In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Dr. Rotem Petranker, Associate Director of the Psychedelic Studies Research Program at the University of Toronto, co-founder of the Canadian Centre for Psychedelic Science, and a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University. His work focuses on microdosing, attention, emotional regulation, and open science.

We touch upon topics of:

  • [00:01:00] Rotem’s background and early path into psychedelic research
  • [00:02:00] Why microdosing research began and early challenges
  • [00:03:00] Perspectives on drug policy, legalization, and mental health
  • [00:05:00] Design of Rotem’s psilocybin microdosing clinical trial
  • [00:07:00] Study outcomes, placebo response, and limitations of once-a-week dosing
  • [00:11:00] Diversity of participants and feasibility for future research
  • [00:12:00] The role of set, setting, and the “social matrix” in healing
  • [00:14:00] Group dynamics, contact high, and integration at retreats
  • [00:16:00] The challenge of reductionist science versus indigenous traditions
  • [00:21:00] Replication crisis in psychology and the need for open science
  • [00:23:00] Pre-registration, open data, and transparency in psychedelic research
  • [00:35:00] Different epistemologies: indigenous wisdom vs. neuroscience
  • [00:37:00] Comparing LSD and psilocybin microdosing (duration, variability, safety)
  • [00:39:00] Benefits and drawbacks of microdosing—mood, anxiety, sleep
  • [00:42:00] Microdosing vs. antidepressants and side effect profiles
  • [00:45:00] Bro-science explanation of SSRIs vs. psilocybin and how little we know
  • [00:47:00] Why open science matters and how to evaluate credible research

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Dr. Rotem Petranker at @rpetranker and through the Canadian Centre for Psychedelic Science.

Transcript

Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: This is my opinion that substance use is a problem, but if it becomes a problem, it’s a mental health problem, and we shouldn’t be putting people in jail because they have mental health problems. Like you said, if we’re allowing people to drink alcohol, if we’re allowing them to smoke cigarettes, we should allow them to use drugs, and if their drug use becomes problematic, we should offer them supports rather than prison.

Sam Believ: I recently interviewed Gal Burma and he says, don’t look for addiction. Look for the pain. People that are addicted is not because of the substance. Sometimes it could be like, opiates and stuff.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Some substances are more addictive. But there are many people who use substances recreationally, even addictive substances, and they do it sporadically because they have supports.

They have a good social network, they have meaning in life. They have reasons to live. But if you don’t have these says it’s so easy to spiral.

Sam Believ: Like this famous red experiment where they, yes. Cocaine and sugar or sugar water and then eventually got so addicted, but then they put it in a perfect environment and it stopped taking the cocaine.

Exactly.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Because antidepressants suck. They have such bad side effects and like you said, they’re addictive. And with psychedelics you can take a large dose once every few months and that’s probably enough. And if Microing is effective, then it would be the same. Like the side effects people are reporting is feeling a little bit hot or cold, some GI stuff, sleep problems, nothing major.

People with SSRIs are like. They lose their sex drive. They gain weight, they become fatigued. It’s like really bad things. So if the case is that sex drugs are as effective as antidepressants, that’s amazing. So we found an antidepressant, but basically has no side effects.

Sam Believ: Like a lot of people don’t know that the very first antidepressant brought to the west was actually MA.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: From Ayahuasca and we discovered serotonin thanks to LSD. We were like, oh, LSD is doing something to the brain. Let’s track that because LSD mimics serotonin. And that’s how we discovered serotonin, which is now like such a huge thing.

Sam Believ: Yeah. And you say like people taking a large low psychedelics every few months, and it’s same as having to the persons.

What about those people that do it once and they’re good for a few years? That’s amazing. I think that’s less common, but that does happen. Yeah, it’s definitely less common.

Hi guys, and welcome to our Oscar podcast, as always with you, the whole Sam. Today I’m having an interview with. Rot Tran, is that correct? Accurate. Rodham. Is a psychedelic researcher and PhD candidate in psychology not a candidate anymore? I am. I have a PhD now. Okay. So I’m not a candidate anymore. PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at McMaster University.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: I’m now yeah. Postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University.

Sam Believ: Amazing. He’s the Associate Director of psychedelic studies research program at the University of Toronto. Co-founder of the Canadian Center for Psychedelic Science. His work focuses on microdosing attention, emotional regulation, meaning making in the modern world.

Rotten is also a strong advocate for open science and ethical psychedelic research. You have to tell Chad G. PT about your progress so it knows and updates here. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability. Accessibility and authenticity. The Yra Connect, heal, grow.

Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting You Rotten. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. Rotten, let’s start with your history and maybe your upbringing and your early life and what brought you to this line of work?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Yeah, it’s actually. Not so interesting or not I think some people have life-changing experiences with psychedelics, and that’s what draws ’em to do this kind of work.

But for me it was just because it was becoming very topical and trendy. And there was very little research on it, especially microdosing. So at the time when I started doing microdosing research, there were no published studies on microdosing at all, and people were doing it so much. So I just thought that this was something that we need to study.

And then, yeah, it snowballed from there. I became a microdosing guy, but I’m mostly a scientist who is interested in discovering new things.

Sam Believ: Are you on microdose right now?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: I’m not. I would not tell if I were you as well. She says, yeah, I’ve actually given an interview before where I was on TV in Canada and I said that I could be on a microdose right now and they wouldn’t know.

And then they asked and I said I’m not, but if I told you that I’m on a microdose of lte, say, oh, okay. So if I told you I’m on a microdose of heroin, you’d be horrified. Yeah. And that’s weird because these are all drugs. We’re all adults. We should be able to have agency over our bodies.

Sam Believ: He might or might not be microdosing right now, but yeah, totally agree.

This is stupid. Yeah, you can drink alcohol, you can kill yourself. Why? Why can’t you take whatever you wanna take? Especially psychedelic, which are proven to be pretty, pretty safe. Is that the open to open science

Dr. Rotem Petranker: topic? No, this is more about legalization. This is my opinion that. Substance use is a problem, but it’s a, if it becomes a problem, it’s a mental health problem and we shouldn’t be putting people in jail because they have mental health problems.

So I think if we’re, like you said, if we’re allowing people to drink alcohol, if we’re allowing them to smoke cigarettes, we should allow them to use drugs. And if their drug use becomes problematic, we should offer them supports rather than prison.

Sam Believ: Yeah, totally agree with that. At least we could let’s say if the psychedelics are completely illegal.

Affordable because most of them are, mushroom is very cheap to grow. Yeah. Then people come to pharmacy to buy them. Legally, at least we can give them like a brochure, here’s a dosage, here’s, recommendations. They can pay taxes, legalizing I’m, I live in Columbia right now.

That’s a topic I think about a lot because the whole cocaine story and how it hurt the place, the moment they illegalize cocaine. It stops being, it stops making money to any criminals who just, it becomes like a potato. What are you gonna,

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Coca grows everywhere. Yeah. This is the same as what happened with cannabis and Canada.

Once it became legalized, then the black market doesn’t get all this money. It goes into paying essentially your taxes, and then it goes into all these social programs that you need. Exactly

Sam Believ: to support people that do get addicted. And at the end of the day I recently interviewed Galbo. He says don’t look for addiction.

Look for the pain. I think I’m paraphrasing it, but something like that. It’s like people that are addicted, it’s not because they, because of the substance. Sometimes it could be like,

Dr. Rotem Petranker: opiates and stuff. Some substances are more addictive, but. There are many people who use substances recreationally, even addictive substances, and they do it sporadically because they have supports.

They have a good social network, they have meaning in life, they have reasons to live. But if you don’t have these, say it’s so easy to spiral,

Sam Believ: like this famous red experiment where they there cocaine and sugar or sugar water, and then eventually got so addicted. Then they put it in a perfect environment and it stopped taking the cocaine.

Exactly. So you said you got interested in microdose and there were no, no studies. Yeah. And obviously now you’re working on studies and today you’re gonna present on it. Tell us, what did you find?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: I’m hesitant to tell you because I guess you won’t come to my talk if I tell you it’s, you’re busy.

It’s okay. I’ll tell you.

Sam Believ: I’ll post it like a long time from now, so Perfect. It’s not gonna prevent anyone from coming.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Okay. What did we find? So our study, let me tell you a little bit about the design first before I tell you about what we found. We wanted to see if a microdose of psilocybin, and when I say microdose, we use two milligrams of psilocybin.

That is roughly the equivalent of maybe two. Two or 0.3 grams of dry s. You wanted to see if this dose will help people that have a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. So if it would reduce their depression symptoms. Now we were, when we were thinking about how many people, how many times to administer the micro dose.

The most popular way to do this is basically twice a week, every three days. But because Health Canada, which is like the Canadian FDA, they insisted that we keep people under supervision the whole time. They’re under the influence. So if we do it twice a week, that means that at least once a week, people have to take a day off work.

And it’s not like you do it once, you have to do it several times. We wanted to do it over eight weeks, so we ended up doing it just once a week on the weekend. Then the way it worked is people come into the study and they get run randomized either to psilocybin first or placebo first, and then they get four weeks of either psilocybin or placebo, and then everyone gets four more weeks of psilocybin.

The first four weeks it’s blinded, so we don’t know what they got and they don’t know what they got. The last four weeks, everyone knows that they’re getting psilocybin. We wanted to assess expectancy and see how much of the effect is from the drug and how much is because the of what people Yeah. The placebo response.

And so in short, we didn’t find a lot of signal when it comes to depressive symptoms. We only out of maybe five or six ways that we measured depression, one was a significant drop. In the placebo, or sorry, in the psilocybin group. It was in a measure called the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale. It measures cognitive tendencies towards depression.

So it attitudes. An example is how much do you believe the following statement? If I fail, partly it’s as bad as failing complete to it. If you believe this, then you’re more likely to be depressed and people who were in the microdosing group. We’re lower in this kind of thing.

But they were not lower in any other kind of depression assessment.

And we also measured a bunch of other things like personality, mindfulness, creativity. We’re still in the process of analyzing a couple of our measures, but we found almost no other significant effects. So I. Think that the dose of two milligrams of psilocybin once a week for eight weeks is not effective.

Sam Believ: Once a week is still little so based on my observations, we, once again, not a scientist, not a medical advice, but there’s a lot of people that when they get off antidepressants, they use microdosing ERs. Yeah. And it helps them and they report, like it really helps them. Yeah. I can’t really, not a science, not double blind, but I’ve had plenty of people that helped to but I think it’s mostly two days on, one day off.

Anyway, definitely works. Maybe placebo, but placebo in itself can be a very positive thing. Yeah. Like why did they choose once a week?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: If, so like I was saying, it’s because I didn’t want people to have to take a day Ah, because of the work part. Yeah. Because I want, if this medicine works, I want people to have access.

And I also, there’s a real problem in psychedelics research that most participants look like me. And the question isn’t, do psychedelics work for white guys? It should be, do psychedelics work for humans? So I wanted to get a more diverse sample, and we did. We had a lot of people that are non-white, a lot of older people.

The average age was like 44, 45, which I was really important. Yeah, that’s too bad. You couldn’t figure out how to give the, a bit more. But I consider the study to have been a feasibility study. And now we have enough evidence to convince Health Canada that people can go home. So we can do it twice a week.

But honestly, you know what was really pr like everyone who participated in a study got so much better. People were very depressed and they became very mildly depressed by the end.

Sam Believ: So they got much better, but it just was not showing in the measures. There’s no difference between the groups.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Yeah.

And you know what was very much predictive of if they got better is if they guessed they were in the psilocybin grief. So people had, it’s like expectation, the placebo response. That is a key here.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s that understanding that placebo is not a side effect. Yeah, it

Dr. Rotem Petranker: is the core. I think it’s the core mechanism and I think having seen other talks at this conference there, other people agree with me.

I, it’s becoming, I think, more and more clear that what matters most is the container. And the psychedelic experience is a catalyst and it is very important for people because it’s such a powerful psychological experience. But what matters is. Are you in a safe environment? Are you getting good care?

Are you being made to feel like you’re important? Are you making connections with within yourself and with other people? Those are the things that are going to support your recovery. And the medicine is important, but it’s, I think what’s really important is everything around it.

Sam Believ: Yeah. SAT and such thing is really important.

And then there’s a couple more Ss. People say six. Skill as in like your experience with working with those medicines. And there’s another s very elegantly put, but I am not remembering it right. There’s,

Dr. Rotem Petranker: A controversial thinker who is of the original wave of psychedelics named Betty Eisner. She did some very sketchy things that I only recently learned about.

Your listeners might want to check out the paper by Patrick Asha and Tal Davidson. What is it called? I don’t remember, but it’s about Betty Eisner and how she was a controversial figure. Her important contribution was the introduction of the social matrix to set and setting, so it’s not just about your current set and setting, it’s also where do you come from and to where do you return?

Think about addicts that go into rehab. They go back to their original setting or their original matrix as Betty Eisner would put it. Yeah. And they relapse because it’s hard because you have this entire cultural matrix around you that decides a lot of how you do. So I think this is a really important aspect as well.

Sam Believ: Yeah, I like to say that if I were to make a formula about, obviously the Ayahuasca retreats that we run, what’s the percentage. What percentage of healing comes from the ayahuasca? What percentage of healing comes from the group integration, et cetera? Group part is very important. Setting is very important.

So it’s and of course ayahuasca is as well, but ayahuasca acts more like a catalyst, like something that opens the door. Yeah. And I would honestly prefer for people to do it in a group as opposed to one-on-one because it’s, there’s. And placebo man. It’s yeah. Have you heard about Contact High?

Yeah, of course. Yeah. It’s like that’s defect as well. Even, if we if people are having great experience on, let’s say 60% of group are connecting really well, the other 40 will feel good as well because they’re like, I’m gonna get there and it’s this, motivation.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Yeah. Sorry, can I just add one more thing about Jarat?

So I agree with you so much. I think this is an important part and the, I think this has been part of the reason that we’re finding I think relatively modest effects for psychedelics is because the way studies are conducted is in this atomized way we’re doing individual therapy, and that is not how these substances were meant to be used.

We need to be doing it, like you said in a group, because I think that a big part of the mechanism of action is it’s espouses, it cultivates a sense of connectedness to yourself internally, to people around you, to your family, to the land, to humanity. And that is what’s gonna heal you because you all be, I think we become so alienated from each other and true connect connection, that’s what makes us feel better.

Sam Believ: Yeah, I’m a big fan of this way of thinking. Obviously we’re here at psychedelic conference and psychedelic science conference and people that do science, they want to like, isolate everything and put everything in a box. But it’s really hard to measure social container, right? Because each time it’s different.

Every group that we receive at the retreat is a little bit unique. It has its own personality and, the sim, the simple thing is let’s not reinvent the bicycle like they’ve been indigenous people have been working with those smart medicines for a long time and they figure out that it works best in the group.

We could just do it and just have the results.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Yeah. Sorry, I have more to say. I think this is part of, if I had to pick reasons why I didn’t find any results in my study, the first one would be the frequency of dosing, and the second one would be. It’s crazy man who microdose is and then sits around in a room the whole day alone during tasks on a computer.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to microdose and go for a walk or paint. Hey guys.

Sam Believ: Yeah. So any benefit you get from the microdose and gets offset by the depressive Exactly. And the process of

Dr. Rotem Petranker: not even moving. Yeah. So I think just also to respond to what you were saying, you’re saying how.

In science, we like to break things down and yes a lot of science is reductionist, but I think I can tell you, I’m aware of how it’s like there’s a I guess you give some, you get some, and in what I did a very tightly controlled clinical trial, you get a lot of internal valid validity. What you got is what you got and you’re confident about that.

But. If you do a more ecologically valid version, so if you send people home with a dose, then you’re more likely to find the way it is really in the world, but you’re not gonna be so confident about your results because I might go home and I have a swimming pool and a tennis court, and I can paint all day, and you might go home and you have to go to work under fluorescent lights for eight hours.

So we get different outcomes and then it’s hard to assess I have a swimmer bowl. Sorry, I’m just kidding. Oh, yeah. But yeah, I’m just saying there are benefits to either approach and I think Yeah, a way to think about it it’s not like that one, any one study will give us the answer. We need a bunch of studies that are from different perspectives and together we will see the actual picture.

Sam Believ: Yeah, absolutely. There are cer, there are certain things that can just cannot be reduced. It’s measuring like a relationship between two people can’t just reduce it to one interaction. So it makes no sense.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: I I partly agree with you. Sorry, I completely agree with this particular example, but are you familiar with the concept of irreducible complexity?

No. So this is unrelated to psychedelics. There are people who believe in intelligent design. It’s a form of kind of creationism and. What these people believe is that there are certain parts of nature that could not have evolved through evolution because they’re irreducibly complex. It’s like there’s no way that this was a piecemeal kind of stage by stage development.

And for example, they give the eye, which is they say it’s like it’s too complex, or there’s a particular, there’s, I forget the name of the microbe. There’s a microbe that has like a little tail, which it uses to move around kinda like a sperm.

Sam Believ: It’s like an extremely complex electric motor

Dr. Rotem Petranker: with hundred percent efficiency.

Yeah. If I’ve seen this the example that these people give is if you walk on the beach and you find a watch perfect with perfect clockwork, yeah. You’re gonna assume that there’s a clock maker somewhere. You’re not gonna assume that just everything

Sam Believ: giant fell in such a way that’s I think they use this example with the creation of life.

Yeah. It’s oh, there was a saline solution with nutrients in it. It’s like they’re saying it’s like you are in a scrap yard and accidentally a Apache helicopter in a perfect Yeah. State with the pilot. Yes.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Synthesizes. So that is I agree with that. I think that this is what happened. I think that life, this happened actually, I think last year, chemists were able to create life from scratch using the kind of the original primordial soup.

They created the same environment that existed on Earth half a billion years ago, and they were able to create a new cell from just from chemicals. So like the scientific approach is there is no irreducible complexity. Everything can be broken down, or at least in the context of evolution, by natural selection, everything could have evolved.

Now, this is not to say that reductionism is always the correct approach. Some things are emergent properties, some things are not their particular parts. But just, I dunno. I think it’s also important to remember that,

Sam Believ: but in this case, scientists using primordial soup created life. Yeah. That’s a pretty cool, and I’ve never heard about this.

Yeah. But it was scientists that created it. Yeah. Take away the scientists.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Yeah. The idea is that it’s very simple and if you like, if things bashed together enough, eventually they’re gonna just stay connector. I really need to put, yeah, this was a really highly publicized, this was in 2024. Yeah.

Geez. Read it and I might be wrong. They might be wrong. It’s okay. I’m not attached.

Sam Believ: You make me understand that. I need to focus less in psychedelics and more on science. Yeah. Everything. Is it just, let’s talk about science. You’re a big fan of open science. Yeah. What

Dr. Rotem Petranker: is it? Oh, I’m so happy you asked.

So have you heard about the replication crisis?

Sam Believ: Like the stop with ai?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: No. So let me tell you, I, and I’m,

Sam Believ: I assume that many of your, so here’s what I understand by application crisis, because AI learned from internet unrelated, but let me see, maybe it’s a similar thing. AI learned from internet Now everything created an internet.

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Dr. Rotem Petranker: a.com, which is also a huge I don’t know if it’s a problem. I think it’s really interesting, but no, the replication crisis is what happened 2011. So we assume that psychology is a science, and so in science, let’s say, I drop a ball from a certain height, it’ll take it a certain amount of time to reach the floor.

If you drop the same ball from the same height, it’ll take the same amount of time, right? So you replicated my experiment now, in psychology, we assumed that it’s a science, but for decades, no one was replicating experiments. So we didn’t really know if other people’s work was sound. We just assumed that it was.

And then in 2011, a paper was published by some of the most high profile psychologists in the field where they tried to replicate a hundred of the most canonical experiments in psychology. And I think, I don’t remember, I think 60 something did not replicate, and that created the replication crisis because all of a sudden we’re like, oh shit.

So much of what we thought we knew, we don’t know. And this has been ongoing ever since. The, there’s a real problem in science in general, mostly in psychology and biomedical sciences where there’s not enough replication and. People’s incentives to publish are just get it out there as fast as you can and not do the best science you can.

And so in I think 2014 or 2015, this counter movement, which is the open science movement was trying to correct this issue because really we’re trying to build something that works. That is, we have a strong foundation and everything is so shaky if we’re not rigorous in the science. So the way to do rigorous science is first you preregister your hypotheses.

So you, you plan on what you’re going to do, you plan which tests you’re going to make, then you register it online, and then no one will know about it until you wanna publish a paper. And then when you wanna publish your paper, you show the plan and you show what you did, and you show that they fit. And where they don’t fit.

You say, action didn’t plan for this, but I thought it’d be cool. So I did this, but consider that exploratory. This is important because a lot of what people do is they just do a bunch of things. They don’t really think about it too much, and then they run tests on it. And whatever is significant is then what they present.

And they create theories after the fact to say, oh yeah, I totally knew what I was doing. And that is dangerous because a lot of what they find is just by chance. And so this is a problem across the board, but in particular, this is a problem in psychedelics. Because in psychedelics, people are so eager to publish and it’s like everyone believes in what we do so much that people are not taking their time to check all of what they do.

So I think it’s really important to do to preregister. Now, in addition, there’s two other important components. One is open methods, open materials. That means whenever I run a study, everything I did is then available online. So if you wanna run the exact same study, you don’t have to contact me and ask me how I did it.

You can just take it, do the same thing, and then you can make sure that I did it correctly. The last important bit is open data. So once I’m done analyzing the data, I share it with everyone. And then that gives an opportunity for junior researchers who maybe don’t have access to cool data, they can run analyses on this and they can publish.

People can check my work, maybe I got stuff wrong. That’s okay. I’m human and I want people to check it. And so these are all very important and psychedelics specifically so that we can share, we can collaborate and could do good science and in general, no matter which field you’re in, so important to do this.

Sam Believ: It’s basically like open source, but for science. Exactly. I think you mentioned that, everyone’s so eager to publish studies because they just want to legalize everything and just progress and I think the reason for this is they already know that it works and because they’ve experienced it themselves.

Like in my case. We hosted like more than 2000 people, so many success stories. Wow. And just at this conference alone, I’ve met three people. They came to us like, oh my God, I went to a wire two years ago. My life has changed. I did this, I trained this. And it’s oh, thanks to that experience. So I know it works.

And now of course, we like, let’s do some science to prove that it works and just. Move onwards. I think that’s where, maybe

Dr. Rotem Petranker: that’s where it’s coming from. That is a problem. The other problem is that I think the incentive is to build a career for yourself as a scientist. And the way you do that is by publishing as many papers as you can.

And so it’s quantity over quality and it’s very dangerous. Yeah, I agree. Also, sorry, I just wanna say I don’t believe that these things work. I’ve had my experiences and they’ve been positive. But my aim is not to show that it works, it’s to see if it works. I think this is the correct scientific approach.

Sam Believ: That’s definitely scientific approach, but isn’t it, let’s say long time ago before we had scientific methods, that’s how we do science. We just do stuff and if it works, that’s hard to figure out and isn’t it science that I can say, hundred people came through my door and 70 of them.

No longer depressed and have a better life just because they told me and that’s what they believe. But then it’s like, Hey, is it placebo or no? But honestly, who cares?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: That’s a good question. These are good questions. I think part of what I love so much about the scientific method is that it’s self refining.

So when we first started using when they first came up with what is now the scientific method. They were just, as you said, they were just taking notes, they were doing whatever they were doing in the world and keeping notes so they can compare it to other notes. And then over time it became more and more not just whether things work, but how do things work.

And so I think if all other things being equal, so I think microdosing is actually a great example to this. If you ask people, like in surveys that I’ve conducted, people who micros report, so many benefits, improved mood, improved focus, improved creativity, reduced anxiety, you name it. And so if that is enough, we could say people should just microdose and if some people will get these benefits, some people won’t and whatever, it’s not a big deal.

But then there’s a couple of other things to consider. If you’re microdose there, it might interfere with other psychiatric medication that, that you’re taking. If you’re microdosing, it costs money, and if you’re microdosing, it might be cardiotoxic, like we don’t know about this yet, but just based on the binding profile of psilocybin, it might be bad for your heart.

So over time it might be degrading your heart valves. So there is a cost to doing this, and that’s why we need to figure out if it is effective because. If it’s effective, we can say, look, there are potential harms and potential benefits, and it’s up to you to decide what you want. But if it’s, if there’s no benefits, if it’s just harms, people should know about this too.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Everything I think every, everything in life has some side effects. Yeah. Nothing is perfect. Has something has to be, and then you have to figure out, whether it’s worth it or not. Yeah. But people should be allowed to do it. Allowed, wanna test on themselves? Yeah. Yeah. This, I I have a question for you.

I, honestly, I’m a fan of science in a way because I used to be engineer before I became, I was a retreat leader and a happy, and all those things. I’m not really happy, but. I’m just joking, but basically spiritual person. So I kinda like things that can be explained and how can I, so I have seven nugget people a year that come through our doors.

Holy cow. How can I, what can I do to say, okay, this is real science. This is not just a end of one, or is this not just anecdotal? What is the low hanging fruit that I can do? To prove that it works because

Dr. Rotem Petranker: I know it works. Yeah, track ’em. This is, so I work with one retreats in Jamaica, and what we do is we track people’s wellbeing before, during, and after retreats.

And so once you start tracking how people are doing a, you can say, look, people come to my retreat and then by the time they’ve left, they’re this much better and six months later they’re this much better. And then the next thing you can do is if people sign up in advance, you can start tracking them well before they come.

And then what you’re doing is com essentially comparing to treatment as usual. ’cause people are on antidepressants, they’re in therapy, they’re doing what they can without the medicine. And then you can say, look, when people are taking SSRIs and going to therapy, this is how well they are. But after they come to my retreat, boom, they get so much better.

Sam Believ: So if I get how many people should I get before, after, and like one month later, would that be enough to make a study and say, bla the effects of ayahuasca on over

Dr. Rotem Petranker: wellbeing? Yes, but I don’t think it, then the question is, can you say it’s what, is it the ayahuasca? Is it your retreat? Is it your personality?

What is making the difference? You might have clearly. No, but I’m not in

Sam Believ: every ceremony anymore yeah. But is it your other guides? Yeah. And then no, but that’s, once again I can prove it because I’ve had since the beginning probably three different heads of facilitation and different team, but the result was always the same.

Okay. Yeah. So I, but this is your

Dr. Rotem Petranker: subjective no. That’s what testimonials say, but the testimonial, I think once you make it quantitative, you can really compare it. So you can also compare between facilitators.

Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s yeah. Is there maybe like an app where I can use to track them? ’cause it seems so much work.

Oh

Dr. Rotem Petranker: no. You have to hire someone like me to do it. Okay. Can I don’t think I can afford you. Yeah, I can suggest other people.

Sam Believ: Sounds good. Some people would do it. Maybe a volunteer, somebody who wants to come and drink some my and explore that. ’cause I really wanna do something. Yeah. I’m happy to, there’s people at the conference

Dr. Rotem Petranker: that are more junior than me.

I might be able to help you.

Sam Believ: How can I people that people ask me like how does it work? And shaman says It’s planned spirit, or a scientist says it’s neuro flexibility. Different people have different explanation. I don’t know which one I can have my own. I just know it works based on my observation.

Once again, unproven. Yeah. Yeah. How can I, what can I do to learn how these things work? ’cause like it’s, something happens in the brain, it’s so complex, it’s so many factors. Do you have any ideas?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: It depends on, I think you alluded to this, it depends on your epistemic approach. A few.

If you subscribe to more like indigenous ways of knowing, then you would, I guess it would be more about the spirit and how do I measure planned spirit? I dunno, this isn’t my epistemic space. If you wanna do it scientifically, then I had my suggestion. But that’s more psychological. If you wanna do it more biologically, you can take people’s blood and look at biomarkers, look at genetics.

There’s many ways to do it, in my opinion. It’s the container that matters most. It’s what you do before, during, and after the ceremony. I think that is the key thing, because maybe another way to think about it is, yeah, either the spirits arrive and they take some of the bad things from out of you, and then there’s space, or maybe it’s more cognitive flexibility.

You can for a short amount of time you have, you can learn new behaviors. And that is key because then once you have this kind of this short period it’s called a critical period and like then a neural cognitive understanding of things. It’s like you can relearn things. So if before you were thinking, I am a bad person and I deserve to suffer.

You have a short period of time when you can relearn and maybe say, maybe I’m an okay person. I just, I deserve to have an okay time. So this is my opinion, how to measure it. Again, it depends on where you’re coming from. You might want to talk to some indigenous leaders from your area and see if they’re willing to share their opinions.

Sam Believ: Yeah. We definitely need more signs just so that people can trust his medicines more and know it’s safe. In your studies, in your observations so far, and your knowledge about microdosing let’s say mushrooms is the most common

Dr. Rotem Petranker: thing people microdose. It’s been a very interesting trend. So the first s survey we ran was in 2017 and it was probably two to one, so like maybe 65% were using LSD.

The rest we’re using psilocybin, but that is now switched. And I think in the most recent survey we ran, that we analyzed in 2023, there’s another one that’s currently being analyzed from 2025. Psilocybin was twice as common as LSDI think it has to do with how it’s just a lot more popular. And in Canada you have a lot of dispensaries, so people just go get it.

I don’t know what’s going on in other parts of the world, but I assume it’s just about what’s socially acceptable.

Sam Believ: Yeah. We’re feeling mushrooms are also very easy to propagate and spread because, you just send some spores and stuff like that. It’s, you don’t need a laboratory to,

Dr. Rotem Petranker: yeah.

But call D is it’s so easy to send a finished product. So I think that’s why for a long time, for 30 years when these drugs were super illegal and culturally also sanctioned. People were using a lot more LSD because it’s easier to smuggle.

Sam Believ: Yeah. So you said you personally experimented with LSD microdosing and Sy microdosing.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Yeah. I, for microdosing, I have, there’s good reasons to prefer LSD. So the amount of psilocybin and the same fruiting body and the same mushroom can vary up to 500%. So if you and I take. Two parts of the same mushroom. I could be tripping balls and you could be feeling nothing. So depending on the, if it’s a root or a stem or a, it’s not about that.

No, I thought that too. But it’s just random or at least we haven’t been able to detect the pattern.

So that’s one thing. So if you microdose, you might have a surprise trip. And I think a lot of people who microdose have had this experience of a surprise trip. Which is unpleasant.

I’ve had it before. Yeah. And then the other thing is mushrooms only last for a few hours. Where whereas LLC is like, twice as long, maybe three to four hours for mushrooms is six to eight hours for LLC. So if you’re taking it on a workday, let’s say you take mushroom, you take your microdose at 8:00 AM you start feeling it at nine.

If you took mushrooms around 1:00 PM you’re gonna crash a little bit. If you took LSD, it’ll last you until the end of your workday. So I think it’s a better fit in that sense. And finally, as I said before, psilocybin is more likely to be cardiotoxic. So I think LSD is safer for that.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I’ve never tried LSD somehow, but the crash that you described, that is definitely familiar.

And that’s that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you if you observed that. And some people mushrooms, microdosing, make you feel just better and sometimes people get more anxious. What do you know about

Dr. Rotem Petranker: that? Yeah, so this is something that we found pretty consistently in our surveys.

So we ask people to describe the three main benefits in the three main drawbacks of microdosing. And we saw a lot of these parallels where some people were describing, for example. Their anxiety got better and some people were saying that their anxiety got worse. So I don’t know. I think it’s probably mostly due to set and setting.

Like I said before, if you can do whatever you want, if you can go out on a walk, it can be in nature, it’ll probably reduce your anxiety. But if you’re microdosing and going to the office, it’ll probably increase your anxiety. Yeah, I think set in your office is in the nature. In my case, then you’re already, you’re living your best life and you do need to microdose.

Sam Believ: That’s that’s true. No I’m just kidding. But yeah, I do have a little office overlooking the nature. It’s perfect. But I do definitely, it’s like a lottery. Sometimes you feel better and there’s nothing. I definitely notice that I cannot take a microdose before going to bed. You

Dr. Rotem Petranker: ask me like, yeah, it makes sense because, yeah, this is one of the pretty recurring drawbacks that people reported.

Is that it interferes with sleep if you take it too late in the day because it’s very, it’s it affects your serotonin receptors. And serotonin downstream from serotonin is melatonin. And that affects your state. So I would recommend for people who do want a microdose to do it earlier in the day,

Sam Believ: what do you observe?

The more people take microdose to heal depression or. Or to just improve their cognition, get to get better. What is more prevalent in this

Dr. Rotem Petranker: space by far? People microdose to improve mood. That’s the most common reason, followed by creativity and wanting to be like having better performance.

So more focus, stuff like that.

Yeah. But I would say about 30% of people microdose to improve mood and then everything else is a lot less. By the way, it’s very interesting. So in the first time we ran a survey, we asked people just say why they microdose, and then there were qualitative responses and we analyzed them.

And then in the next survey we, we gave people some pre-made answers. We said, check this box if you microdose for this reason. And so we had everything we, that we discovered before, like improved mood, produced anxiety, substance use, all that stuff. But we also added a just curious option, and that was the second most common after improved mood.

Sam Believ: Yeah, definitely. ’cause like it happened to me when I discovered microdosing for the first time. It’s, you just see all those videos of people raving about oh my God, this is amazing. And then you want to try it, and then you try, it’s like actually not bad. Then you, it’s just, it’s an amazing tool really helped.

For example, in case of my wife when she was in postpartum, she got a little depressed. And I don’t really wanna suggest her taking antidepressant or not that I’m to choose, I’m not a doctor, but because then she gets addicted to it and so it helps her a lot. So what do you reckon, let’s say.

Once again, we’re not doctors. I’m not a scientist in its psych, but I would say there’s very comparable, based on my observation, anecdotal study, there’s very comparable relief from depression with microdosing and with antidepressants. But microdosing, you can stop any moment and antidepressants if you stop, you get like completely crippled.

Why do you think that is? And I’m like, what? I don’t know if it’s a good question to you, but like what, why is one is so addictive and the other

Dr. Rotem Petranker: isn’t? They operate differently. Yeah. So yeah, that’s the most obvious reason. These are just different substances.

But I think maybe to let me pivot a little bit. I think that it is becoming. I think evident that psychedelics at large doses in large doses at least, are roughly as effective as antidepressants. And I think this is amazing because antidepressants suck. They have such bad side effects, and like you said, they’re addictive.

And with psychedelics, you can take a large dose once every few months, and that’s probably enough. And if microdosing is effective, then it would be the same. The side effects people are reporting is feeling a little bit hot or cold, some GI stuff, sleep problems, nothing major. People with SSRIs are like, they lose their sex drive, they gain weight, they become fatigued.

It’s like really bad things. So if the case is that psychedelics are as effective as antidepressants, that’s amazing. So we found an antidepressant that basically has no side effects.

Sam Believ: Like a lot of people don’t know that the very first antidepressant brought to the west was actually MAI from Ayahuasca.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: And we discovered serotonin thanks to LSD. We were like, oh, LSD is doing something to the brain. Let’s track that. And then we, because LSD mimics serotonin and that’s how we discovered serotonin, which is now like such a huge thing.

Sam Believ: Yeah. And you say like people taking a large low psychedelics every few months and it’s same as having antidepressants.

What about those people that do it once and they’re good for a few years? That’s amazing. I think that’s

Dr. Rotem Petranker: less common, but that does happen. Yeah. It’s definitely less common. Yeah. I think we should maybe try and study these people, understand what makes them so susceptible to improving their quality of life.

Sam Believ: Let’s study them. Help me out. I need to find someone to figure out that whole science stage. Sure. It’s really cool. Talking about science. Please help me understand this. I, I. My bro science understanding of SSRI versus psilocybin is this SSRI is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So basically it prevents your serotonin to be absorbed by a body and it keeps your levels artificially higher.

Yeah. Psilocybin when it breaks down is the psilocin, the molecule looks a lot like serotonin and it kind acts like artificial boost in serotonin. So in a weird way, in a very reduced bro science approach, they’re doing kind of same thing

Dr. Rotem Petranker: in not Yeah. In a, the bro science way. Yeah. Although I’m like I’m a little hesitant because I think that was a very accurate, kind of high level description.

Yeah. I think the most important thing to know is that we don’t know how SSRIs work. When I took a course in this when I was an undergrad and I remember being presented with five different theories of how SSRIs work, and then a bunch of evidence that show that support this theory, and then a bunch of evidence that disprove this theory.

So we don’t know how SSRIs work. It’s the ssr, the serotonin hypothesis of depression has, it’s mostly been disproven. It’s not like you don’t have enough serotonin and that’s your problem. The brain is probably the most complex thing that we know in the universe. It has so many processes and subprocesses and just nested systems.

We don’t know anything. So serotonin is definitely a key component of whatever it is that’s happening. But it’s, it’s a, this is a reductionistic approach.

Sam Believ: Yeah.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: And this is not the correct way to look at it. It’s more holistic is the way,

Sam Believ: so you see, I’m somewhat of a scientist myself.

Dr. Rotem Petranker: Yeah.

It’s clearly I have a scientific education.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Very interesting. It’s very fascinating. I’m that see everything I wanted to ask. Is there anything else you think we should talk about?

Dr. Rotem Petranker: I just wanna say about open science, that for people who read. Original science, like original, articles that are published in scientific papers.

Only believe people who have pre-registered their hypotheses and are part of open science. The other people, you don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they’re doing good work, maybe they don’t. But if you remember only one thing from this conversation, trust the open science people because they’re being transparent and that’s the most important thing.

Sam Believ: Check your science guys. Yeah. I’m sure every listener of this podcast reads scientific studies name at least once a week. Great. Just kidding. But I’m not. I know some do. Thank you so much. I wish you best luck at your talk. And yeah. Let’s do some science. Yeah,

Dr. Rotem Petranker: absolutely.

Sam Believ: Thank

Dr. Rotem Petranker: you. My pleasure,

Sam Believ: guys.

You’ve been listening to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole assembly and I will see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic Renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us alike wherever it is you’re listening. Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information.

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