physical workouts are better. People just kind of get that and agree to it.
Jim: A general upregulation of all kinds of good things.
Jordan: Exactly. Exactly.
Jim: Now let’s go to the other side, fixing broken stuff. One that’s of interest to me because a few of my friends are afflicted with this: Long COVID, a very mysterious and debilitating condition for many people.
Jordan: Long COVID is especially interesting because there are several conditions that the way Western medicine is designed, it’s extremely poor at helping. The problem with Long COVID is the COVID bacteria can appear anywhere in the body in any system and have any kind of symptom. That really makes Western medicine, which is symptom specific, hard. And according to the federal government, they see that maybe they have a twenty percent success rate with whatever else they’re doing for Long COVID. And we’re talking now several million people in the United States.
Our data is that a number of people have written in and said, “tried everything, and I was still physically better, but I had brain fog, and I didn’t sleep well, and my mind wasn’t very good, and microdosing turned it around.” So we have a bunch of those. We have a couple of serious Long COVID cases. This is the one that we have the most data on: This was a young man who got COVID before the vaccine and before hospitals and medical people knew what was going on. He was bounced from hospital to hospital as he got worse, and he actually suffered some physical damage, which he still has, but he ended up basically a recluse in his room for about three years. As he says, his mother was the only person he talked to.
He dropped out of high school where he’d been doing fine, and he started microdosing, and he gradually became social. He went downstairs, then he came to dinner with family, then he went to family holidays, and then he went to events, and then he went back to school and was doing okay. He kept microdosing, and he started to recover what he called his normal mind. At one point, he’s coming back from a physical checkup, and he says, “Mom, I can do multiplication again,” which it used to be you could say to him, “Hey, what’s 15 times 82?” And he would give you the answer. It just was a capacity, and it came back. He is now taking AP classes, and he went back to physical activities. He now hangs out with his friends and they drove to Florida—normal teenage behavior.
That’s the one we’re watching most closely because he was totally debilitated physically and mentally. That’s what we’re looking at, and again, we’re particularly interested in situations in which conventional Western medicine doesn’t work. Now I say Western because we don’t have enough information on Ayurvedic and other systems, but those systems are more whole-body systems, and probably we’re going to see some help there as well. The Long COVID is not, as the government would say, almost uncurable. From our point of view, it looks like it’s exactly the kind of situation where what you want is to improve the functioning of the whole body, and where the disequilibriums are, the body pays more attention.
Jim: Alright. Now there’s another one on your list, which also is in this “man, does it mess up a bunch of people and the regular docs don’t seem to be able to do a whole bunch about it.” It’s Lyme disease. At first, I thought it a peculiar item on your list, being bit by a tick. But, yeah, talk to that one a little bit.
Jim: Alright. Now there’s another one on your list, which also messes up a bunch of people and the regular docs don’t seem to be able to do a whole bunch about it—Lyme disease. At first, I thought it was a peculiar item on your list, being bit by a tick. But yeah, talk to that one a little bit.
James: Same actually, it’s the same as long COVID, which is the problem with long Lyme is that it can affect any part of the body. If you catch Lyme early, massive antibiotics seem to help. If you don’t, there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done.
I started corresponding with a young woman who was a college graduate, smart, athletic, and on a vacation, she got Lyme. She went through not only conventional medications, she went to what are called Lyme doctors, which are people who specialize in Lyme, and got some help, but not for long. When she reached out to me, she was in bed most of the time because of pain. She started microdosing, and it wasn’t like a couple of weeks, but it took some time, and she hurt less and less and got out of bed and did more and started to think more clearly. At the moment, she has a boyfriend, has a job, works with other Lyme patients. Actually, I just heard from her recently because she attended a national psychedelic conference and sent me some pictures. She’s basically working on a book to help Lyme patients.
Now that’s terrific, but getting medical people to say, “Well, what do we know about this case?” Well, we have one other case which appeared in a medical journal, and it was somebody who does medicine, and he got a client. Same portrait. Had Lyme twenty-five years ago, and he would have moments, maybe even a year in which he had no major symptoms, and he’d collapse again, but nothing had really helped. This physician wasn’t able to help him either but tracked him, and he started microdosing, and the same as with this woman—basically, no symptoms, as of a couple of years. So we’re looking now at why Lyme and why long COVID? Same problem, which is, Western medicine is really good if it’s focused enough. If you have a liver problem, they go for your liver. Microdosing goes for healing. You’re raising your capacity for self-healing, which we know is far better than anything medicine can come up with.
Jordan: And all of this brings us back to the high reward-risk ratio. You could say that without real large numbers and double-blind studies that we’re providing people with false hope, or we can say for people who don’t have any hope, these are real healings that have happened with some of these people. We know this is possible and has actually happened with some people, and there’s very little chance it’s gonna hurt you in any bad way, but there is some real chance it’s gonna change your life and heal you. So maybe it’s worth taking a shot.
Jim: Yeah. Low risk, high return. Why not? Right?
Jordan: That’s the investing philosophy that Warren Buffett suggests.
Jim: Actually, yeah, he likes—he doesn’t like the high-risk ones, though, you know?
Jordan: No. He says, I’ll take something that’s really successful, and I think we’ll stay that way.
Jim: Exactly. Exactly.
James: Now let me go back a step because you were asking about negatives, and we didn’t mention one that actually does appear. It’s called tinnitus, which is ringing in the ears or sound in the ears. What we found is if you have tinnitus and you microdose, chances are you will have more tinnitus while microdosing, and it will go away. Some of the reports are “my tinnitus was helped enormously,” but most of them were it wasn’t. And we have several people who had tinnitus for the first time while microdosing, and it went away when they stopped microdosing. But it’s a real condition, and we do warn people.
Jordan: And the other one like that is red-green color blindness. Some people, it’s accentuated when they’re microdosing, although there are also some cases where it seems to improve, so it can impact that.
James: What they get with red-green color blindness is what’s called a tracer. I’m looking at a light here, and if I move my eyes away, I don’t see any of the light. A tracer would be as if the light follows.
Jim: We used to call that trails back in the psychedelic days. Exactly. Contrail. Trail. Oh, man. Check out the trails. I can remember seeing them.
James: Well, that’s microdose, we all know about it. In an earlier incarnation, there was a warning on my website: if you have red-green blindness, we don’t recommend it. So I got a couple of letters that said, “Yeah, I have red-green blindness, and yeah, it causes these after-images with light, but the advantages are worth it.” So it’s not a major issue, but it does occur pretty regularly for red-green blindness.
Jim: Let’s now switch to our last topic, which we’ve run through multiple times here in our conversation, which is the kind of science that you’re doing, right, which is a little different than, you know, n equals fifty type science, double blind. Talk to us about methodologically, how you’re approaching this.
Jordan: Well, that’s iDose, we all know about it. In an earlier incarnation, there was a warning on my website: if you have red-green blindness, we don’t recommend it. I got a couple of letters that said, “Yeah, I have red-green blindness, and yes, it causes these after-images with light, but the advantages are worth it.” So it’s not a major issue, but it does occur pretty regularly for red-green blindness.
Jim: Let’s now switch to our last topic, which we’ve run through multiple times in our conversation, which is the kind of science that you’re doing, right, which is a little different than, you know, n equals 50 type science, double blind. Talk to us about methodologically how you’re approaching this.
James: Well, methodologically, we’re limited by what people tell us. We’re not limited by anything else. We have thousands of reports. Now and then, as we did in looking at the very low amount that some people took, we went to a big database on Reddit and asked a couple hundred thousand people if they had any information. They’re very glad to share it, and they’re all anonymous.
The science that we’ve started with is the same way science in the West started, with first-person accounts of real-world evidence. If you look at the early 1663, the beginning of the Royal Academy of Science, their rule of thumb was “question authority.” In their case, they were saying if the church says it, that doesn’t mean it’s true—it just means the church says it. So you have to check it yourself.
They had two forms of measuring. One was easy physical measuring, like how tall are people, how heavy is a one-inch sphere of gold versus a one-inch sphere of copper—things that could be measured. The other, they called subjective. What they said is with subjective, you describe as well as you can, and then other people also describe as well as they can, and you reach a consensus of what generally is so.
Here’s one that may surprise you: What’s the most cited mental illness in the world? Depression. How is depression measured in twenty-first century science? Asking people if they’re depressed. Period. There are seven major scales, and some of them have different numbers of items. What are the items in common? Almost none. The only one that appeared on all seven best-known scales was “are you sad?”
We are doing conventional science probably less expensively and with a wider group. The problem with conventional science is it’s gotten kind of rigid, kind of like the church. One of the people I like a lot was willing to be quoted saying, “Don’t believe anything until there’s a double-blind study.” I thought that sounds a lot like people who say, “Well, that’s an interesting story, but where is it in the Bible?”
There are sciences that can manipulate things, such as pharmaceuticals. There are other whole sciences where one case is all you need. Take astronomy and botany—those are single-case changes. They say, “Well, we found we have a theory that black holes are either very little or very big. Well, here’s a medium-sized black hole.” And astronomers say, “That’s terrific.” Why is that terrific? You just spent a lot of time making a theory. They say, “Yeah, we like making theories, but we like it when the facts change and we get to do new theories.”
So there’s a lot of different sciences out there, and we’re doing what I’ve called sometimes “search,” which is discovery. Research is when you already know enough to put twelve people in a room and lock the doors and do things to them. That’s another kind of science—it’s called research very accurately. But research only comes after search.
Jim: Yeah. That’s a very nice distinction. I like that a lot, actually. One I haven’t heard before, surprisingly.
James: So, Jim mentioned the Royal Academy, and there’s a guy named Mike Jay who’s a historian. He wrote a book about cyclonauts. He described when they were dealing with nitrous oxide and how they would have groups of people in these parties and parlors, and they would come together and talk and figure out what it did and what its capabilities were. My old friend Ken Wilber would describe that as intersubjective hermeneutical verification, or basically you could say having a community of the qualified decide what it is and what’s going on with that.
That’s opposed to the double-blind criterion, which came into existence after the thalidomide disaster and was legislated in as the gold standard. But psychedelics, we have known for a very long time, are particularly not good subjects for anything that’s double-blind. It’s like if you’re a Star Trek fan, just like the Kobayashi Maru scenario where Kirk reprogrammed the computer to win because you can’t win. If it’s insisting that there has to be a full-on double-blind the way they normally do it, and we know that psychedelics are notoriously difficult to blind, even at the microdose level, then it’s sort of a non-winnable, non-solvable criterion that we’re up against.
Jordan: So, fundamentally, if you’re using the wrong tool, no matter how high the quality of your hammer, it doesn’t screw screws into wood well. And if your only criteria is a hammer, then you’re just limiting your capacity to discover and understand things.
Jordan: So, fundamentally, if you’re using the wrong tool, you know, no matter how high the quality of your hammer, it doesn’t screw screws into wood well. And if your only criteria is a hammer, then you’re just limiting your capacity to discover and understand things.
James: And also with psychedelics, finding out these kind of real-world evidence, the citizen science reports that we get, these are coming from the context of people’s actual lives. That’s very different than if you try to force people into an experimental protocol where they have to do things in a certain way. And so, you know, the reports that we’re coming from are real and arise on themselves. And, you know, again, you just have to read the Mothers of the Mushroom survey reports, and you get a completely different feeling about whether psychedelics might be appropriate for pregnant women.
Jim: Have you guys coded up your reports? Have you done any kind of attempt to systematize?
Jordan: See, the problem with statistics—and here’s one of the things that drives me nuts. I’m reading a research report that says we took forty-two people, and we did such and such, and then we measured such and such. And then we didn’t use the outlier. We didn’t use the extremes on either end. And I’m thinking, wait a moment. Whatever you were doing, the extremes had something else going on that probably was more interesting than what you were going for, which is what’s in the center.
That’s one of the standard ways in which people do statistics—you get rid of things that don’t make it look so good. We don’t call that science in our world. Because we think science is trying to figure out how or why or can it help such and such for some reason.
You know, we are all old enough to remember before there was a biome, before you looked inside someone and saw it wasn’t just acid, it was thousands of species of bacteria and viruses working out their destiny in the box that happened to be you. It shifted, it’s continuing to shift medicine. It hasn’t quite shifted psychiatry yet, but we do know that mental conditions are deeply affected by the biome.
But early on, I remember reading, “Well, it’s going to be really hard to understand the biome because it’s too complicated.” You know, there’s something in physics called the three-body problem, which is way harder than the two-body problem. And here we have the ten-thousand-body problem. So what began to happen, of course, is you ended up having to subsist off of results rather than manipulation. So we’re simply the old-fashioned scientists that say, let’s see what we can find out. And we have an agenda. Our agenda is not to come up with something commercial, but just to see if it helps or it doesn’t.
Jim: Cool. I would suggest that there might be some interesting things you could do with LLMs in your reports. I’m not sure what, but I do a fair bit with processing data with LLMs and sometimes it surprises the hell out of you how good it is. Sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s usually pretty easy to do. So it’s like low risk potential high return, might be worth a try.
Jordan: We will look into this with you offline.
Jim: Yeah, let’s chat because, I mean, seriously, I design these kinds of experiments a lot. I would say half the time they work, half the time they don’t, but you get them done in a day. Right? So it’s amazing.
Jordan: See, the nice thing is if you know when it doesn’t work, that is very important data. When you don’t know anything, then whatever you find counts. Or it could be completely misleading. For instance, we’re looking at a case of multiple sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis only gets worse. It turns out that the person that we’ve brought most data on has been microdosing for about three and a half years. First year, no more screaming headaches that she’s had since she was a child. She’s had MS for, like, twenty years. She’s about in her forties.
Second year, she said the main shift has been in releasing trauma. She says you can’t have multiple sclerosis without accumulating trauma. Third year, she said, “I’m walking more steps.” Now remember, this is incredible in multiple sclerosis. You only go down. That means that the myelin sheath, which is what the problem is in multiple sclerosis, for some reason is improving in the third year of microdosing.
Nobody’s going to do a study where you are measuring for three years in the pharmaceutical world. There’s lots of long-term studies. You know, we know how many steps you walk, you’ll live longer, but that’s a study of, like, 150,000 people over fifteen years. So we are getting new information about conditions that we thought nobody would ever—you know, nobody’s going to—I can’t go to people without that story and say, “Have you thought of using microdosing for multiple sclerosis?” Because the answer would be that makes no sense at all. And the answer is, well, it might, but it’s very different. You know, it isn’t like three weeks in the lab.
So there’s a lot of issues that we’re still finding information in excites real scientists. And more and more the nice thing, of course, is more and more scientists are now saying, “The reason I’m in this field is I started taking drugs in high school. And then I went to medical school, and I didn’t say anything.” And I just talked to someone wonderful the other day who got his degree in food science, and he said the project that I found that I could work with was the effect of mushrooms on such and such. So he’s become an expert on mushrooms, but his school doesn’t quite know that. We are getting people who share our interests and who are in appropriate places in the culture.
Jim: So let’s actually make that final turn here. One of the cool things about this book is that at the end, each of you gave your own personal reflections on all this. So let’s exit that way. Don’t regurgitate what you said in the book. But maybe, Jordan, why don’t you start first with your personal reflections about this whole experience in this domain? Then we’ll have James wrap it up, and then I’ll read the title again and tell everybody to go out and buy a copy.
James: Yeah. I think microdosing is going to continue to spread by word-of-mouth because it’s so effective for so many people in so many different ways. There’s a lot of forces pressing against it. Conventional scientists say you’re not meeting our criteria. People in the microdosing leadership say, well, we’re not sure if it’s all placebo yet, and the only way to work with certain conditions is high doses with therapists. And we know that’s not true, but they’re kind of repeating things that are based on their position.
Nonetheless, microdosing continues to spread. Like even I have a neighbor who had a kid who’s now about my daughter’s age, and she used to have some bad problems. And she told me, “Oh, I read your book, and by the way, I’ve been microdosing for a few years.” She used to have bad problems and was suicidal and whatnot, and now she’s totally healthy and healed. I think there are a lot of stories like this, and word is going to keep getting out.
And in the enhanced performance part from art and creativity and crocheting and coding and martial arts and all these things, I do believe that at some point, nearly every discipline you can think of or name will have people at the cutting edge who are experimenting with microdosing, again, because of the huge reward to risk ratio. So I think that we’re kind of in the right place, but there are forces pushing back. Our book in England was pulled by the British publisher because they thought they might have legal liability, so you can’t even buy the book yet in England. But we’re going to have a German translation probably, and a Spanish translation is in the works, and it keeps spreading. So I think we’re in the right place at the right time, but it’s going to take a while. And keep in mind, this is only fifteen years since James started focusing on this after over forty years in psychedelic research where he only was interested in high doses. So we’re still in the very beginning, really.
Jordan: I’ve been reflecting when I say one of the advantages of microdosing is it’s so inexpensive. And I’ve now been looking at what’s happened in high doses, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in companies, none of which have shown anything like a profit. Microdosing has been ignored probably because what I call the capitalist vultures have not discovered it. And that may be slowing it down, that it is readily available inexpensively and benefits a wide number of people. That’s all positive. But in the system of how do you argue with the government? How do you make patents? How do you basically profit? Psychedelics on the whole have not been profitable, but there’s a huge announcement that they should be. Because if you can help depression with a high dose and charge $250 to $500 for it, there’s more likely that you will want to do that rather than you can do it with a low dose, and it’ll cost about $8.
James: And the good news is there are some studies going on, and there’s one in Canada and one in Australia or maybe it’s New Zealand, where it’s sort of at-home depression for microdosing. And so some of the healthcare systems are aware that this could prove a huge leverage turning point of, maybe we could handle twenty percent of treatment-resistant depression in this very inexpensive, very safe way that doesn’t have to involve therapists and cost thousands of dollars for a course of treatment. If this is really true, we believe it is, this should eventually be a game changer.
Jordan: And it will be a game changer first in countries that have government healthcare. Would you rather spend $20,000 on depression or $200? It’s worth trying $200 if you’re the government. If you’re the manufacturer, you want the 20,000. So there’s some curious things there that are not easily to predict.
Jim: Alright, guys. Well, I want to really thank you for a wide-ranging conversation, and the title of the book is “Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance” by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber.
James: Audiobook is available as well. It’s got a great reader.
Jim: Who’s the reader?
James: His name is Kaleo Griffith, and he’s done Harry Potter. He’s done “The Art of the Deal” for Trump. He’s done all sorts of things. He’s got great enthusiasm—he’s the kind of guy who keeps you awake when you listen to him.
Jim: Thanks again.
James: Thank you.