67: Christopher Timmermann on Researching the Neuroscience of DMT on the Brain and Mind

Imperial
LinkedIn
X

2012: Time for Change
Dennis Mckenna
David Luke
Magical Realism
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Catholic University of Santiago
Stan Grof
Compassionate Enquiry – Gabor Maté
Psychedelic therapy
University of Bologna
Mirror Neurons
Breaking Convention 2013
David Nutt
Imperial College London
Default Mode Network
David Chalmers – Hard problem of consciousness
DMT
Michael Pollen
MAPS
Peter Levine
DMT Study – ICL
Mauro Zappaterra
David Bohm
Aldous Huxley
Leor Roseman – Conflict Resolution
UCL
Jeremy Skipper
5-MeO-DMT

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello, hi, welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I’m so grateful to have Chris Timmerman. Chris PhD is the head of the DMT research group at Imperial College London, where he investigates the action of the potent psychedelic DMT. and 5 MeO DMT on the brain. His empirical and theoretical work employs an interdisciplinary approach to the neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and ethics of psychedelics, their relationship to [00:01:00] consciousness and application in mental health.

The aim of his work is to explore altered states, such as psychedelic and meditation, to understand their contribution to the study of human consciousness and their impact on mental health. His work has been published in high impact scientific journals and covered by mass media outlets such as BBC, The New York Times and WIRED.

Thank you for doing this, Chris. 

It was a pleasure. 

Chris: Thank you for having me Giancarlo. 

Giancarlo: So yes, I always repeat that you know, even if we’re going to talk, you know, very out there topic of, you know, cosmic consciousness and, And stuff like that, we feel that we wanted to keep a very conservative format for this podcast.

Very biographical, very personal, you know, this, this podcast is a little bit the brainchild of a, of a production company. We produced 2012 Time for Change. That was a little bit the beginning of my journey with exploration in alter state and, and, and, and the idea behind the documentary was that global transformation [00:02:00] comes from personal transformation.

So since then, I got very interested to, you know, explore what. You know, brings people to devote their life in psychedelic research, for example. So with your permission, I’m going to bag you with personal detail and cathartic moment and stuff like that. If I can, you know, I, it was, it’s not easy with you guys, you know, like even with, with, with, with, with the Dennis McKenna, for example, it was so hard to make him say, I.

I felt. 

Yeah. And with David, you was a little bit easier. And now let’s see how difficult it’s going to be for you. Well, we can explore it. Yeah. Let’s start from the beginning. 

Yeah. Childhood, where were you born? Where did you grow up? What kind of values, what happened at home? 

Chris: Yeah, no, of course. Yeah, well, at first, you know, I, I, I just want to mention that I think it’s really important to start from personal experience.

You know, a lot of the work that I do comes in a very big way from a [00:03:00] focus, a recentering of the focus of exploration, starting from human experience and putting that into science. And so I think yeah, I mean, experience is, is fundamentally important when it comes to the illegal compounds, it’s, it’s a bit difficult to, you know, what it can be shared, what cannot be shared and how to tread that, those waters when you’re a scientist.

So I understand that. But let’s explore. Let’s see what 

Giancarlo: happens. We just assume that any legal substance happened in country where it was legal.

Chris: My background is from Chile. I, I come from Chile, Latin America for those who are not aware, I mean, Chile is like this little strip of a country that is between Argentina. And Peru and Bolivia. So it’s couched in between these, these countries facing the Pacific in South America. I’m 

Giancarlo: famous for his pension system and his architecture.

Chris: Is that true? Well, I think, unfortunately, because of the pension system rises, there’s a lot of issues there. And there’s a social, social inequality is high in Chile. And, and, you know, that’s, [00:04:00] that’s also a big part of the backdrop. And and, you know, like and so. I grew up with with like, you know, these Western secular, but Christian values, I guess that’s how I was brought up in a family that was Christian, but, you know.

Not really. Very, you know, how it goes. It’s, it’s, it’s a loose kind of religious affiliation, but the values are kind of there. And there’s, you know, I think good things and bad things and, and tricky things, challenging things that come with that baggage sometimes. 

Giancarlo: But that’s interesting because already, you know, secular and Christian in theory is a contradiction in term.

Right, 

Chris: yeah. I mean, I mean, I think it’s It’s interesting to think about the current times in which we live in, in which we’re constantly confronted from, you know, the Western perspective on how we need to learn how to navigate from coming from a place and having a set of beliefs and learning to live with other kind of cultures.

And I think that’s in a very big way, the secular [00:05:00] projects in, in many ways. And that’s, I think one of the values of what we’ve achieved in, in Western cultures in many ways. I think. Of course, there’s a lot of challenges and horrible things have happened in the name of different religions, but at the same time, I mean, living in the UK, one of the most amazing things here I find is, is this ability for all these different cultures to not be completely assimilated in a given set of beliefs, but that are assimilated into a system of respect, of mutual respect and And I think that’s incredibly, that’s, that’s an achievement of, of human society, of Western human culture.

Yeah. And I think it’s quite amazing. 

Giancarlo: It’s, it’s true that I’m driving like now I rented a car here in London and the radio, I was looking for a classical, classical music and there is Islam station, Muslim station, Christian station, Evangelical, Methodist. There is, it’s, it’s interesting how. All the beliefs are represented by different radios.[00:06:00] 

Chris: I mean, it’s amazing because, yeah, in some places you don’t, you don’t see this kind of things happening, right? And you see that the merger of the state and religion is much more, much stronger and it’s more old fashioned and there’s war, religious conflict happening in the world today. I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s a thing and it’s been a topos in human story, in the human story for quite a while.

this thing of religious conflict. And so I think this is, this is one of the values to be treasured and appreciated of our culture. I think it’s amazing. And so, you know, that’s, I think that’s, you know, broadly speaking, also coming back to the background, I think the values that I was brought up into in Chile.

And the, in the backdrop of that is the idea of you know, indigenous and mixed race lineages and traditional lineages that are inherent to Latin American culture. And so I think very different from North America and South America, the Spanish empire integrated or tried made up a very strong effort [00:07:00] for indigenous culture to assimilate you know, the Christian values, you know, coming from this sort of Catholic sort of orientation in terms of.

Adopt, you know, like converting and missionaries and so on, you know, that was a big strong thing in, in Southern America. And so, so in Chile, there is no rain forest. It’s more like the Andes. Exactly. Yeah. It’s, it’s like the Cuero. Exactly. You, you have deep intense forests down South, but not rain forest, like this humid sort of jungly Amazon thing.

You have pockets of that which are like microclimates, but Broadly speaking, what you have in Chile is like in the North, the driest desert in the world, which is the Atacama desert. Then you have the Central Valley and the coast, which is where Santiago is. And then when you go down South, you have the most incredible, amazing sort of green things.

Green landscapes, forests, places that look like, you know, the beautiful parts of Germany and Austria. In terms of [00:08:00] forests and parts of the UK as well. And then when you go down South, even further, you have the Patagonia, which is this incredible, crazy thing. With all these species that you don’t find anywhere else in the world, this incredible mountains all over the country.

And so it’s interesting, I think the landscape of Chile is that it’s this mixture between a bit this desolate thing of the desert and this magnanimous things of the mountains and the immense richness that you find in nature in very beautiful kinds of ways. And of course the ocean, like the, we have 4, 000 kilometers of ocean and is one of the most.

Intense and scary oceans in the world the ocean of Chile, everybody knows, learns how to respect the ocean there because it’s a hardcore ocean. 

Giancarlo: So as a kid, yeah, well, how, so how, how did you 

Chris: interact with all these as a child? Well, I think it’s just in the background. So you, you grow up, I grew up in Santiago, it’s a big city and You know, it’s like the, you have on the one hand the Andes [00:09:00] on the one side of the city and on the other side of the city you have this range of mountains that is the coast, coast range of mountains.

And so you’re, you’re in this valley where there’s a big city where six million people live, but you have this reminder of nature and mountains kind of like, in a way. Providing a sense of shelter and orientation that you always have there. So for me, I went, you know, after I left Chile, I went to live to Italy for a while.

How old were you when you left there? I was 26. I went to do a Master’s in Italy. By your teenager years? Oh yeah. No, I just wanna quickly mention that. Yeah. Just to say that when I went to Italy, yeah. It was no mountains there. I was in the Pura, in in Bologna, in Bolognia. And so it was like. It was almost like I, it was, I felt anxious because you didn’t have this sort of like hugging element of the mountains.

And so my yeah, my childhood was just growing up there. You know, the secular Western Christian [00:10:00] values mixed in with a backdrop of, you know, the indigenous traditions that are present in the culture in many, many different ways. So the idea of the evil eye or the. Or the idea of magical realism, which, you know, this, this, this literally tradition, literary tradition that is very much inherent to Latin America.

We’re excited, you know, precisely the point is this mixture between the hardships reality of Latin America with the magical elements of those indigenous traditions mixed in together. Jodorowsky was from Chile. Jodorowsky is from Chile, for example. So you have these examples of, of people mixing in these These sort of like realities in, in many different ways and and, you know, so, so that was a bit, a bit the backdrop very inspired, very interested in the mind.

I grew up as a, you know, I think I was always fairly introverted not necessarily shy, but definitely introverted, interested in the mind. And so one of my earliest memories is [00:11:00] What is this thing? What, what is going, how does this work? Like, you know, like, I remember like, how does this work was a question growing up.

And so the, and you know, I think I also had eyesight issues as a kid. And so I think that that maybe also drives the exploration within rather than without in many ways. And, and that was another thing that I think may have marked me in different kinds of ways in my story. So I was always interested in the mind and.

And, you know, it, it, it remained a topic of, of curiosity and, and inquiry. Do you have 

Giancarlo: any brother and sister? 

Chris: I have six siblings. Oh, wow. You grew up in a huge family. Huge family. Yeah. We’re, we’re seven siblings. Your mother was busy. She was pregnant for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. She was pregnant for 

Giancarlo: a long time.

And it was a good dynamics. I mean, did you receive enough attention? I immediately think that seven kids. 

Chris: Yeah. Well, I am I consider myself to, [00:12:00] to be very fortunate you know, with when you’re seven in a family, there’s, there’s a lot of figuring out infighting, tolerating, you know, we’re all 

Giancarlo: life school.

Chris: Yeah. We’re all very different as kids as well. We’re not like none of us, none. There’s not a single person that is the same with each other and we’re all get along. Pretty much on kind of like equal terms, you don’t even have like inner cliques even within the, the siblings. And so and I think that my parents did a very good job of like really making no distinctions between us.

You were like 

Giancarlo: in between older, younger? Yeah, 

Chris: I’m in the middle. I’m in the third. My mom married twice, but we all grew up in the same household. And there was no, there was never a feeling of difference between. Between the siblings and, you know, so you have good memory or attention. Yeah, very, very good. I consider myself very lucky growing up in a loving family.

Nice. And and so, yeah, I grew up in that family. And I was always [00:13:00] fascinated by the minds and therefore when it came to the moment to choose something to study a career or something to do in life. I think two things dominated my life at that time. And one was music and the other was psychology.

Psychology. So I studied psychology. And so I, I, I developed somewhat of a career in music while I was studying the minds at the University of Santiago At the university. Yeah. The Catholic University of Sania, which is like the, it’s a Catholic university. It’s one of the top universities. It doesn’t necessarily have any sort of, 

Giancarlo: yeah, like in Milan we have like Catholic, ah, like exactly.

Chris: Yeah. And so I studied their psychology and you know, I, I, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do by the end of it. Music had become a big part of my life by then. You were in a band? I was in many bands. And one of them started to take off. It’s like when I was kind of finishing and wrapping up, I didn’t want, I felt that the commitment of being a [00:14:00] psychotherapist.

I tried it out for a bit, like studying that and learning about it. It felt like coming out of university at 23, 24 years or 25 years old was absolutely like, it was like kind of ridiculous, like, how are you going to sit as a five year old and, and, you know, counsel someone who’s in their fifties, whose partner died and they are grieving and they cannot, you know, they need some form of.

personal development story around that, or they are alcoholics or whatever. And, and just felt to me that the way to, I wasn’t mature enough or I wasn’t at, at a stage where I felt it was responsible to do that. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But nobody was even able to do that, right? To have to, with talk therapy, to access someone’s subconscious, which is unknown even to the people involved.

Yeah. You know, so it’s not just because you were young, it’s just because that discipline didn’t work. Well, I’m, I mean, I’m a big fan 

Chris: of psychotherapy. Even [00:15:00] today? Yeah, I think. Talk therapy? I think talk therapy is like really important actually. Like I, I, I’ve been a user of, of psychotherapy. I think that there is incredible value in finding the right person to do that.

I am a big believer that That the way that we develop as human beings is in relation and I think talk therapy is just one of the ways in which society has developed a way to do that. It’s artificial because it’s, it’s, it’s a job, it’s a profession, it’s a craft also as well. And it’s put into, you know, the typical devices of Western societies.

But I think it can be immensely, immensely helpful. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Stan Grof says that, talk therapy can be useful. You can develop rapport with the therapist and you can get support and you can understand the origin and the nature of your emotional wounds. But an emotional wounds need to be healed emotionally, not [00:16:00] intellectually.

Oh, yeah. He, he says that some of these people that do 20 years of therapy, like I think Woody Allen in his movie, you know, you, you can, you learn so much the nature of your emotional wounds that you can teach it, but yet you can’t transcend it. Yes. That’s why I feel that things, you know, like therapy, like Compassion Inquiry by Gabor Mate and Internal Fibers, but like somatic therapy, I think is much more effective.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s interesting. I think, you know, as societies, we go through different periods in, in, in different things that become popular and, and, you know, these may correspond to the specific needs of societies at given periods in time. And I think right now we’re refocusing on the body as a, as a source of experience, as a source of trauma, as a source of knowledge and wisdom, and I think that that’s immensely valuable.

But I, I also think that we are thinking human beings and, and we’re relational human beings and, and these things are [00:17:00] not isolated. Yeah, yeah. It’s all connected. These things are in conversation. Yes. And this is why I really, I think there’s something really interesting about fleshing out and developing this idea of psychedelic therapy because you have precisely that interaction when it’s sophisticated, you have that interaction very much in place where you have this sort of like, you know, accessing the body from a bottom up way where you have a drug that induces catharsis or somatic reactivations or whatever you might phrase it, but you’re couching this in a process of The cultivation of a trade and the cultivation of preparation and the development of like putting yourself in that right mindset and then bridging whatever happened in that, putting words into that, making that into a form of meaning that is developed in this relation, this therapeutic relation that then solidifies and anchors into something that also carries out in life.

And I, and I think that that form of learning. [00:18:00] Implies both of those levels. And so I do agree emotional 

Giancarlo: and the verbal. Exactly. And so I 

Chris: do agree that the talking therapy can be, can lend itself to over intellectualizing things and talking like, yeah, and not necessarily feeling it, feeling it. But I don’t think necessarily talking therapy has to be that I think a lot of talking therapy can, can help you open up things in life and open up these forms of experiences and so on.

And also a lot of things require also thought and figuring out and like being able to step back. And so I think it’s a combination. It’s 

Giancarlo: a combination. But it’s true that the subconscious subconscious. It’s so powerful, you know, like I was speaking with this friend of mine from Paris and she’s has been doing talk therapy for 20 years and like, you know, emotional unavailable father and she’s been going for a series of emotional unavailable boyfriends.

And now again, she’s with the emotion and she was [00:19:00] telling me about how is that possible? I know that it has been. 20 years, but yet that subconscious drive that make, make this person that create pain familial, she yet cannot transcend it. Right. Yeah. And, and, and because looking at this emotional wounds that has created this desire for recreating a situation, I’ll bet.

Painful, but familiar. It’s, it’s, she doesn’t have the tool to transcend that. And so I feel that something like, you know, Gabor would say, okay, you activate the wounds or when, you know, I’m attracted because this guy, you know, doesn’t, he’s not emotionally supportive. And so he would say, when was the first time that you didn’t feel emotionally supported?

When I was seven, eight and nine, my father would never really consider in this and that. And then Gabber would activate that wounds. And then the old work is to stay with the pain [00:20:00] without talking, stop with the story and just feeling it, feeling and feeling it for months and months and months until that feelings you disidentify from the feeling.

So you have the feeling, you have the pain. Some people feel it. in the stomach, in the back, in the back of your, of your, you know, you feel it in the body somewhere. And by keep on staying with it, it might take months and months and months, sometimes years. You don’t let that pain inform your subconscious that then move your legs.

To go to the house of the guy, you know? 

Chris: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: I don’t know if it makes sense, but we’re going to go back. I mean, it’s 

Chris: interesting. I mean, I mean, I know a bit of Gabor Mate, haven’t I? Like, but I think, I mean, this resonates very much with the beginnings of psycho analysis and Freud and like working with the thing and, you know, like you have a frozen arm.

And so what you do is you work with suggestions of like, what’s happening with the arm. And then healing happens with [00:21:00] what he calls the abreaction. Yeah. So when the cathartic thing is connected with the intellectual insight and then boom, you know, like it solves the symptom. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I think the ways of psychotherapy are still being developed and I think they will always be in development because I think we are in development.

This is the stuff of life. I don’t, I don’t, there’s an interesting thing of understanding of mental health as if it was the same as physical health. Yeah. I’m not entirely sure about that because I think mental health is just the mind and this is, this is the water in which we’re swimming all the time.

We will always figure things out. We will always have to figure things out because that’s the nature of life. 

Chris (2): Yeah, 

Chris: yeah, yeah. 

Giancarlo: So you were 25 and you felt completely unequipped to start therapizing 

Chris: people. 

Speaker 4: Right, 

Giancarlo: exactly. Yeah. And then what happened? 

Chris: And so I did, you know, like I was living in Chile and I I worked.

In, in jobs as a psychologist, like, you know, interviewing people that wanted to [00:22:00] apply for companies. And then but I wasn’t, my heart wasn’t really in that. As a 

Giancarlo: human resource helper. Exactly. 

Chris: Human resource. I was working at like an advisory company doing that thing. And then, but most of my energies was, were put in music.

And so I was, you know, like had a band and then we were doing fairly okay. What was the name of the band? It’s called one of them was called Meccanico. Meccanico. Meccanico. It was called Dr. Robinson, Dr. Robinson. Both of these bands were there. And then when, when I play guitar, the other one, I play keyboards.

I had a lot of fun, but you know, it wasn’t, it was really something that I didn’t feel necessarily very fulfilled. And I always had a very strong intellectual pursuit. There’s a, a strong tradition of consciousness research in Chile consciousness inquiry that it’s, is very much reflective of.

of this mix between the, the Western scientific understanding and the traditional indigenous perspectives that is born, you know, bred out of that. And these beautiful theories about how the mind emerges from [00:23:00] life and so on. I was, my heart was always very much in that. And so at some point I applied for a scholarship and I wanted to go to study in Bologna neuroscience.

And so that’s where I started to develop my craft, which is science. And so I did a master’s there. I studied the neural basis. You did a master in 

Giancarlo: Bologna. Oh yeah, I forgot you speak Italian. That’s why. Yeah, exactly. 

Chris: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Chris: And so I studied the master’s there in Bologna beautiful place to live in really amazing.

Very interesting. The difference culturally speaking also with Chile and with the UK. And then after living there for three years, two and a half years, three years. Can you 

Giancarlo: elaborate? What, how was culturally different then? 

Chris: Interestingly enough, it was less conservative. and more traditional than Chile.

Speaker 4: How is that possible? 

Chris: So it was less conservative in the sense that Bologna is like hardcore left wing the city. There’s a lot of anarchic [00:24:00] sort of occupied places. It’s a university town with a lot of uprising and, and you know, social activism and stuff like this. I see. There were, I think at that time I encountered a lot about this sort of like people who were doing alternative ways of having relationships and open you know open partnerships and stuff like that.

And I was coming from Chile from like, very much, a much more straightforward kind of thing. More 

Speaker 6: libertine with Riccione and the party, hedonism. Yeah. 

Chris: Yeah. More hedonistic. Yeah. Which is part of the Italian tradition, right? In many, many interesting ways. And so, yeah, and, and, and, and that, yeah, exactly the, the, the value of pleasure.

I think that that was something that was novel to me coming from Chile Santiago. And and at the same time, more traditional in the sense that it felt kind of old. Like everything has been kind of done, like the, the city’s all [00:25:00] constructed. If you’re an architect, it’s not like you’re designing new places.

You’re restoring things. Culture has reached its pinnacle and it felt like it’s a society just looking back on that past glory and trying to revive it rather than like moving forward. And I think like, of course there’s people moving forward, but. This is the general, general sense. 

Giancarlo: It’s a little bit the curse of the old town, yeah.

Chris: Yeah, and whereas in, in Latin America, in Santiago there’s this feeling that it feels young as a society. It feels like we’re figuring out things. We’re figuring out how, how to make things work. Social movements take into account the idea of indigenous. Living and traditions and into the, the social discussions about how to put society together and so on and so forth.

And so it’s, it’s also thought of as a, as something fresh and new, like, like the human being is something to discover rather than something to optimize necessarily. And so I think [00:26:00] that is expressed in the arts is expressing culture and it’s expressing this idea that, well, you want to do something, maybe just, you know, if you want to play an instrument or if you want to do something, just, you know.

Span you on and see what happens and you get together with people, boom. And then you put a show or something. Yeah. Whereas in in, in a place like Italy, like no, you wanna do it. Right. You wanna talk. Right. And that no have to conservator. You have to speak. Right. And you have to do this thing. Yeah.

Yeah. The classical. And so that, that was, there’s a 

Giancarlo: little bit of an slavery in the past. Yeah. 

Chris: Which is interesting. I mean, I, I don’t, I, I’m not saying one is better than the other. I think it was an interesting 

Giancarlo: contra sophistication of 

Chris: understanding how things are different, I guess. And, and so. you know, and so that was my life there.

I enjoyed it very much. I spent two years and a half there, I think. And 

Giancarlo: neuroscience, did it satisfy your curiosity? 

Chris: Yeah, very, very much. And so the, the, there’s there’s as I was mentioning, like there was this this is tradition in Chile centered around the study of the mind and consciousness that is [00:27:00] based on neurobiology and neuroscience.

And there’s like these intellectuals in Chile that are very inspiring for a lot of people, a lot of scientists coming from there that were developing strong bridges between the science of biology, the science of the mind and Buddhism. And so they were bridging these different traditions and they were, they were generating these sort of connections between these things and, but neurobiology was an important part of the question.

And and so it was a very disciplined way to understand the mind. It’s not just understanding the mind as like well, you know, we’re just going to do this, this, this circle of, or we’re just going to do this Reiki sort of thing, or we’re just going to do this indigenous practice sort of thing, which all are valuable things.

But it brought in along the Western tradition, the Western tradition of science to understand the mind. And so neuroscience felt to me, like, if I’m interested in the mind, if I’m interested in understanding how the mind works, and if I’m interested in understanding how the mind can be [00:28:00] transformed in a process of therapy, for example there’s so much out there in terms of how we can try to figure out how this works.

But if I can ground it also in biology, in nature it kind of gives it an anchor. It, it, it gives us something to agree on as individuals. It’s like, instead of saying, yeah, no, you know, this is the way that psychotherapy works. And you say, no, this is the way that psychotherapy works because this works for like, this makes sense to me.

But if we can both point towards something out there and say, well, this is happening to the brain. 

Giancarlo: Because evolutionary biology brought us there. 

Chris: Yeah. Like it gives you a common ground. It gives you a form of, of starting to agree upon things. Yeah. Or it gives you a very pragmatic way to go about it as well.

And so it felt important to incorporate that. And yeah, 

Giancarlo: it 

Chris: felt like a fascinating 

Giancarlo: possibility. And the degree in Bologna had this part, this component of biology, which Exactly. So 

Chris: I studied neuroscience and I I studied with one of the people who [00:29:00] discovered the mirror neurons. I don’t even know the mirror neurons.

No. Mirror neurons is like this it’s a long winded thing, but it’s quite interesting. So they, they were like the experimenters were studying the brain of monkeys, right? of apes. And they had an electrode in the motor area of the ape, and they were studying the firing of these neurons whenever the ape went to grasp something, let’s say a cup, right?

And so the ape, you know, moved the hand like this, grasped this, and the neuron fired. This is like the, the neuron that corresponded to the grasping movement of the hand, right? And so what they found was that the They, they, okay, we’ve done the experiment, the experiment is now done, alright, let’s wrap things up and go home.

The ape was still connected, the electrode to the ape, the neuroscientist went and grasped the cup to take it away, to pull it out, and they found that the neuron was firing, of the ape. But the ape wasn’t grasping. [00:30:00] And so, they said, well, what, what’s going on? And so, they realized that the, the same neurons that are in charge for movements.

are also firing when the ape was observing another person doing that movement. And so they, they started to develop this sort of like interesting research program where the idea that perception and action are really not that different. They’re part of like the same continuum. And this research was then developed even further and further and further.

And you know, some theories say that this is potentially the basis of empathy, right? You know, what I see. the emotions that I see in you, you know, the same neural mechanism is activated when I have that same emotion within me. And so it’s a way for me to understand you, to reach out into you, to connect with you, these sort of mirror neurons.

Anyway, so that was, yeah, 

Giancarlo: it’s very interesting. And it [00:31:00] makes me think that sometimes When you pitch a project, it’s like you create this excitement as if it’s happening because you’re imagining it, right? I think it’s a similar mechanism. Exactly. 

Chris: Yeah, very similar. And so I did that and and so around that time, this is 2013, when I was wrapping up my PhD.

Giancarlo: With the PhD you haven’t met him. Sorry, sorry, 

Chris: I was wrapping up my master’s. And and so I found out that there was a conference happening in London that was devoted to psychedelics. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy. I mean that 

Giancarlo: was the Hoffman birthday, you know. No, that was the breaking convention conference.

The first one. The 

Chris: second one in 2013. And I mean, I come from Chile, like this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in Chile. You were not 

Giancarlo: exposed to psychedelic as a kid with the band and everything? I 

Chris: think, well, I it happened you know, it [00:32:00] was part of the milieu. I’d rather not speak about the specifics.

Okay. But. Yeah, I mean, psychedelics were always a very fascinating interest. I was I remember when I was in school, I had taken a course in psychology when we were trying to, you know, pick the courses that you, you know, will determine the thing. And I remember being fascinated by drugs. This is school time, right?

I was, I think, 16 or 17. Fascinated by drugs. As a mind altering substance. As, as all drugs, because they were the toolbox to perturb the mind. Like, it was like, what, like, this is insane. And I was You picked 

Speaker 6: the least little thing? 

Chris: Exactly, I was reading this thing, and I was like, understanding how addiction worked, and I was understanding how, you know, like, how the opioids, you know, the, the, the withdrawal, and then the, you know, and the withdrawal mechanism in the brain that generates this addiction, and then reading about psychedelics, and then understanding cannabis, and, you know, and cannabis was a big part of, and, and, you know, what was happening in that culture at that time.

In Chile, it still [00:33:00] happens. Cannabis is huge. And so it felt like, you know, me that I was always interested in the mind that you would have this toolbox. I mean, for me it was insane. I mean, it’s just like, this is crazy stuff. And so I was always fascinated by that. And so It went a bit dormant, the drugs thing, as I was 

Giancarlo: studying, 

Chris: studying and then getting into neuroscience and getting a bit my chops, my intellectual chops, right, and my theoretical one, my experimental thought, you know, chops, right.

And reemerged as I was finishing my, my initial period of training in this conference. And I went to the conference in 2013. And I remember being like, this is, this is awesome. Like, this is so amazing what’s happening here. It felt like I’d encountered some sort of secrets, some sort of secret treasure or something.

I mean, it was like, I remember arriving, it was a sunny day in London for some reason, which felt like, wow, that’s nice. And is in the University of Greenwich, which is a [00:34:00] beautiful place. And the first lecture that I saw was the one by David Nutt. A hugely inspiring speaker in many different ways. Hugely respected authority in psychopharmacology.

And a feeling at the time of real excitement. It didn’t have this complexity that it has now in the psychedelic field. It was really like this thing of like, there is this secret that has been dormant for 30 years in research. and it’s coming out again. And there’s these few things and Imperial was just like an emerging name at the time, right?

And so I think David had been there with Brovin for only two years doing these experiments. Psychedelics, there was no psychedelic team. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. David Nutt was famous. He upset the government because he said that horse riding was more dangerous than MDMA. Exactly. Yeah. 

Chris: Yeah. And Exactly. So, so, so he was a controversial figure.

He was a bit of a cowboy and he was admired by that, by the psychedelic community, while [00:35:00] at the same time being hugely respected by scientific communities. Because he was 

Giancarlo: not using. 

Chris: Actually still is by both, by both you know, by both fields. And so I mean, I was absolutely hypnotized by it. That’s what happened.

And Amanda 

Giancarlo: probably was speaking. 

Chris: Amanda spoke and David Luke spoke and I heard Eric Davis, which I felt was. Awesome. And I just felt like there was this I’ve always been a person of many interests, literary interests, scientific interests, artistic interests, and it, and it felt like the conference had that sort of multidisciplinary, multidisciplinary.

And the, the science, you know, I go to scientific conferences, serious ones, and I think they’re very important, very serious as well. This one also seemed to have something very unique, which, you know, it kind of was able to have all these different things talking to each other. Yeah. And so that was also like, wow, this field is so much fun.

You find a common thing of all your interests. Exactly. So much fun. And I [00:36:00] remember coming back and talking to my girlfriend and say like, you know, I think if I go into this field of research, I I’d be able to maybe dedicate my life to this and not think that I’m always leaving music behind or something like that.

And and in that conference, I met a very dear friend of mine to this day who was starting his PhD, the first PhD of that, of the Imperial Group, which is Mendel Kalin, who who then connected me with, with David Nutt and and Robin. And, and, you know, I applied to a scholarship, got a scholarship from the Chilean government to study, you know.

a PhD there at Imperial College. And you got it? And I got it. 

Chris (2): Nice. 

Chris: Luckily I, I still don’t understand how that happens. 

Giancarlo: That’s amazing that the Chilean government gives money to Imperial. I mean, 

Chris: it was, it was crazy. And and so I started my PhD in 2015. And and I, you know, I devoted my, my studies, my second part of my training, my PhD.

I devoted it [00:37:00] to understanding what DMT is and what, and that developed into essentially what are the effects of psychedelics in the mind and consciousness. 

Giancarlo: That was your PhD thesis? Yeah. And you discuss it, you finish it? 

Chris: Oh yeah. I mean, that was in 2020. Ah. And so I, I, I did my PhD from 2015 to 2020.

Huh. That was all devoted to the neuroscience of DMT. And other psychedelics, but mostly DMT, the effects in the, in the brain and the mind. There was a, a big part of my PhD was also very much devoted to developing methods of phenomenology. So developing methods that are not just about understanding the mind, but also understanding the experience.

And putting the rigor of science into inquiring into that experience. When I first got into psychedelics and I started to do a PhD. My friends would tell me, dude, you’re doing a PhD in psychedelics, but you’re neglecting like the most interesting part of this thing, which is like the trip itself. [00:38:00] And you know, there was that intuition.

I always agreed with that. And so there was a very strong commitment to, okay, like, what is this experience about? And how can we Bridge and ground that experience with the rigor of science and neurobiology. 

Giancarlo: But why was the critic, why were they saying you were ignoring the trip? Because you were more interested in, look at the, what was happening in the brain rather than what was the feeling?

Chris: Right. I mean, it’s more like the, it wasn’t an critical on, on me or what I was doing. It was a scientific method. It is more on, on the, on the broad project, the neuroscience of psychedelics. Mm-hmm . Which is like, all right, okay. You finite that for, found out that, for example, like, you know, you take LSD and the default motor network disconnects or becomes hyperconnected.

Okay. So what? Right. And so what, what, what I think is interesting in that question is rather what are the qualities of that experience? Of course. In that experience, how do they relate to brain activity and how, what does that tell us about the brain more generally and [00:39:00] about the mind more generally?

So that the focus for me became, how are these tools? To understand the mind, which again relates, you know, we started with my fascination with the mind, like how does this help us understand the experience of human, of humanity, of human beings? 

Giancarlo: What’s for you the difference between brain and mind? 

Chris: Brain, the difference between brain and mind it could be the same thing.

But the way that we approach and, and what we’re talking about, There are different things. The brain is the apparatus that you have inside your skull that if I’m a scientist, another person is a scientist can poke at it, you know, something will happen and we will observe the same thing. The mind is your experience.

When I talk about the mind, it’s the same when I talk about consciousness more broadly, it’s about human experience. And human experience, I can study it by interviewing you, for example. Or by, or by giving you a [00:40:00] questionnaire and you can tell me about what happened to you, for example. But I cannot.

Like there’s this thing, intuitive way to understand that I think is very interesting and actually quite important. There’s this philosopher, David Chalmers, who speaks about the heart problem of consciousness and the heart problem of consciousness is fundamentally speaks about. The challenge that science has to explain the intimate subjective quality of human experience, like the feeling that you are having right now as Giancarlo, how do you connect that with the patterns of brain activity that you might have in your brain?

What’s happening in your body more broadly? We know they’re related. I know that if I cut a bit of your brain out and put it out, your experience will change. However, how that, what is that bridge that is unexplained in science? And this is what’s called the heart, [00:41:00] this is the heart problem of consciousness.

How is it that the brain relates fundamentally to mind? How is it that the ineffable, like the subjective quality of human experience relates to the natural biological stuff that’s happening to you? And that hasn’t been solved. 

Giancarlo: That’s still a mystery. 

Chris: Like, that’s, that’s, that could be an unsolvable problem for science.

That could be fundamentally a philosophical problem that we will always have. Because these are two registers that just never connect. Or it could be a matter of empirical research and development of technology. And then we may be able to maybe solve it at some point. Yeah, we don’t know. And so, until we solve it, they are kind of like two different, I speak about them as different things.

Because it helps us guide the discussion and, you know, understand what is that we’re talking about, define our terms and be specific about the things that matter. 

Giancarlo: But so when, okay, so we are at [00:42:00] breaking convention, you felt I found my purpose. This compound would allow me to explore in a way all the different discipline I’m interested on, including, including music.

I, you connected with David, you start working for Imperial College and when was another moment of ecstasy, like the same moment you had at breaking convention, when you discover this field, when was the, the next big ha ha be high moment saying, I’m really excited for what I’m doing. 

Speaker: Yeah. 

Chris: I think the moment that we started to dose people with part of our DMT experiments 

Giancarlo: intravenous intravenous.

Chris: Yeah. So we were, I mean, I don’t know if you want me to break down what DMT is. And 

Giancarlo: yeah, sure. Of course. 

Chris: And so, yeah, I mean, my research unfold like devoted itself primarily to understand what is the impact that DMT has in the brain. DMT is a molecule. Psychedelic [00:43:00] molecule that induces very powerful experiences.

It’s a molecule that is present in nature in many plants. It’s also present in mammals in very low amounts, very, very tiny amounts. But when you inject it or when you smoke it, it provides this very compressed, intense psychedelic trip where people feel transported or immersed into what feels like a different reality many times.

And in kind of half of the cases that we’ve seen, people interact with these entities and beings. 

Giancarlo: We produce it endogenously, that’s been proven? 

Chris: Yeah, that With the lungs? There is a lot of evidence that we produce it endogenously. The ingredients are in the lungs to produce it. It’s not proven entirely that it’s produced in the lungs, but the ingredients are there.

We know that it has been found in the brain of rats. 

Giancarlo: So we don’t know if we produce it with the holotropic breathwork. No, we don’t, we don’t know that. We can speculate. 

Chris: That is, that is pure speculation at this point. [00:44:00] And also whether or not it happens at the moment of death and birth that some people have claimed.

That’s pineal gland speculation. 

Giancarlo: The 

Chris: pineal gland speculation that has been mostly debunked because What they’ve done is that they’ve taken rats, they’ve taken out the pineal gland, and they still see that there’s DMT in the brains. And so you don’t need the pineal gland to produce DMT. That’s what Some pieces of evidence are saying there’s still emerging evidence showing that the DMT levels in the brain may be high.

And so this is a, you know, it could play an important role in human experience. We just don’t know what is that role and we need more work to be done in that regard. It’s a fascinating avenue of inquiry for sure. And so I, I, I did my you know, these first studies and, and the first But what, 

Giancarlo: what, sorry to interrupt, but what connected you to DMT?

It was, it was Imperial that recommended or Yeah. Because there was so many different others. There was Salah Sabin trial going on. So at the 

Chris: time there was LSD development, they just, there was just doing that LSD [00:45:00] initial, no brain imaging much before that. I finally enough when I first got in there, I worked for the trial that David Luke was running with creativity and LSD.

I sat for a few people there, you know. I never got published, unfortunately, but it’s fascinating having this research. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, yeah. He talked, he talked on this episode Oh, very cool. On, on, on how he was problem solving for people, scientists that had been working on tectonic plate and different things and had a major breakthrough thanks to the, That’s very cool.

Chris (2): Yeah. 

Giancarlo: And so What drew you to DMT specifically? 

Chris: So there were, I think there were two reasons. First, one of them was, it wasn’t being researched At the time, there was an avenue to, to further knowledge on something that was still undeveloped. And on the other hand, it’s, it’s like it’s a perfect molecule to, to employ in neuroscience and to employ in consciousness research.

Because it’s short acting. And so instead of having this kind of like [00:46:00] long thing that happens with LSD or psilocybin, this long experience that has many components and many different aspects to it, with DMT you can capture the impact that it has in the brain and the mind before, during and after.

Because DMT, and this is an experience that lasts 10 minutes when it’s injected intravenously. And so that’s what we did. We did experiments where we injected it intravenously and we’re just having these experiences. And so I think when we were starting to get into it and I started to do the research, that’s when there was a second, you know, huge moment of like this kind of thing.

It’s like, it’s like an adventure. This is, this is, this is quite an amazing, lucky job that I have. This is an incredible opportunity to understand these things. How is it that Why is it that there is a form of recurrence on the fact that people see entities? What is it this thing that there’s a drug that induces presences?[00:47:00] 

Why is it that what these presences have to say appear to be very meaningful and fundamental for people? Why is it that it connects people with themes of life and death? How is it that these experiences are inducing a form of ontological shock? A, a sort of realization or, or, or, or a, or a feeling that the nature of reality might be somewhat different.

And so these things were like, I think those, those first experiments were like a bit of a moment where I was, okay, let’s go down. Now it’s down. It’s time to go down this warm hole and try to figure this thing out. And, and, and that was also a long period. And so not only did I do these experiments with the MT inside of the fMRI scanner, I looked at patterns of brain connectivity and all these changes and all these effects, but I also started to do naturalistic research and try to see like, for example, how is it that psychedelics might impact your beliefs after you take it for the first time?[00:48:00] 

And so I did a large scale scale survey based on that. And we showed. that a single experience with a psychedelic such as DMT can dramatically alter your beliefs concerning the nature of reality. Your ontological view, your ontological view your, your, your perception on what is the nature of both the nature of reality, but also the nature of, of the mind.

Well you know, like theories of consciousness and stuff like this. And then that, well, you know, while I was doing that, This whole kind of work. It became apparent to me that there were there was something very delicate about this. There was something both potentially precious for people undergoing these experiences, but also delicate.

These are strong experiences. I was seeing that some people were maybe getting a bit too fascinated with this. you know, this whole alternate reality or, you know, people going down this wormhole in a bit of an obsessive way [00:49:00] sometimes. And then sometimes people like smoking DMT every day for, I don’t know, months.

And then coming back and saying, Chris, I’m convinced about this. Like, you know, like going to the DMT researcher talking about these things. And then at the same time, I saw that, you know, there was this kind of like emerging thing happening in parallel with the clinical applications of psychedelics. I mean, in the lab that I was working, there was, there was these trials going on.

So around the third year of my PhD, the Center for Psychedelic Research was created. Michael Pollan’s book comes out and there’s this like explosion of like, of interest. And at the same time, there was this feeling of like, You know, it’s putting all these things together, a feeling of like this thing becoming very much a fixture of the wellness industry in many ways.

And a certain trivialization or banalization of the experience and, you know, like something like, kind of [00:50:00] like, it was kind of losing its depth, potentially losing that, that form of depth when it was coming into this broader discourse, which is normal and expected to happen. So I started to see that there was a bit of an ethical thing coming up.

And so, you have these molecules that impact the nature of the mind. So, impact the beliefs that people may have. May induce some form of conspiracy theories if people are not in the right container for the experiences. Can induce a form, maybe, of obsession for some individuals. And what I was seeing in the clinical trials, maybe even bringing up false memories and false beliefs.

Yeah, false memories that can deal with abuse, for example. And so another aspect of the research so the first is DMT. The other one is like beliefs. And then the other one was like the ethical aspects of this. And so a strong focus on what is the nature of these insights that people are having, [00:51:00] they feel true to people and that appears to be driving the therapeutic benefits in a very big degree.

And also those insights appear to be the source of distress. These false memories, these conspiracy theories that can happen. And not to say that all these things are bad things, right? But in, in, in, in certain contexts, they can be problematic for the person. 

Giancarlo: But the conspiracy theory is some sort of like paranoid behavior.

Chris: Yeah. Like, like the The, the, the guy that stormed the capital, the, the shaman, the, what was his, there was a name for the guy. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, I can visualize him with the horns and everything. 

Chris: That guy. Yeah. Right. And so and the spiritual bypassing element. Yeah. And so all this were aspects that concerned the nature of that psychedelic experience as well.

And so this, This sort of like impact that psychedelics have on the mind inducing these experiences that appear to be transformative and this insights that appear to be very much revealing to individuals and helping [00:52:00] individuals, but also on other occasions or for other individuals causing forms of distress.

And so, you know, developing this idea that these experiences can act as double edged, like a double edged sword. And so the question arising of how is it that this. practice is enabled. And this awareness, this realization that this is not a passive thing that just happens to you. And in a way that may be needed is a form of cultivation of sophisticated practice around psychedelics.

And this is very intuitive for many indigenous practitioners, for many psychotherapists that employ psychedelic therapies and so on. And for many psychonauts that engage with the practices themselves, But for many individuals, this is not obvious that you need 

Giancarlo: practice to become better at something 

Chris: exactly like this is a skill, but this is this is not you taking, like having a beer you know, like every weekend or something [00:53:00] this, this, this is like a ritual or this is a form of science or you know, this is a form of inquiry into the mind.

And so at the tail end of that. becoming interested in the idea, for example, of meditation as a form of cultivation of a practice that has this sort of parallels as a, as a lineage of development of practice of generations after generations, where they kind of perfect these rituals, these practices, these ways of doing things that are sophisticated, that could somehow help people navigate these insights so that they are safe, but also meaningful.

Interesting. And I think this is something that we’re developing and we will continue developing, I think. 

Giancarlo: Nice. So that was the answer to my question of What was the second time you felt really excited? 

Chris: I give you like many things that I felt excited about. No, no, but, 

Giancarlo: you know, this is very interesting.

It’s important because people still don’t understand to [00:54:00] what extent this trip into Yosaki is really like a trip in a, you know, on an active volcano and you need a guide, you need to be able to, you know, help navigation and also some insight on where you want to go. Yeah. But so, so. This, you know, the third legs of your research, you said, okay, the first one is the effect of the DMT in the brain.

The second one is what was the second one? 

Chris: The second one was like the impact on beliefs, 

Giancarlo: the impact on belief ontologically, what do you think about it? And the third one is how can you can develop skills to improve the chance of a positive outcome and a useful outcome. 

Chris: Exactly. And, and at the tail end of that like how is it that you develop skills and so on?

Yeah. Yeah. Implicitly and explicitly that, that the, the, the, what seems to be an important way forward is to bring an attention to experience, is to bring an attention into the phenomenology [00:55:00] of these psychedelic experiences. And what needs to be developed is a skill of experience. And this is kind of like the avenue.

Where, where where I’ve, I think I’ve, I’ve developed my, my research since then in the past four years, my, my, my first postdoc and we’re I’m pushing it forward now as I’m moving to a new institution and, and opening up a research center. And so that, that’s, these are the questions that fascinate me.

These are the questions that I think connect. The basic science, the nerdy techie stuff and understanding how these drugs impact the brain and the mind with the practice. With why these things will be impactful for people. How is it that they could help, if they could help? And, and how do we enact this in a way that is helpful for people and, and it’s meaningful and beautiful.

Giancarlo: Yeah, you know, I’m thinking when, when you mentioned about, you know, the [00:56:00] different ontology, sometimes I feel that You know, our society is not really, I mean, in the, in the in the psychedelic research industry at large. There’s a lot of attention in drug develop, development and. But sometimes I feel, you know, when people talk about the integration of this experience, usually it’s one or two Zoom calls, right?

But so sometimes I think like ontologically that word is so different. It’s like, it’s like you take the, you know, the people from the cavemen, like they take the flintstone, you take them to Manhattan for one day and then it’s like, okay, let’s integrate that. It’s impossible, right? You need to go through 10, 000 years of 20, 000 years of civilization.

And so And then I would see if I can try to, to, to bridge what I’m trying to say with the FDA refusing the, the, the, the approval to, to phase three for MDMA for us, for us psychedelic for MDMA assisted [00:57:00] psychotherapy. So, you know, I, you know, I, I live in Ibiza part time and there’s a lot of ceremony, a lot of sharing and, and it happens very often.

Maybe not very often, but often that you have maybe an inexperienced younger person that is completely destabilized by What they see, because ontologically they don’t have the framework and if they haven’t been prepared, they haven’t been exposed, it’s, it’s, it’s a cultural shock that can be hard on, on the psyche and might take weeks or months to integrate and, and it’s not necessarily like useful to go through that shock.

So my question to you, don’t you think that and I’m curious to know what is this new institution you mentioned? Together with the drug development and together with the, with the, with the, with the, with, with the patent and finding the permit to, to, to sell this drug crew and be like creating more like educational center.

That start at least suggest a possible ontology like you know, [00:58:00] animist or panpsychist that would create a more you know, a more compatible world view. To avoid this clash and, you know, until we’re going to stay stuck on the secular materialistic worldview, the integration will be difficult, don’t you think?

Chris: Well, I think that, well, there’s, there’s a lot to say about that. I, I, I, I I am fully agnostic on, you know, what is the nature of reality. I, or the nature of consciousness, I think, are you 

Speaker 4: really, or you’ve been politically correct? No, no, no, no, no. 

Chris: I am like, I, this is like, you 

Speaker 4: might have, you might have a hunch.

Chris: No, no, no, no. Really? Like this is, this is like my, this is my religion. And I think this is the, or the problem of humanity achieving certainty in this. I mean, I think, but it’s not 

Giancarlo: certainty, it’s a hunch. I mean, you think that when you die, you die. 

Speaker 4: I have no idea. Okay. I believe, I believe. [00:59:00] No, no, but no, but I mean, I, I truly, 

Giancarlo: and I think.

You don’t have a scientific idea because it’s impossible to prove it the other 

Chris: way, but. But, but this is the thing. I mean, I, I, I strive to make this sort of endeavor of science very much connected to my personal thing. And I think you know, as human beings, our conundrum of existence is that we don’t know that.

We don’t know that. Yeah. Like this is the basis of what we are, this not knowing this, like, you know, as Heidegger says, is being thrown into the world. You’re just, you’re just appearing into this thing. You don’t know why. And, and, and, and, you know, we don’t know where we go and we don’t, we don’t know that, you know, the ultimate meaning of things.

We just don’t. I mean, the West. But I, I also in the East, I think is this the basis of humanity that we don’t know. And it’s not to say that if people believe something, that’s wrong. It’s just that my view is very much agnostic in that and I think that in the, in the secular [01:00:00] context that we live in it’s almost like that uncertainty is something that we’re kind of cultivating in a way.

Because if we have that full blown certainty, then, well, I believe this, you believe that. If you come here and you believe this, this is incompatible with this thing, war. And so I, I, I kind of think that it feels like a way forward to cultivate that, at least at the societal level, to, to cultivate a form of being able to inhabit the uncertainty of it.

I, I think that, 

Chris (2): yeah, 

Chris: yeah, I mean, I think that that’s a real skill. If, when you talk to some people who are long term meditators, not all of them because there’s different traditions and different things, but you know, what the very good meditators sometimes say is like, whenever you feel that you’ve achieved.

this understanding of the nature of mind and you’re inhabiting and you’re like indulging in that, you have to like break frame. You have to like break it down, like don’t stay there. That’s, that’s the trap. [01:01:00] Because the moment you stay there, you know, conviction, conviction arises, hypersensitivity arises, and then, and then, you know, that’s, that’s when the tricks of the mind start to happen.

And I think that’s true to, to many, many things that happen to human beings. And From the secular Western perspective, I think that there’s a way forward also with understanding the psychedelic experience from that perspective. 

Giancarlo: From an uncertain. Yeah, and so rather than educational center on panpsychism and enemies, you will have educational center that teach you to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Yeah, 

Chris: I mean, but think about that. This is the project of science. The project of science is this idea that, OK, you have a paper. Say we found this thing out. You have a thesis. That is never crystallized. Yeah. There’s always another person doing, Oh, but we found out now this thing. 

Chris (2): Yeah. 

Chris: So it’s a process.

Yeah, it’s always a process. And I, and I think if I have a metaphysical conviction is that life is a process. 

Chris (2): Yeah. 

Chris: Consciousness is a process. Is this whole thing is a process of figuring out. We’re [01:02:00] always in a process of figuring out things. And I think that the, the, the, the, there’s a true. There’s a, there’s a truth to this idea of understanding life as surfing as like, well, it’s about enjoying the process rather than thinking about the goal is about being able to inhabit that.

And it’s about developing the craft of figuring it out while you’re a human being so that you can enjoy the act of the jazz of life in a way. And I, yeah, I think that there’s a, that resonates with me from a personal perspective. And I think. Also from a scientific perspective. 

Giancarlo: I see. Okay. Let me ask you something else.

Like, my friend says that psychedelics are not for sick people. Psychedelics are for everybody. And so, so we are looking for, you know, I don’t know, two, three hundred million people over seven billion people, right? So all of a sudden we change the focus. And I agree. I agree that psychedelic is not just for the sick people, [01:03:00] right?

I mean, psychedelic as a form of self exploration and self improvement and healing and self connection We I, you know, I, I’m sure that is good for, for everybody it, we eat with the right preparation, with the right education, with the right integration. But so how do we, how do you see in the West preparing this society to offer psychedelic for everybody?

Chris (2): Yeah. 

Giancarlo: And if you can, in your answer, maybe comment on why. What happened with the FDA and with MDMA, if this is going to also slow down the psychedelic and is, you know, is this, is this the integration in the, okay, let me just add one thing because in the, you know, we’ll see what you say, but you know, a typical answer is that, okay, we start with the, with the Western healthcare because then that’s, you know, it’s the Trojan horse.

But then. What, [01:04:00] what I feel is what I feel there’s something not right about this medical system is that it still follows this pathology diagnosis prognosis method, which is very reductionist. And that’s only can work if the drug is directly meant to address a symptom. If the drug is. meant to expand consciousness and then use the placebo really to deal with the symptoms.

It doesn’t fit in the Western healthcare. So my question is, shouldn’t we, shouldn’t we also try, you know, like I asked David Luke, if you were the prime minister of the universe, or at least of this planet, and you can have a limited power, what would you do to offer this medicine to everybody and not just to the sick people?

Chris: Yeah. Okay. So there’s two, two things there. I mean, two, two [01:05:00] questions, it seems. So let me do the first and which is about how to prepare everybody to have this. And I also want to clarify something that I just said. I think it’s quite relevant. And the second one is a comment on the FDA and the medical model.

So first one and so I, I, I, I think that you know, we live in a secular world but also a pluralistic world. I also want to just like qualify what I said about like teaching people how to inhabit that uncertainty. And I think what I mean is it’s just a larger project where I think people can have their convictions, they can have their beliefs, but I think what, what you kind of teach them, what, what, what you, what you want to develop in society is flexibility and the capacity to adapt to change when it comes to these things.

And so. Thinking about an example if my partner does something that upsets me and I become mad at that or I become a bit upset at that, you know, I have to learn how to be able to [01:06:00] communicate that, but I have to be able to say it. I have to have that conviction and feel it and say, I don’t like this.

Like this is a thing, this, this. To me this matters, and I, you know, I want to communicate to you that, you know, and I’m inhabiting that conviction. I’m inhabiting my subjectivity, and I’m inhabiting this idea that I come from a place, right? I, I have my convictions. I have my beliefs. I can be a panpsychist.

I can be a materialist. I can be a whatever. But in certain contexts, it’s important to me, for me to be flexible and maybe drop those beliefs for a second and inhabit other beliefs if, if, if it needs come to be. Or inhabit a form of like, yeah, like a, a loose touch, a gentle touch around these things. 

Giancarlo: For config resolution.

Chris: Yeah. Or, or rather than this massive sort of holding onto this belief, like this is my thing. And if, and if that is threatened, I am being threatened. Identifying with that. Identify, that identification process, I think. So I think, what is it that we need to, so just to finish that [01:07:00] thing that I just said, but also to, to answer your first question, how is it that You know, like this could be helpful for a lot of people is I think we need to develop some form of literacy about the mind.

We need to develop a form of literacy about our internal states, about our experiences, and about how we identify with this process so that we can better adapt to change. I think this is not just relevant for the psychedelic stuff. That’s happening and the popularity of psychedelic use, but also for what’s happening with technology and how society is changing at this rapid pace.

I mean, what’s happening in the world is vertiginous. The amount of change and the rate of that change is insane. 

Giancarlo: With AI. 

Chris: And so I think that if we think about the skills of humanity, it’s this ability to change. And so I think, you know, when I think about consciousness science and stuff like that. I’m not just saying this abstract thing of nerdy scientists poking into the brain and understanding the nature of mind, but also, [01:08:00] you know, developing a form of education about our internal states.

A lot of humanity has been about developing the outside and technology and stuff like this. And the time has come, I think, for us to be able to understand ourselves. And how do we navigate what’s happening with the, in the outside world in a way that it is compassionate, in a way that is collaborative, in a way that is, you know, resonant with the natural environment in which we live.

And I think that psychedelics can help in that, in, in, in a large way. And, and I think developing those skills is what’s necessary for this sort of like psychedelic engagement. And I think the values of pluralism in education are important. The values of You know, adapting to change, I think psychotherapy is important process to prepare and literacy about the mind.

I mean, you know, I think these, these are the important things. And we can talk about more detail if you want, but you know, how is it that that could be implemented in society? Going into the medical model [01:09:00] and the FDA approval. 

Giancarlo: And is it the right strategy to focus on that first? 

Chris: Yeah, 

Giancarlo: On, on what? On the medical model.

Chris: Yeah, well, so this is the thing. My, I come from the perspective that our understanding of the mind, this is the medical model, is that mental disease emerges from this thing happening in your brain. Like, you know, the, the, the caricature of this is the chemical imbalance. Theory, right? You have a chemical imbalance, you have a deficit in serotonin and therefore you have depression.

But we know it’s not true. I mean, the, the, the problem with that is that it’s precisely what you say, it’s reductionistic. And it’s coming from this larger philosophical project where we look into the ultimate, we, we, we take a complex problem and we narrow it down to its finite solutions. But life is this complex and mesh.

You know, mixture, the spaghetti of mixture [01:10:00] of things that involve your brain, involve your body, involve your life history, involve this, your relationships that you have outside of yourself, and it involves also your perspective of the future and in, you know, a range of other things. And so the remedy for this reductionistic approach is this ecological approach to the mind, to the mind and mental health.

Consciousness and mental health, right? And so it’s holistic. It’s yeah, holistic is, is another way to put it. And so what I think happened with the FDA is, is just a reflection of that tension is, is the fact that the way these, the FDA approves drugs, it doesn’t approve therapies. And so the, the system is, is not geared for a combo application.

The system is geared to approve just the drug. And so if you ask me about, you know, what happened wrong, and some people criticize MAPS because they were like us, they [01:11:00] were overly complicated. They try to make this too much of, instead, if it would just been a drug application, they would have just gotten in and that’s it.

I think what they did was very ethical in that regard. They took it very seriously upon themselves and said, this is not just a drug. This is a drug plus therapy combo. And we’re not going to go down this process without acknowledging that therapeutic component. And so I really take my hat off to, to MAPS because of that.

I think that they really played the long game in that regard. And I, and I really commend them because of that. I think it’s very, very important what they did. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. And, and to avoid what happened with ketamine, which has been legalized without the therapy component and now went too much all over the place.

Chris: You’re releasing these weapons of mass, you know, like transformation. without the appropriate sort of container and culture surrounding that. And I, so I think, yeah, like so it just reflects this sort [01:12:00] of I think it, the FDA approval on the one hand reflects that inherent tension. On the other hand, it reflects I think also the, the, the, the problems that come with sometimes With a more extreme, transpersonal, disruptive view of things, where, you know, like the way that you can see it, right, like you have reductionism.

So what, what you say in reductionism, you’re essentializing biology. What matters to you, ultimately, what you think is the ultimate source of truth here is what’s happening in your brain, right? And the chemical stuff. On the other hand, you could essentialize the mind or the soul. What happens here doesn’t matter that what’s happening in your brain, what’s happening really is source.

What’s happening here is the spirit. What’s happening is here is just this stuff. 

Giancarlo: It’s a feeling of connection. Yeah. 

Chris: You’re, if you just take that view and you neglect completely what’s happening at the level of biology, [01:13:00] you’re essentializing experience, you’re essentializing that I am a, I have a strong conviction that the way forward is this.

To combine them middle way approach. Yeah. Where these things are interacting and this is inherent to the thing, I mean, it’s undeniable the dose matters. For example, people speak about set and setting. Set and setting is massively important. Context and how it influences the therapy is key. It’s key to attending it and understand it.

But if you look at the studies, the biggest predictor of a specific response is the dose. You cannot neglect this, this hardcore chemical naturalistic component and what this is, I think, Making very evident that this is a dance. This is a conversation. And what I kind of find beautiful about this FDA sort of debacle thing and the discussions that are happening and the tensions is that they’re shedding light on the fact that these reductionistic approaches [01:14:00] are insufficient.

You need to have both of these views. You need to have a view that takes very seriously what’s happening in the brain, what’s happening in the chemistry, what’s happening in dosage, what’s happening with contraindications, what’s happening with the rigor of stuff, what’s happening with looking out for boundary violations.

And also you have to take a very disciplined approach to understanding what is the nature of those experiences. Having a framework that allows all kinds of experiences that can emerge as a potential source of healing. And understanding the relational, inter subjective factors that are also part of the healing.

It’s not just a drug, it’s that therapeutic relationship. And there’s more and more evidence showing that that’s the case. The more people have this report in the process of psychedelic therapy, The more they have these mystical experiences or these cathartic experiences and the better they end up getting from these depression or [01:15:00] other mental health conditions.

Giancarlo: So you’re optimistic about this conversation that is going on and. 

Chris: Yeah, I think it’s just a necessary part of the conversation. I think it’s the long game. I don’t know what will happening in the short term and whether or not there’ll be a, I mean, you know, investment has gone down, but at the same time, you know, what’s happening in the U.

1. strangely enough is. Developed maybe now a renewed interest in, in what’s happening. 

Giancarlo: With the new administration, you mean? Yeah, 

Chris: I mean, this is, you know, they say that there’s a, I don’t have any political affiliation, but apparently that, you know, they’re trying to put it back in center, you know, centerfold again.

And so I think The psychedelic research. Yeah, the psychedelic research and the psychedelic applications. And so I say, I think that as long as we keep having these big effect sizes, as we say in science, it’s Of the interventions that the interventions are very what’s the term you use big effect sizes like the the size of the of the [01:16:00] finding that you find in science around how they can help depression or anxiety or addictions.

You know, the, the, it’s difficult for us to abandon the project. Yeah, I think more research needs to be done and it’s a call on to say. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we need to have better models to understand the mind. We need to have these more holistic ways of understanding it, but not let go the rigor that is necessary to understand these things better.

If there’s a placebo effect that is undergoing here that has a big component that is interacting with the psychedelic therapy, well, we need to understand what are those components of the placebo effect that matter so much. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Chris: Well. 

Chris (2): Yeah. 

Giancarlo: I understand what you’re saying about integrating the biology and the experiential, but I feel that this is, it’s, it’s, it’s happening.

I mean, the, the experiential and the spiritual has been saying, you know, like you see at this yogi, you know, doing this chanting and, and the [01:17:00] breath work. And then you find on the course of Peter Levine who mapped the autonomous nervous system and the Vegas nerve. And you see, we have all this nerve in your throat, in the chest.

So what the experience of transcending and the mystical experience of the chanting and the breath work is now confirmed by the presence of the relaxation of the ve vagus nerve 

Chris: maybe? Yeah. It’s possible. I’m, I’m, I’m, maybe it’s outta my own you know, lack of, lack of inquiry specifically into that.

About the vagus nerve specifically. Mm-hmm. I’d like to. No more. I’m not an expert precisely on that. But yeah, I mean, these are lines of research. We also recently published something that, for example, we saw that, you know, your, the way your sympathetic and parasympathetic system are activated predicts whether or not you will have an increase in well being after having a DMT administration.

So before having the experience, your level of fight or [01:18:00] flight or relaxation in the body that we can detect in the body. Will determine whether or not. Yeah. And so, yeah, definitely we’re, we have more and more of the impact of the body and, and the brain and, and, and how they interact with these things.

Sure. There’s, there, there is an integration that seems to be increasingly happen at the level of, of human culture. The thing is that it’s it’s a difficult one. This is not an easy to have a model that is sophisticated to understand these things. 

Chris (2): Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But you didn’t, you know, because as you know, I, I was a volunteer in the DMT extended state and I don’t remember you guys preparing my parasympathetic nervous system by relaxing, you know.

Chris: You didn’t have a body scan because we do a body scan. 

Giancarlo: I had a body scan. Oh, there you go. But there is so many practice now just with the heart rate, variability, breath work, you can relax your fight or flight, right? 

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we, we do a body scan because that’s what we, what we’ve done in the past and it has worked.

Giancarlo: And you, [01:19:00] you can see the level of stress or tension. What was the body scan for? 

Chris: The body scan is to relax you, to bring you to the present moment. What exactly? Sorry, 

Giancarlo: sorry. What we 

Chris: did before we started this interview, I mean, you know, a way to ground you, to bring you back, to lower down your heart rate.

Giancarlo: Yeah, maybe I was so nervous I forgot. 

Chris: But you had a good experience, right? 

Giancarlo: You know, listen, it might be too much information, but I already, I already told David Luke, you know, I felt a lot of pressure from this one of the sponsor from Anton to connect with this entity. I just felt that I had to meet with the entity, so I felt I had a little bit too much expectation and then he’s a little bit embarrassing.

I don’t know if maybe this time we’re going to cut it, but. You know, like in, you know, in the past now I’ve been, I’ve been, I’ve been sober for three years, but you know, my go to way to relax my nervous system was have a drink, have a have a joint, masturbate. 

Chris: Right. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: And so I [01:20:00] was really anxious, obviously for this experiment.

Right. And so, you know, I didn’t have the cannabis and the alcohol available. So I, I, I went to the third, I went to the third solution and and my trip was. Over and over and over this message that I had to stop with the energy leaking and the signal was so fragmented and almost black and white. And so my whole experience was there was moment of bliss because it’s a familiar landscape for me.

So I always feel welcome there and I always feel supported there. But there was this, this, the signal was not clear. And my takeaway was, you know, I join a mystery school to deal with my energy leakage. And so I started the neotantric work around that. So that was amazing. And my wife find me really changed and much more connected for a long time after that.

And she wrote [01:21:00] a long letter to Anton. Do you remember when we were in Ibiza? And so it was absolutely a positive experience. Also, I want to mention in terms of, because that’s super interesting for me. One of the most interesting part of research for me is when science confirms spiritual practices that doesn’t make so woohoo anymore.

Yeah. Like there is this Harvard doctor N PhD. He did his PhD on the second spine fluid. Yeah. Called Maza. And we had him on the podcast and basically his theories that, you know, this fluid you have on your spine that then bathe your ventricle in your brain is responsible for this mystical state.

Speaker: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: And this is then I, you know, I charge GPT. In which esoteric or spiritual tradition is the spine considered like a vehicle to transcendence and like almost all of them from Kundalini to mystic Christian [01:22:00] to shamanic with the tree of life with the, with so many, so many tradition was about the spine.

So where am I going with that? Yeah, I think that 

Chris: this is needed by the, 

Giancarlo: yeah, the integration when they match. Yeah. Yeah. Because I feel that ultimately what I would like to see with the psychedelic practice is more of this spiritual tradition or other spiritual practices that then will maybe, you know, transition humanity on a more tolerant and empathic and non conflictual base, you know, this, because You know, ultimately this idea of, of this understanding of, of a larger, you know, like a mind of large or or you know, like explicit order that David Bowie is talking about, there’s all this Western science, Aldous Huxley called mind at large is this idea that once you know that there is something bigger than maybe, you know, [01:23:00] depression on your, on this lifetime and your individuality can be a little bit more subdued and maybe we can, Reduce the tribalization, the polarization, and the war.

And so that’s my, that’s my, that’s my hope. That’s why when I see this compound in, in, in the, in the health, in the you know, in the Western healthcare system, I feel, but why not having like psychedelic clinic for the weekend, where you don’t have to be a mental disease, where you can only just be like, you know, like a long regeneration weekend.

Chris (2): Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Well, you can go with your wife if there is going through a crisis, or you can go with your 20 years old son who’s out of college and is a bit lost, where is it like more like of a spiritual reset? 

Chris: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But that doesn’t seem to be in the card anytime soon. I mean. Yeah, because the compound are illegal, right?

That’s why. Yeah, that’s the problem. 

Chris: Legality. Yeah, the 

Giancarlo: legality. [01:24:00] So the idea is that we go through the medical system to make them illegal. It just to make them legal. And then when they’re legal, then maybe we can serve them outside the medical prescription. But the first step is legality and that can only happen through the medical system.

Chris: Yeah, no, I, I, I agree that well, I, first I want to say that. You know, the possibility that psychedelics can be a tool for human development beyond just treating mental health conditions is a very plausible one. 

Speaker 6: Yeah. More than plausible. Yeah. I 

Chris: mean, from a scientific perspective, I have to say that you need the evidence to firmly say that.

And, but there’s lines of research that seems to be very beautiful in that regard. Like, for example, my friend Lior, who’s doing it for conflict resolution between Israelis and Palestinians, for example. Who’s doing that? Lior. Lior Roseman. That’s, you know, an amazing sort of avenue of, of research and, and I think very fruitful.

Just the idea of, of thinking it as couples therapy, you know, speaks about that, but at a more micro level, you know, [01:25:00] this, this thing of getting along and, and, you know, it’s, it’s absolutely plausible and there seems to be avenues there that I think are absolutely amazing of development. And then there’s the element of creativity.

of, of fueling this capacity that we have as human beings of, of reaching out beyond our, our current state and developing innovative solutions and find ways forward of development that are also, you know, ethical. That’s, that’s, those are the possibilities. And, you know, I think that’s, That is the next step in the research for me, you know, that this development of this research center is very much linked to also that idea of, of understanding this as a, as a means to explore and develop the mind as well.

And so. You know, one way to do that is just by doing the science, but also is to understand how these applications might work outside of these contexts too. 

Giancarlo: But so tell us a bit more about this new research center. Right. Is it official now you can? [01:26:00] 

Chris: Well, it’s, I can’t tell much details now. I’m just moving to UCL to start the research center together with Jeremy Skipper, who’s an expert in language and the brain.

Giancarlo: Nice. 

Chris: So UCL stands for? University College London. Yeah. And so our focus is consciousness research, psychedelics and meditation. Amazing. And so putting these things together and Is a 

Giancarlo: big center in terms of funding and people and resources. 

Chris: We’re developing it right now. And so, and so we’re, we’re, we’re looking to find partners to, to help develop this and to make it into something where You know, we can, we can somehow propel these new avenues, avenues of development with psychedelics, avenues of research, understanding psychedelics in the context, in the natural context in which they’re used, understanding psychedelics in terms of how It can be used as tools of insight.

Yeah. Or, or creativity in certain degrees. 

Giancarlo: But then you see, when, when you say understand them in a natural environment, [01:27:00] you mean on a more animistic ontology? 

Chris: Well, I, I ecological, I mean not just in the lab, but also how they’re used outside labs in these natural context. In the jungle. In, in the jungle. It could be in, in the, I mean, there’s this huge thing of like for example, just give one example of that, the whole question of.

Psychedelics and nature connectedness, right? The idea that psychedelics make you resonate with the natural world, makes you aware that you are a living system in the same way that the natural world outside is, is a huge deal. When we think about our times of ecological crisis, we are in a crisis of disconnection with the natural environment.

And what we have to develop is to find a, yeah, develop a form of kinship again with the natural environment. Psychedelics are tools that can help us do that. That is a massive sort of thing. If the way that they do that is by bringing about an animistic perspective on nature, well, that might be, you know, fascinating way forward.[01:28:00] 

From the point of view of consciousness research, there’s still very open questions of to what extent are animals conscious, to what extent is a mammal conscious. We’re opening that up very much right now in the, in the research, like right now the consciousness research group, the very serious scientific consciousness research community is like saying, you know, we think like many mammals have a degree of consciousness that resonates with the consciousness of human beings.

And a lot of people argue that all the way down to, to plants or, or even very elementary biological systems. And it’s this hypothesis that. In a very big way, there’s a continuity between life and mind, and that somehow there is some form of cognition that is happening at level of the cell that is simply bootstrapped all the way up into our human experience right now.

These are fascinating. Open, open, you know, like open questions that I think [01:29:00] for many people they become somewhat intuitive in the psychedelic experiences, in, in different kinds of ways, and I think it’s, it’s an avenue of exploration. And there’s another thing. I think it’s quite relevant to mention in that regard.

Right now, how psychedelic therapy happens is this, you’re laying down with the eye mask, and you go in, and you explore your things, and you heal, and so on. You look at the traditional use of psychedelics, it’s used in nature. It’s used outside. And, who’s to say there could not be a way to employ psychedelic therapy also within that context.

And so I think that there’s, there’s a lot to do. There’s a lot of to figure out and avenues to develop. And I think, yeah, the question of human development more broadly is hugely important. 

Giancarlo: Fascinating. But so do you plan any new trial at UCL? 

Chris: Yeah. So right now what we’re we have like these two broad, you know, areas of [01:30:00] development right now.

One, it concerns the development of. DMT for inside development and creativity. 

Giancarlo: Inside development. 

Chris: And so DMT extended, right. And so one of the things that we did in my postdoc, and this was supported by Anton and the Tiringham initiative is, you know, like that you would somehow be able to extend that DMT experience, you know, that I mentioned before, which is you inject it and you’re smoking is your 10 minutes in and you’re out.

You would be able to somehow extend that beyond those 10 minutes to 30 minutes or to one an hour and a half or, or, you know, even longer possibly. We did those experiments, we developed that technology, it works. And opening up the possibility that somehow we can now extend the duration of that, of and also tailor it to the individual.

And so, you know, if you’re an individual and you say, well, you know, what I need [01:31:00] maybe is not a boom experience that I’m immediately there, but it’s a slow come up. Or it could be that a slow come up, but then I come down and then I come back again. And so. Finding ways of personalizing this psychedelic experience.

Also with therapy, maybe. Potentially with therapy as a development. So we’re interested in developing those tools that can personalize that sort of 

Giancarlo: thing. 

Chris: We’re going to have to 

Giancarlo: get ready to do another documentary.

Chris: So that’s one of the areas. And the other areas is you know, using 5 MeO DMT. And so these are the lines of research that I’ve been developing in the past two years, and we’ll develop even further. down the line. My interest with 5 MeO DMT is the same interest that I have with advanced meditation practices and the science of advanced meditation practices, is that it seems like in these states consciousness appears to be deconstructed to a fundamental or elementary state.[01:32:00] 

And so when people smoke 5 MeO DMT they lose the sense of self, But in the extreme cases also, they lose all thoughts, they lose all memories. All that remains is an experience of awareness. And so if you’re interested in understanding how the mind works, like the initial impulse to this whole thing, you know, you would have this sort of minimal model of the mind to accessing the canvas that is supporting The painter, the, you know, the, the, the picture of experience, right?

And so it’s like understanding the basic structures of, of the mind. And so I’m interested in, in developing this, this research program further understanding how does the brain conjure up an experience without a sense of self altogether or without any other thoughts? What is that brain state? What is the fundamental things that are happening at the level of the mind and the brain?

Giancarlo: Wow. Amazing. 

Chris: There’s a deep dive into that. [01:33:00] Yeah. So that’s the other element. 

Giancarlo: Wow. Yeah. So one last question to finish I couldn’t really get much of your personal experience. So let’s, let, let me, let me see if where, where would you like to see yourself in five, 10, 20 years? Like you woke up in the morning in five, 10, 20 years and what would you like to be doing?

I would, I would really like to 

Speaker 4: I mean, it’s three different questions, I guess, right? 5, 10, 20. 

Chris: 5, 10, 20. Yeah. Establishing a, a, a research program that takes, that takes the idea of consciousness and experience seriously, that you would. We could have the funding to do that kind of research easily, that we could do that safely and that we could do that meaningfully.

That is the project that I am invested in. I am invested in ways to explore and develop the, the mind in the best ways that we can and [01:34:00] my hat in this game. Most of the time is science when it comes to that. That’s what I’m particularly interested and I, and I think this research center is one of those avenues.

And so to develop that you know, that is my, my program, my research. Amazing. 

Giancarlo: Chris, thank you so much. Thank you for your work. If ever someone that listened to this episode who has. extra money to donate to a research center, what should I do? Maybe just text me and then I’ll put in touch with you. 

Chris: That would be the ideal, yeah, or contact me.

You can look me up online you know, there’s, there’s contacts. There’s, there’s the website that I have, my personal website. That is the Imperial. I’m also active in Twitter. 

Giancarlo: What, what’s your personal website? 

Chris: So it’s the Imperial one. It’s right now. I’ll have one in UCL soon. But Twitter is the easiest way to contact me.

What’s your handle on, on X? Neuro, and X is at Neurodelia. Yeah. Neurodelia. I’m also on LinkedIn. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. So we’ll put it on the show [01:35:00] notes your handle on X and your LinkedIn page. And so, you know, what’s the minimum donation you accept? 

Chris: All donations are very much 

Speaker 4: welcome. All donations 

Chris: are 

Speaker 4: welcome. 

Chris: Yes.

Giancarlo: Okay. Anything you want to share with, you know, with people interested in psychedelic? Yes. Okay. Any last thoughts? 

Chris: No, I think just to mention that it’s been a pleasure to talk to you and hang out and then get to know you a bit better. And and thanks for the invitation. 

Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you guys out [01:36:00] there.