The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia’s World-First Breakthrough (#883)

Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Tania de Jong, a co-founder of Mind Medicine Australia. In 2023, Tania and her husband Peter helped lead the push that made Australia the first country in the world to allow MDMA and psilocybin to be prescribed for psychiatric conditions. I wanted to understand how the hell they helped make that happen and what the rest of the world can learn from it.

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How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia’s World-First Breakthrough

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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Tim Ferriss: Where do you think it makes sense to begin? I mean, we could just begin with “The Trip Treatment” and how that domino knocked over so many dominoes. And—

Tania de Jong: It did.

Tim Ferriss: —then what you did with all of the momentum of said dominoes. Do you want to just begin there and we’ll just chat through it?

Tania de Jong: In 2015, I came across your blog. Well, I’d been signing up to your blog for ages. I mean, I’ve been reading your books and admiring your biohacking courage to try all different things and experiment for yourself because that’s very much how I also like to operate. I just don’t believe anything until I try it myself. And so being that person that had never had any alcohol really, don’t drink coffee, never got high, never had any drugs in my whole life until I read your 5-Bullet blog back in December, I think it was 2015, when you said that you had donated 100,000 US dollars to the Imperial College with psilocybin for depression, I think it was, Tim. 

Tim Ferriss: 2015 would’ve been Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths. So there was a depression study there.

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm. So that was like a light bulb went off for me. And I clicked on the link, and I read the article, and it was a fascinating article in The New Yorker magazine called “The Trip Treatment,” and—

Tim Ferriss: Michael Pollan.

Tania de Jong: —one—that’s right by—

Tim Ferriss: The one and only.

Tania de Jong: —Michael Pollan. And I said to my husband, “We have to do this. Please read this article.” And I think he thought I lost it. And he read the article, and then he said, “Why don’t you see if we can get into a trial?”

And so we then approached Robin Carhart-Harris, who has subsequently become a great friend of ours. But at that time it was like, “Well, can we get into one of the trials in Europe?” And he said, “Well, no, you don’t qualify. You don’t have a mental illness diagnosis.” And then he proceeded to see if he could introduce us to The Psychedelic Society, and finally, we were introduced to a guide in the Netherlands. And we flew over to Europe, and we had this extraordinary experience where we took a large dose of psilocybin. But for me, I had spent the previous six months when we’d planned this just getting more and more nervous. I was just petrified.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sounds normal.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. And I was like, “Am I going to lose my mind? What’s going to happen?” Meantime, my husband’s just not engaged in it at all. And so it got to the day before where we’re going to go and meet this guide, and I wrote an email to my accountant, and I said, “If anything’s to happen to me in the next 24 to 48 hours, these are my last wishes.” I was that scared, scared of losing control, scared of what this would all mean. I’d never had any drugs in my whole life before. And was I going to go crazy?

So anyway, we went, and my husband picked up the guide at the airport where we’re meeting him. He surrounded him in his white robe, sort of Ram Dass-style, hippie Indian white robes, gave him a huge bear hug. Then my husband asked him all the way back, “Well, what’s going to happen?” 

Tim Ferriss: “How does this work?”

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Run a show for me. Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Right. And after 45 minutes, he was no wiser, and then literally, we, the next day, took the medicines with the guide, and we were blasted into multiple realms of consciousness, all different dimensions of consciousness. And it was an extraordinary experience, as you well know, a sense of being connected to self, to others, the planet, feeling like you’re part of everything, that everything’s part of you. I think I said to you last time we spoke that I never saw a single piece of nature the same since that day. So every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass, just everything was transformed by that experience, and I could see the energy in everything. And my husband was also completely blown away. It brought us much closer together, which was also something, well, we didn’t plan for, but it was a fantastic bonus. And we then just started going, “Well, what has just happened to us?”

And so it was such an extraordinary experience. It took us about a year to really integrate what had happened, and we kept talking about it, and it was a true mystical experience at the highest level. 

Tim Ferriss: When you say it took a year to integrate, was it really just letting the snow globe settle and seeing what was discernible after things had settled, or were you using therapy to talk through the experience afterwards? What did integration look like for you guys?

Tania de Jong: No, it was sort of the snow globe. Everything had sort of been blowing like a huge fireworks display, and actually, it was like a fireworks display at times. And so for us, it was letting that settle. And then for me, I’d thought, “Well, there’s no way I’d ever do that again.” It was challenging. I mean, it was beautiful, but it was also challenging because a lot of material came up relating to my ancestors, probably relating to other ancestral lineages that I’d had before. And I thought there’s no way I’m going to do this again.

But then as the year went on and we were going to go back to Europe again and stuff, I thought, okay, well, maybe we’ll have another go and see if it’s the same or if that was just a fluke or what happened. And so we went back again and we worked with the same guide, Dutch guide, and we had an even higher dose, and it was even more profound. And so by that stage, we said to one another, wow, well, if this is having this impact on us—and it was really healing us personally. There was something going on. There was some kind of magic. I mean, magic mushrooms, but it was like there was some kind of golden thread that was trying to connect us back to ourselves, to integrate us into ourselves and then connect us to one another and to other people.

And we said to ourselves, we’d already founded five charities between us by that stage, and we just thought, wow, well, if this is happening to us, imagine if this could be applied to all the people who are suffering with homelessness or domestic violence or unemployment or disabilities, people suffering with depression that we come across through all of our charitable work, because underpinning all kinds of disadvantage is usually some kind of mental illness, some kind of trauma, depression, something that has happened to that person in their lives. And it’s usually that they’ve ended up being unemployed or committing domestic violence or whatever it happens to be, but it’s through the intergenerational trauma that they’ve experienced.

And so Peter and I just started looking and going, “Let’s meet all of the people around the world. Let’s go to all the conferences. Let’s start meeting all the researchers.” And we did that, and we started meeting researchers from all over the world, which was absolutely extraordinary. And we attended events, and we learned everything we could. We watched every video. We listened to every recording that we could. And then by that stage, Peter and I were like, “This is extraordinary.” And we spoke with Rick Doblin at about that stage, which was in 2018. And in 2018, he said to me, “Tania, I think you should set up a charity in Australia to do this.” And we were mad enough to do that. I mean—

Tim Ferriss: And for people who don’t have the context—

Tania de Jong: —we—

Tim Ferriss: —just to describe Rick briefly, Rick is really one of the primary drivers, probably the primary driver, I would say. And there are a lot of people, of course, who have played large roles behind the psychedelic movement through this organization called MAPS, and they have been predominantly focused on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. That’s been the main indication. So he has been a fixture. He’s very unorthodox. He is very well-educated in policy, incredibly colorful. He’s just one hell of a character. And I wanted people to have just a little bit of—but he’s been forging ahead since the ’70s or ’80s, well before there was any kind of tip of the hat from anywhere in the mainstream. So that’s Rick Doblin, and he’s very good at helping other people and encouraging other people.

Tania de Jong: No, I mean, absolute inspiration.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. I mean, he’s dedicated his whole life to this work, and it’s just extraordinary. And he was a total inspiration to us, as was Roland Griffiths and Robin and David Nutt, Professor David Nutt, the head of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. Just amazing people, these legends.

And the thing was, in Australia, we really didn’t have a lot going on. There was one trial in the making. It was a trial for end-of-life stress and anxiety through a terminal diagnosis, which had been replicated in other parts of the world, like at New York University and Johns Hopkins University. And we just knew that if Australia could start to position itself in this space, that there might be a chance to heal a lot of people. So we did start a charity, Mind Medicine Australia. We launched it in February 2019, and we started working in this field starting to work out, well, how could we get these medicines to Australians as quickly, safely, accessibly as possible and cost effectively as well. We originally approached the Therapeutic Goods Administration, I think it was in late 2020, and we asked them if it would be possible if the medicines could be rescheduled. And they—

Tim Ferriss: So let me pause you and apologize, Tania, just for—

Tania de Jong: No, no, go for it.

Tim Ferriss: —the Yankees listening and others. The TGA is roughly analogous to the FDA in the US. So if you want a new drug approved, if you have something that is in a highly restricted drug class and you want to make it more readily available through prescription with fewer controls, et cetera, then you have to contend with, in our case, the FDA, but in your case, the TGA. Is that a fair way to put it?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And these bodies require a lot of data and evidence, and generally speaking, pharmaceutical companies make applications to them for the rescheduling of medicines. And in this case, we wanted to make an application to move these medicines from prohibited substances, which in Australia was called Schedule 9, but in the US, it’s called Schedule 1, to a Schedule 8 medicine, which is a controlled medicine, so that it could be used in clinical environments.

And so we started applying to the TGA and we put an application in at their encouragement. And then at the interim stage, it was knocked back. And then at the final stage, despite many public submissions, it was also knocked back. And so we thought, let’s put it in again. And one of the things that the TGA has to do is it has to provide its reasons for knocking it back. So my husband, who’s an extraordinary intellect and strategic, I guess, mind, started really working on these applications and really addressing their concerns.

And so then we put in another application to reschedule psilocybin MDMA for the treatment of depression and trauma in Australia. And again, at the interim stage, the application was knocked back, and they had to provide their reasons, and then we put in a final submission. And in that period, there was another public consultation period, and we did this huge campaign, and we were educating people all the time through this period. We were presenting webinars, and we were presenting talks to politicians and health professionals and anyone we could, business leaders. We were talking—we probably gave thousands of presentations about these medicines over that period. And then finally, we put in a submission, and over 13,000 Australians supported this submission through public submissions to our Therapeutic Goods Administration supporting the medicine. And over 98% of people supported the rescheduling of these medicines, and this was the largest amount of public submissions ever received by our regulators for rescheduling any medicines. So there was this huge pressure. And—

Tim Ferriss: Not every one of those recipients was super happy about the volume, I imagine.

Tania de Jong: Right, probably, because they had to publish—

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The—

Tania de Jong: —them all as well on—

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Tania de Jong: —their platform.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a lot.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So a couple of questions. At that point, was it still just you and your husband who were working on this, or had you assembled volunteers to assist you guys in various ways? What did it look like at that point?

Tania de Jong: No, it was like this massive movement by then. I mean, we had started chapters in communities all around Australia. So we had over 30 chapters in place like Byron Bay or Brisbane, Darwin, Perth, even chapters in New Zealand.

Tim Ferriss: And that would be chapters of Mind Medicine Australia. So it’d be like MMA—

Tania de Jong: Yeah, people who were just—

Tim Ferriss: —put in place.

Tania de Jong: —behind this mission. Yeah, just chapters and chapters of people.

Tim Ferriss: When you have chapters, how did you—I’m just thinking of the challenges involved with retail and franchising or whatever, like quality control and giving people marching directions of some type. When people would reach out, how would you enable them or what materials would you send them? What would you encourage them to do if you’ve got people in Byron Bay and 29 other locations across Australia? What would you guys send to them?

Tania de Jong: Well, we had templates for everything. So we had precedence and templates, and we had how to actually do this. So we made it as easy as we could for the public to put submissions in. And we had volunteers in all those places who were leading these campaigns and getting a whole lot of people together in those places.

But in addition to that, we also had clinicians. So we had already started training clinicians through our world-leading Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy. So we started that training in 2021, and we’ve already trained now over 750 clinicians, so psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, oc therapists, social workers, counselors, you name it. We’ve trained a lot of clinicians in Australia. So we already had an enormous amount of clinicians who were starting to put pressure on their peak bodies and professional bodies, as well as the general public. So there was also an enormous amount of people, not necessarily in our chapters, but just people who—just families, had people who were suffering with mental illness in their families. There was workplaces. So there was a lot of people who had people in their workplaces suffering with depression or trauma or addictions. And people just started to really jump on the bandwagon to start to really learn about these medicines as sacred medicines.

Tim Ferriss: And the medicines at that point, just to define the molecules we’re talking about, that was MDMA and psilocybin?

Tania de Jong: Yes. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Let me bring us back for a moment to David Nutt. And the reason I’m going to bring David Nutt, N-U-T-T, back into the picture is because in the process of doing homework for this conversation came across a number of allies that you had recruited over time, right? You really had a multi-pronged approach and I want to talk about some of those.

Tania de Jong: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. That’s a big approach.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So this is abc.net.au, and it mentions you engaging new lobbyists, “Hawker Britton, known for their cozy relationships with the labor government,” and that goes on da, da, da, “understand the dynamics of Canberra. The organization then flew out Imperial College of London Neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt for a roadshow up and down the East Coast.” And it goes on to mention him as one of the celebrities of sorts in psychedelic circles, certainly within scientific circles. And I’m going back to the piece here, “During a whirlwind tour sponsored by herbal tincture and organic chocolate brands,” perfect, “he addressed packed town halls in Byron Bay, Sydney and Canberra,” if I’m pronouncing that correctly, “and Melbourne. Then there were black-tie events with philanthropists and stakeholders at the Australian clubs in Sydney and Melbourne.” It goes on and on. Right?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: So if there’s any more color to that, I’d love to hear the purpose of doing that.

Tania de Jong: No, absolutely. I mean, that was a huge part of it. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the reason I’m bringing this up and part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation is because you did something very remarkable, and there were other parties involved and a lot going on, but I mean, MMA was a real driving force behind some incredible world firsts on the playing field of global pharmacology and mental health treatments. You’ve accomplished something really impressive. And there are pieces of the playbook that I think people could apply in other locations, and this would be, I think, potentially one example of that. So could you speak to what you did with the roadshow with David and maybe how you used lobbyists? And also, how did you pay for all that?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. Well, I mean, these are really important questions, and we are being asked by a lot of other countries and organizations how we did it. And it was very tough, but we tried everything. So we never gave up. That was one aspect of—and my husband and I are very persistent people. So every roadblock that we get, we think, “Okay, what are we going to do now?” And we would climb around or over or through that wall, whatever we could do to keep going. So what happened was in 2022, David, who’d become an incredibly good friend of ours and someone we deeply respected and we just adore his humor and his intellect—

Tim Ferriss: How did you first connect with David?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so that was—

Tim Ferriss: Cold email or—how did that happen?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. I mean, so as you would see, one of the other really strong prongs of our strategy was to put together this world-leading advisory panel. And so we’ve got about 75 or so leaders in this field or people who are really great advocates for these medicines, scientists, doctors, researchers, and others. And I just started reaching out to people, but also in 2018, I went to a conference run by Usona in Madison in Wisconsin, and I spoke at that conference.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s a trip. It’s a bit of a trip for you.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it was, but—

Tim Ferriss: So for people who don’t know, the organization, at least last I checked, predominantly focused on psilocybin.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm. Correct. And their medicine’s likely to be registered as just about as soon as Compass Pathways, another huge pharma company who’s an applicant for psilocybin. Over the next six months or so, we anticipate a number of these medicines becoming registered medicines. We can talk about that shortly.

But back to the time that we brought David Nutt out. So basically, I had approached a lot of people. I’d also met a lot of people at Usona, and so I then started inviting them to join our advisory panel. And so that was how I met Robin, Roland, David Nutt, all of these people. And as we’d meet one person, then they’d say, “Well, have you met this person and have you met that person?” 

Tim Ferriss: Let me pause you, Tania, for a second. So I know you’re persistent, but these people get asked to do all sorts of stuff all the time, right?

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: How did you make it easy or compelling for them to say yes? What’s the pitch? What was the pitch to someone like Robin? Because at that point, I’m trying to put a date to it, but Robin at that point had probably appeared, I’m just guessing on the timeline here, in How to Change Your Mind, he’s somewhat of a main scientific protagonist—

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: —certainly figure within How to Change Your Mind, a book by Michael Pollan that really shifted the tectonic plates of what was possible for psychedelics in the US and elsewhere in some ways, in a lot of ways. And many, if not most of the best known philanthropists and supporters of psychedelics, not all of them, but a very high percentage would reach back to that as the tipping point for their interest. So how do you get then Robin’s the hottest girl at the dance? And he’s very charismatic, he’s good on camera, he’s good on audio.

Tania de Jong: I met them. I met them, Tim. I met most of them actually at the Usona conference. And also, I happened to sing at the Usona conferences and speak. So I gave a speech. I spoke about what we were hoping to achieve in Australia, also sang. I serenaded Roland Griffith. It was beautiful. I mean, I miss that guy so much. And so I met these people and we just connected and they were inspired by the fact that we were trying to move the needle in Australia. I don’t think that they thought that we could do it. And to be honest, I didn’t know that we could do it either. It was just persisting and persisting. And so I think people just started joining us because maybe they believed that we could do it. I mean, we had set up five charities before that had already done some significant things.

Tim Ferriss: How did you end up speaking at the conference? Because that seems to me, have an important piece of the recipe—

Tania de Jong: It was.

Tim Ferriss: —for why suddenly you could talk to them afterwards. And they were already a warm audience at that point. So how did you end up speaking at that conference?

Tania de Jong: Well, that was through Bill Linton. And so Bill Linton is the founder of Usona and as I’m sure you know, and you know him, and he’s just a lovely guy. And again, we connected. I wrote to him. 

Tim Ferriss: What did you say to Bill in the email?

Tania de Jong: I’d really like to speak at your conference. In fact, I think they even had heard what we were doing and that we were trying to do this in Australia. And then they actually, I said, “Look, I can also sing.” And maybe that was part of it. And then he just said, “Well, look, I’d like you to come over. I’d like you to sing.” I think we probably had a Zoom call or something like that. And they then invited me to speak and to sing. And it was a long trip. It was a very long trip and literally I had to get off the plane.

Tim Ferriss: It was a very long trip.

Tania de Jong: And I was in an altered state. I was in some time warp then.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I wanted to sidebar quickly that sometimes it is the weirdest, not that singing is weird. I have much stranger obsessions and interests, but it’s the most unexpected, maybe, talents or side interests or fill in the blank that you do on the weekends and evenings, that sometimes is the thing that opens the door because it is the thing that other people aren’t leading with. So when you’re like, “Oh, and I also sing.” And they’re like, “You know what? She’s scrappy. She’s willing to fly all the way from Australia. Oh my God. To Wisconsin? Okay, sure. Why not? Let’s give it a shot.”

Tania de Jong: Well also, I think by then I’d also had that connection with Ram Dass. Yes. So that was also a help. I haven’t mentioned that and that was very significant. So actually, and I want to come back to David with you, because that’s really important. But back in 2016, after you’d woken me up into this whole space, and then we did the medicine with this Dutch guy, and he played us some Ram Dass at the end of the medicine session. And I went, “Who’s this guy? This is amazing.” And my husband’s one of these guys who, when he hears someone really inspiring, he goes, “Well, is there a way we could meet them?” And so, okay, well, why not try and meet Ram Dass? So what we did was we wrote to him via, again, his people, and we found out that you could indeed spend a week living at Ram Dass’s house in Hawaii and get to spend time with him living there. So we were lucky enough that we got to fly to Maui.

Tim Ferriss: Hold on. How does that work? Because I’m sure a lot of people would love to hang out with Ram Dass.

Tania de Jong: Yeah no, really.

Tim Ferriss: What are the hurdles you have to climb to live at his house for a week? Or how does it work? Or is it just pay for a plane or how is it?

Tania de Jong: We made a donation. We made a donation and we got to live in the house that was on his land there and live right next to him. And then every day or two we’d get to hang out a little bit with Ram Dass. And so we’d come into the main house, we’d spend some time meditating with him. He’d invite us to some of the ceremonies that he’d be having at the house. We even went to the beach with him because he had this incredible wheelchair that had these amazing inflatable tires and he’d be wheeled out in his wheelchair out into the ocean. And one particular day there’d be two rainbows that appear when Ram Dass gets out into the ocean. I mean, it was like just pinching yourself, like, is this really happening? And a lot of it was sitting in silence with him because he had had that stroke and by this stage, it was about a year or so before he actually would pass.

And so he was still vibrant though. And when you looked in Ram Dass’s eyes, you could just see yourself reflected back in him. And I remember singing to him as well and there were tears rolling down his face when I sang to him. And it was a song called Coming Home. It was all about coming home to yourself. But the minute that we would mention psychedelics to Ram Dass, his eyes would light up and he’d start talking about his time that he gave his guru in India this huge dose of—

Tim Ferriss: Craziest story.

Tania de Jong: You’ve heard this story, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: And nothing happened.

Tim Ferriss: It’s in Be Here Now.

Tania de Jong: Right.

Tim Ferriss: His guru in India. So Ram Dass, again, just to provide a little context for people who are like, what are they talking about? All right. Ram Dass, which is I believe servant of—

Tania de Jong: God.

Tim Ferriss: —Ram. Yeah, Servant of the God, is the non-birth name of Richard, the man formerly known as Richard Alpert, who was at Harvard with Timothy Leary, who some people may recognize. And they were both kicked out of Harvard, little known fact, in part due to Andrew Weil, then an undergrad writing, I think it was in The Harvard Crimson, about their dosing of psilocybin. And there was some discussion, I don’t know if it was verified, of them giving it to undergrads and it became this huge scandal and they were booted out. And at one point Timothy Leary was designated by President Nixon as the most dangerous man in America, which is ridiculous in retrospect, but there you have it. And there’s a lot more we could say about that, but suffice to say, Richard Alpert decides to go to India. And at one point he somehow finds his way. This was pre-internet, pre-smartphone, somehow finds his way to this guru. Again, which was described in Be Here Now.

Tania de Jong: Maharaj-ji. Maharaj-ji.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Maharaj-ji. And he’s, I think, trying to explain to him something about psychedelics. And he’s like, “Well, do you have any?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I do.” And he had—Ram Dass had LSD and he gave him, it was either 400 or 600 micrograms.

Tania de Jong: Huge dose.

Tim Ferriss: This guy had never taken any psychedelics. Took that and just sat there and clearly would’ve set in and an hour later as if nothing was happening, just looked at him with a smile and was like, “Interesting.” And I think he said something like, “Sure, you can peek in and say hello to Christ consciousness or whatever you want to call it, but you’re not actually going to get to know the depth.” But the fact that somebody could take 400 or 600 micrograms. To put that in perspective, 100 micrograms is considered a, let’s just call it standard hit. If I were to take 200 micrograms, I would be completely incapacitated for 8 to 12 hours. So if somebody could take four to 600—

Tania de Jong: I think that would even happen to me on 50, to be honest.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And could just carry on having a conversation as if they only had a glass of water is somewhat mind-boggling.

Tania de Jong: It’s bizarre.

Tim Ferriss: So yes, and Ram Dass went on to do a lot of writing and a lot of recording, and it’s just incredibly compelling—

Tania de Jong: Prolific.

Tim Ferriss: —to listen to. So you spent time with Ram Dass. So the Ram Dass part—

Tania de Jong: We spent time with Ram Dass.

Tim Ferriss: —ends up being helpful to get to Madison. And then Bill Linton—

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it definitely did.

Tim Ferriss: —and co invite you with open arms. You sing, you talk, you meet this whole cast of characters, including, I’m guessing, was David Nutt there in Madison or—

Tania de Jong: I’m not sure that David was there, but I mean Robin and Roland and everyone else was there.

Tim Ferriss: I think they’re all a stone’s throw from—

Tania de Jong: So then this was the year before we started Mind Medicine Australia. So then I wrote to David and I said, “We’re launching a charity. It’s on February the 13th.” That was the date of our launch. “Would you come to Australia and speak at the launch?” And so we flew David to Australia. He spoke at our launch, which was at the University of Melbourne, and we then became very friendly with David and his wife, who’s delightful. And we’ve brought him over a few times since then. And that launch was packed out. And then what happened was in—I mean, cut a long story short, I’m cutting through a whole lot of things here, but in 2022, we invited him to Australia to present at some town hall events in public, but then we also brought him to the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

And we asked the Therapeutic Goods Administration if we could present to them, and we asked the head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration how many people approximately would come to the meeting, that we would have David Nutt there. And we would also have a woman there whose husband had tragically lost his life because he got depression and had not been able to cope. I’ll talk about that very briefly in a second. So what happened was the head of the TGA said, “Oh, there’ll be probably 10 or 15 people that turn up to the meeting.” 140 people turned up to the meeting. Some of them were in the room, some of them were on Zoom.

Tim Ferriss: These are all people internal to the TGA. These are all employees.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, they were like Department of Health people, executives, all from all different parts of the Department of Health and the TGA. And so what happened was we had invited this woman called Vanessa to speak just before David Nutt, and Vanessa’s husband had got depression a few years prior, just out of the blue, all of a sudden got depression really badly. And he woke up one day and he said to her, “I need to go to a hospital.” And so she took him to a doctor and they started him on some SSRIs, antidepressants, and then they didn’t work. And then he got taken to an institution because he was really unwell. He was put in that institution. And they’ve got a young daughter, very successful man, by the way, no previous history of depression, just came on. And so he was put in this institution that didn’t help. They saw every professor and expert that they could. She’s kept a 20-page dossier of every treatment she tried.

During the middle of him trying many, many treatments, she rang me up and she said, “Tania, I’ve heard about psychedelic assisted therapies. Could Franco—” His name was Franco, “Could he get psychedelic assisted therapies?” And I said, “Look, no, not in Australia at the moment. We’re trying really hard to get these medicines rescheduled, but he would have to go overseas to do this legally, like in the Netherlands where psilocybin truffles are legal, for example, or somewhere else.” He was not well enough to be taken overseas and they didn’t want to break the law by going underground in Australia, and this applies to a lot of people. And so what happened was, they kept trying all the different other treatments, the professors, he was in the institutions. She said to me, she rang me about another year later, said, “He’s begging me to go every day. He wants to go. He wants to leave.” Hang in there. We are really working hard on this.

Anyway, he couldn’t wait. She had kept this 20-page dossier and she got up in front of the TGA and she said, “I believe that if my husband had have had access to these treatments, that he might still be alive today and that our young daughter would still have a father. And this is all the treatments we tried. It’s not like we didn’t try to get Franco well. We did.” And there wasn’t a dry eye in the room at this stage. And then Professor Nutt comes on and starts presenting about the science and all the research, the data, the evidence that you know of. By that stage, there’d been a lot of trials, as you know, that had taken place. So he presented and then we presented, and still everyone was going, “There’s no way this is going to happen. There’s no way the rescheduling’s going to happen.” There were scientists and clinicians and others that just said, “It’s not going to happen.”

But this was in about November of 2022, and we just kept pushing. And then in February, February the 3rd it was, 2023, we’re standing in the kitchen and my husband goes, “It’s been rescheduled.” And I just said, “No, you can’t be serious.” I said, “You’ve got to show me this.” I read the document and I kept thinking there must be an error in the document. Can’t have been rescheduled. And no, it’s been rescheduled. So we start dancing around the kitchen and this is unbelievable. This is really amazing. We were so thrilled. Then the headlines start coming out from around the world. Australia has rescheduled. Australia’s the first country to do this. Look at Australia. Now Australia’s leading the world in this field and this is surreal. This is so incredible that this actually happened in Australia because Australia tends to be more of a follower than a leader often, but to do this was incredible.

So then a few months later, the rules changed so that the psychiatrists could actually start to treat patients in clinics. And that was the whole purpose of this, was that there should be clinics around Australia with clinicians that we’d been training since 2021 and that patients should start to be treated with these incredible sacred medicines, with therapy obviously. And so there was these multidisciplinary teams and psychiatrists could start applying to the therapeutic goods administration for what’s called an authorized prescriber status. So you, psychiatrist, put an application into the TGA, and we help a lot of psychiatrists do these applications because they’re quite onerous. And they have to put in their protocols, how much medicine they’re going to use, where they’re going to practice from, all these different protocols. And then those are reviewed by the TGA and an independent ethics committee. And if they get the TGA stamp and the ethics committee stamp, they can start using psychedelic assisted therapy, psilocybin assisted therapy and MDMA assisted therapy in their clinics.

And so there’s now over 20 clinics around Australia, mostly led by clinicians that we have trained through our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies. And over 400 patients or so, roughly, have been treated. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot because there’s millions of Australians who are suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and there’s millions of people globally suffering from these conditions who are not getting well, like Franco. And one of the arguments that was really important for the Therapeutic Goods Administration was there’s a risk to not doing anything. So if you don’t do anything, if you don’t reschedule these medicines, that’s actually a risk because patients who’ve tried everything, like Franco, might end up taking their own lives and that would be tragic. And we, through the period that we were making these applications, heard of other stories than Franco. We had a lot of people who write to us. They texted us, they emailed us, and they begged us.

We even had politicians writing to us saying they’ve got a son, or constituent saying, “Could we please provide the medicines to them?” And we said, “Well, no, we can’t until these medicines are rescheduled.” So we kept having people begging us for the medicines. We obviously couldn’t provide them. We’re not a medicine provider. 

And important to say to everyone that these medicines, you don’t take them lightly, you take them in a very controlled setting. Personally, I love nature, but we have to do it in clinics in Australia under these circumstances. It’s really important for the patient to have the right preparation and mindset so that they can be open to whatever is coming through the altered state and then bring all of those insights for their life, their work, their health, whatever it happens to be back into their life. And usually that’s done through therapy. So a patient goes through a three or four month process, protocol, and we are seeing 60 to 80% remission rates in Australia, which is replicating what we’ve seen in trials around the world. So of those 400 patients that have been treated so far around Australia, 60 to 80% of those are going to remissions and there’s been no serious adverse events.

Tim Ferriss: What does the pie chart split look like for out of those 400, how many are psilocybin for depression versus MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for PTSD?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so more of them are MDMA, so more psychiatrists started out doing MDMA for trauma.

Tim Ferriss: It’s probably a good idea. I think it’s good to get comfortable skiing the blue squares before the black diamonds.

Tania de Jong: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Tends to be more manageable. 

Tania de Jong: And many of the psychiatrists felt more comfortable administering MDMA first. There are some patients in Australia, I think, who’ve been administered both medicines, not at the same time, but subsequently, but it’s probably about a 70/30 split. But psilocybin is starting to creep up, and we’re also seeing psilocybin now being researched for a whole range of other conditions, as you know. So for addictions and obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I think MDMA’s still very underestimated as a tool. It’s been in the zeitgeist long enough that a lot of the writing or videos or podcasts that get attention are focused on the latest and greatest, or what they might consider the new kid on the block, like a 5‐MeO‐DMT. Okay, everything’s about 5‐MeO‐DMT because it can be crammed into 15 minutes and it’s the businessman’s path to God and all this stuff.

Tania de Jong: Correct, correct.

Tim Ferriss: Which from a commercialization perspective, I understand. But at the same time, you have something that is already very well researched, that has actually been around a very, very long time. I want to say it’s the 1920s when MDMA was first patented, and then it was shelved, and then the patent expired, and then Sasha Shulgin, his little lab and his tasting parties conjured up hundreds of psychedelics. If anyone’s ever heard of 2C-B, 2C-E, you can thank Sasha Shulgin, but also resurrected MDMA, which basically replaced MDA as the underground therapists tool. And I think MDMA is very underestimated, given how—

Tania de Jong: So do I.

Tim Ferriss: —broadly speaking, how manageable it is relative to many of the other psychedelics that we could discuss. And I think partially because it doesn’t necessarily, I would say pretty typically, does not provide the 17th dimension shattered into stardust, technicolor, grand finale fireworks show, which make for good stories that it gets underestimated as a tool because it’s maybe not making the rounds at as many cocktail parties because it’s unlikely you’re going to be like, “Yeah, and then these dancing crocodiles with sapphire eyes came out and danced around me and so-and-so,” which you’ll certainly get if you’re hanging out with your ayahuasca friends. So MDMA is really, I think, a tremendous tool, given the risk profile, given the manageability of it relative to other things. Question, I suppose, related to the integration that you already mentioned. Is the therapy that acts as the lattice work of support for these experiences in Australia, is it standardized or is it really up to the clinician and the patients to select the therapeutic modality? Is it standardized perhaps in the way that MAPS was trying to standardize with IFS informed dyads and things of this type?

Tania de Jong: So it’s not standardized, and many of our clinicians, the ones who’ve done our certificate in psychedelic assisted therapies, use a whole lot of different modalities. So yes, some of them may use parts and IFS therapy, Internal Family Systems therapy, or they may use other types of therapy. So there’s all sorts of different therapies that we encourage our clinicians to look at. And that might be, and I feel like one of the things that’s becoming most important is even just nutrition. So just coming out of this experience and having the right nutrition. Because if you go back into your life and just start eating all, say if you were eating a lot of sugar before or drinking a lot of alcohol and you go back to that, well, then you’re probably going to relapse. So there’s all sorts of things around nutrition and exercise that we’re hoping will be more and more included as integration therapy post-treatment for anyone doing psychedelic assisted therapies.

But we don’t believe that there should be a cookie cutter approach. Every therapist has different skills that they bring to the table, and many of them, most of the therapists that we’re training are trauma-informed, but not all of them. And they’re just learning and they’re learning to bring their own skills and work out what works for each patient. And I think that matters a lot because everyone that we’re treating through these clinics, they’re all individuals and not everything’s going to work identically for every patient, just the same way that the dose of the medicine’s not going to be identical for each patient.

Tim Ferriss: How many patients would you hope, not in a pie in the sky, best case green lights all the way scenario, but in a base case, not worst case, not best case, right down the middle case, how many patients do you think could be served with these medicines over the next three years in Australia? What do you think?

Tania de Jong: Well, it’s an exponential thing. So we’re seeing a huge exponential growth. So just even now as we speak, we just found out that now there’s 120 authorized prescribing psychiatrists in Australia for either MDMA or psilocybin or both medicines. So that is a huge jump. We started with one or two psychiatrists back at the start of 2024. We’re now at the middle, latter part of 2026, and that is an exponential increase in authorized prescribing psychiatrists. In the first year, we trained about 80 therapists. We’ve now trained 750. In the first year, only a handful of patients, maybe, I don’t know, 15, 20 patients were treated. Now there’s been nearly 400. So maybe it will get to 5,000 by then. This is me being conservative because well, it could be a lot more, but maybe 5,000 is a realistic number, but that’s a fraction of who needs it.

Tim Ferriss: Right, which I understand, but I don’t want to let the dream of boiling the ocean minimize the impact of even 400 people, because what people listening may not realize is that if you look back at the early studies, if you look at a lot of current studies, they are expensive, at least in the United States. I’ll speak for the United—well, speak for the United States, what a sentence. I will speak to some of the clinical trials in the US, many of which I’ve been involved with. And because these compounds are still schedule one, it is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to recruit subjects, to get approvals through ethics boards, IRBs, et cetera. And as a result, what you could get on the street very easily, in mushroom chocolates or otherwise, for $50 for a patient in a proper clinical trial run at a university could cost $15,000 per person, right?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Something like that. It is incredibly expensive. And what that means is you end up with these studies that are well-designed and hopefully properly powered. And people can dig into that if they want online, if they want to read up on what that means from a statistical perspective. But you end up with 10 people, you end up with eight people, maybe you end up with 15 people. And certainly if you’re a for-profit company, Compass and others have been able to, and have had to, have larger sample sizes and larger cohorts and so on and so forth as you move through the different phases. 400’s a lot. But—there’s a big but, and I’m hoping you can tell me the answer. I’m sure you can.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Is there some type of requirement for data reporting from people who are authorized? Because it’s most valuable as a way of building momentum and creating a virtuous cycle if there is mandatory data reporting that then provides a signal or many signals.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Tania de Jong: Well, no, and that’s a really important part of our strategy. So our strategy at Mind Medicine Australia was to build the ecosystem so that we could make sure everyone’s trained, that the public and clinicians were fully educated, and we keep doing that, that there is ongoing research for new conditions, that clinical rollouts and the medicine supply can happen very smoothly. And then there’s the whole payor part, which I’ll come to you. So there’s the whole cost of it all. But the data collection’s really, really important.

And one of the things David Nutt did with us was he was really like, “We have to make sure there’s real world evidence being collected.” So he worked with Professor Paul Fitzgerald at Australian National University and Mind Medicine Australia has funded a registry, which we have no influence on, we simply fund it at the Australian National University, which collates real world evidence, the data from the baseline of a patient when they go in for the treatment, then what they’re like when they come out of the treatment. And that’s being collected all the time.

It hasn’t published yet, but we hope that it will publish over the next few months, and then continue to publish periodically as they collate more and more data. And this data is critical because this is what can show the government. Well, firstly, they know there’s been no adverse events, serious ones because there’s been nothing reported to the TGA, but it’s also really important to show the government, “Wow, well these remission rates around 60 to 80%,” that’s compared against 10 to 15% for existing treatments for PTSD and psilocybin with MDMA and psilocybin treatment for depression and trauma in Australia at the moment.

So 10 to 15% versus 60 to 80% remission rates, that starts to become very important for a government because they go, “Wow, wow, there could be some serious cost savings here. We could save millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollar over the course of a patient’s lifetime.” And one of the other things we’ve done at MMA is we’ve helped really bring on the payors for these treatments.

So we now have the Department of Veterans Affairs who are supporting treatments for veterans. We have the National Disability Insurance Scheme also funding treatments. And we have Medibank, which is our largest health insurer, who have basically said that any eligible Gold members of Medibank can get pretty much the whole treatment cost paid apart from a couple of thousand dollars.

Tim Ferriss: What does it look like to recruit—

Tania de Jong: So everyone’s shifting to Medibank.

Tim Ferriss: —any of these payers? So how do you even bring the first of these payers online? What does the outreach look like?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so we went to them all from early on. So we were talking to the Department of Veterans Affairs from early on because we had seen what happened in the US with veterans and we knew that that was a core strategy that Rick Doblin and MAPS had also used. And it’s an important strategy, because veterans and first responders have served their nation and more veterans die through their own hands, through suicide, than die in the battlefield. And they experienced so much trauma in the work that they’ve done. And we knew that the Department of Veterans Affairs was really struggling with the amount of veteran suicides that were occurring.

So they were someone we started talking to and presenting to from very early on in our time as Mind Medicine Australia. The National Disability Insurance Scheme came on board because they obviously want to try and reduce the costs of treatments. And this is a really good way to reduce costs over time. Though the cost of the treatment is relatively expensive upfront, over the course of a patient’s lifetime, the potential cost savings are enormous. Rick Doblin and MAPS did some economic modeling and showed that the cost per patient, this was a few years ago already, could be well over $100,000 US of cost savings.

So we knew that cost would be a barrier, and so we also started a patient support fund at Mind Medicine Australia. And how we managed to do a lot of this was through our own philanthropy. 

So we’re philanthropists and social entrepreneurs. And then we got other philanthropists that we know to come on board and start to support our patient support fund and to start to support Mind Medicine Australia’s work. And that’s really how we’ve enabled a lot of this to happen. We just went in, we didn’t let anything be our barrier. We just though, “Well, anything’s possible. We can do this. And if we get enough people behind us and we spend enough time, energy—”

In the end, yeah, we’ve also donated a lot of money to this. Peter and I have done this pro bono for the last eight years, completely pro bono, because we just want to help alleviate suffering and want to see people get their lives back. 

We want people to have meaningful lives. We want them to feel healthy. We want them to be able to see the sacred in everything. And that’s one of the great gifts that these medicines give you, whether you’re washing the dishes or you are looking at the beautiful tree outside or a beautiful sunset, it’s starting to see the beauty in everything in this life. And if that’s a gift we can give people, wow, well, why won’t we do that?

Tim Ferriss: Couple of questions all over the map, is it true that you with your facilitator from the Netherlands were given psilocybin with Syrian rue or was there no Syrian rue?

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: All right, why—

Tania de Jong: No, it was Syrian Rue. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Why did he decide to include that? My understanding, and I haven’t looked this up in a very long time, is that Syrian rue contains—could be multiple beta-carbolines, like harmine, harmaline, which are—

Tania de Jong: Peganum harmala, mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So peganum harmala is the Syrian rue.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: But it imparts when combined with psilocybin kind of an ayahuasca twist of lemon on top.

Tania de Jong: Yes, it does.

Tim Ferriss: Because it’s adding the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Why did he choose your facilitator to approach it that way?

Tania de Jong: I think that was the protocol that he used. Anyway, it was his standard protocol. Now I think it’s a great protocol for the right clients. I think for us it was the right protocol. Firstly, it’s an MAOI inhibitor, as you’ve just mentioned. So he has this protocol which he calls Psilohuasca. So it’s a combination of psilocybin and ayahuasca. That’s how he sort of describes it. Now, when I went in, if I’d known that it was ayahuasca, I probably would’ve freaked out and gone, “Oh, there’s no way I’m doing ayahuasca.” But it was the way that it was done was actually it was like that.

And I think that because Peter and I had never had any drugs in our life at all, we were completely new to this, but we were also type A people.

Tim Ferriss: You don’t say.

Tania de Jong: Right. I was a bit of a control freak then. I’m still one, but I’m not as much one then now as I was then. I will say that. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this, was I wanted to let go of some of the control. Right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Tania de Jong: So I really wanted to see what that would be like. What would Tania be like without all of that holding on?

Tim Ferriss: Good for you. Good for you.

Tania de Jong: You know?

Tim Ferriss: A lot of type A people will not choose to release the white knuckling.

Tania de Jong: Right. So it was like this Syrian rue, it relaxed us, firstly. But then the goal, which I found out later, I didn’t know this at the time, but that it was expanded the visuals and the whole experience between two to 10 times. So it amplified our experience and what we would’ve seen, heard, everything, experienced by two to 10 times. And subsequently, I think that is accurate. I think it extended the experience. It created more visuals than what I had seen say without using peganum harmala subsequently.

But the first two experiences Peter and I had both were with Syrian rue. And I thought it was an extraordinary way of relaxing us and then helping us to just let go of our bodies and just to be able to travel. And at one stage the guide said, “Oh, you guys are really having a lot of trouble stepping out of your bodies.” I could hear him say that in the room.

Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Thanks, bud.”

Tania de Jong: It was like your body’s there fighting you.

Tim Ferriss: Oh man. I’m curious, what dose, do you recall how many grams of, I’m assuming it’s dried Psilocybe mushroom of some type?

Tania de Jong: Yes. With a kick of lemon juice, yes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The lemon, did he let it marinade in the lemon for a while? Did he grind it up and marinade it?

Tania de Jong: Not so long.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Tania de Jong: Well, I don’t know how long he’d marinated it for. I was too petrified to really watch that part.

Tim Ferriss: How quickly did you feel the onset? That’ll probably tell me how long it marinated.

Tania de Jong: It was probably within about—I started feeling tingling through some of my feet and hands probably within about 30 minutes. My husband kept saying, “There’s nothing happening.” And then all of a sudden it was like, “Oh my God.”

Tim Ferriss: Famous last words. Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. I mean, he was on the floor on a mattress. I was on the bed. We were not talking to one another. That was part of the protocol. And it probably took about half an hour and I could feel like there was so much tingling. I called the guide over and I said, “Hey, I’m really afraid. Can you hold my hand?” Because I though, “What’s happening?” I hadn’t felt my body do these sorts of strange things before. And it was like I could feel myself sort of—it was like I was filling up and I didn’t quite know what that meant. And then all of a sudden I started to see the colors and the shapes and it was like this kaleidoscope that I was looking through and it was incredible.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I’d be curious if this matches your experience because I do have some experience with psilocybin plus Syrian rue. Also, just a footnote for folks on the lemon.

Tania de Jong: The lemon, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So my understanding, I’m not a biochemist, but if you marinate the Psilocybe mushroom, especially if it’s ground up, say a coffee grinder, in lemon that it basically pre-metabolizes it, breaks it down or converts it into psilocin. And your body is converting psilocybin into psilocin as the active metabolite to begin with. And in doing so, for me, it would typically take, in some cases, it really depends on a lot of factors, when did I last eat, et cetera, et cetera, but 45 minutes to an hour maybe for effects to really set in with eating mushrooms.

If they’re ground and put in lemon, and it depends on the strain of mushrooms, some can be more obviously potent than others, but 10 to 15 minutes, I mean, I am off to the races, what normally would’ve taken 60 to 90 minutes. Which is actually quite nice, because the waiting game can be the most torturous part for a lot of people.

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Similarly, with the Syrian rue, my experience is, let’s just say if my workspace functional dose is 4.5 grams, let’s just say, or 3.5 to four these days, let’s just say, although I’ve taken the foot off the gas a lot with this stuff. But if Syrian rue is involved, then all of a sudden 1.5 is plenty and you can use much less.

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: Which I think one advantage of that is that you’re less likely to have a headache the next day. Some people at higher dose psilocybin can really get a crusher of a headache, depending on their individual pharmacology. So have you continued to work with the Syrian rue or have you moved to a different toolkit?

Tania de Jong: Sometimes, yeah. And I’m sort of curious again to actually—I have this hankering at the moment to perhaps go and have a session with Syrian rue again. I think that it’s more powerful for me still, but subsequent to the second dose, so when we had the second dose with the guide—and yeah, it was probably about probably 2.5–3 grams of dried mushroom that we were having to your earlier question. And I guess the next one we had after that was probably with a guide somewhere in the US who didn’t use the Syrian. And for me, that was not as powerful.

It was still good. I was still traveling quite a lot. And I think Aldous Huxley famously said, “Once the doors of perception are open, you can never shut them again.” And I really have found that to be the case. What I saw, I can never unsee what I experienced, I experienced, and it’s always going to be there with me. And I consider that the greatest gift that I had that, and it enables me to get into other transcendental states with meditation and singing and other things much more quickly and easily as well. I can access those states more easily.

Would I prefer to do Syrian rue from time to time? Yes, I think so. It is a good thing. Some people find it a bit nauseating. So there are some people who might find that it can make them a bit nauseating. So I don’t get a headache from psilocybin, generally speaking. In fact, a lot of people I know use psilocybin to microdose to remove their cluster headaches and their migraines. So it’s interesting that you said about the headache. So everyone’s different of course.

Tim Ferriss: Well, yeah, I think this is a Paracelsus, the dose makes the poison, situation in the sense that microdosing, certainly there’s research being done with LSD, or analogs of LSD, looking at cluster headaches very specifically.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, correct.

Tim Ferriss: And a lot of the data I think are compelling on the—when I’m talking about headaches, generally what I’m talking about is someone who is relatively naive to psilocybin, who is—and this is most people in the beginning innings, who are subconsciously or consciously trying to remain in control. And so they have three grams. They also don’t know what to expect. So when the facilitator shuffles over and puts a hand on the shoulder and says, “Tania, how are you feeling? Are you feeling anything?” You’re like, “I have no fucking idea.” That’s what 99% are going to be like.

Tania de Jong: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if I’m feeling anything. I have no idea if this is the right thing or if I’m just making things up. Okay.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, I know.

Tim Ferriss: And then depending also on how seasoned the facilitator is, but they’ll say, “Well, if you’re going to boost, this is the time to boost.” And again, 99% of newbies are going to be like, “I have no idea if I should boost.” But if they’re not clearly feeling something and they imagine it’s supposed to be this explosive 17th dimension experience, they’re like, “Sure, I’ll have more.” So they have three, then they have six, and then I’ve seen people have nine, and then some people go 12. In a case like that, the likelihood of having headache is non-zero.

Tania de Jong: No, I know. I mean—

Tim Ferriss: When you start getting up into the brute force—

Tania de Jong: Oh no, definitely.

Tim Ferriss: —flood doses, which it happens a lot. I mean, moms also frequently need higher doses than some folks because they’re so used to taking care of everybody else. And also sometimes a good reason for people to do sessions separately as opposed to as a couple. 

Tania de Jong: No, that’s true.

Tim Ferriss: If someone is a primary caretaker, sometimes they can be so preoccupied that they don’t respond to what is already a saturating dose.

Tania de Jong: That’s true. But there is also something very much to be said for doing this in groups.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I agree with that.

Tania de Jong: And we’ve seen that. Especially with just the experience, but also then the integration, just sitting in circle together, in sacred circles, and sharing these experiences with others, it’s just—you can’t bottle it. I mean, everyone’s experience is so different and it really helps you to understand just how different we really are. But then we’re getting the same sort of messages coming back.

So even though the material is so different that we’re seeing and hearing and feeling, but then our insights coming back can be very similar. And it’s amazing how many people, for example, that I’ve met who’ve literally stone-cold stopped alcohol after having psilocybin experiences and never had it again.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: Remarkable.

Tim Ferriss: The group experience, I mean, the group dynamic I think is where a lot of gold is. And I think it was either 2014 or 15 where I funded a study at UCSF in Northern California looking at long-term demoralization, effectively a variant of depression, in AIDS survivors. And the reason that I funded that study, I mean, there are a number of reasons that I helped fund it, and I’m not sure if I funded the entire thing or part of it, that’s beside the point. The point is that the reason it most grabbed my interest is it was the first time I had seen group integration in the study design.

And I could foresee, or I would bet at least at that point, I still bet, that not only will it be much more cost-effective to deliver some of these medications in group environments—

Tania de Jong: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: —because you’re splitting the cost of one or two therapists/babysitters/nurses across multiple people, four, six, whatever the number might be. I actually think, and this is certainly borne out in the data from a number of the better Ibogaine clinics, the outcomes are better. It’s not just that the cost is lower, the outcomes are better. And certainly I think the experience is much more nuanced and deeper for the participants. So I do think there’s a lot there.

Let me come back to MMA, and every time I say it, I think of mixed martial arts, but I know it’s not mixed martial arts.

Tania de Jong: Oh, Magic Mushrooms Australia. That was sort of the secret name behind the real name.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, got it. Okay. Right. So Mind Medicine Australia, what are some of the mistakes that you made? Because if someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “We want to take a playbook. We want to try this in Croatia. We want to try this in Japan. We want to try this in—” fill in the blank, what are some of the cautionary notes or the things on the do not repeat list where you’re like, “You know what? If I were to do this all over again, I would probably not do X, or I would do Y a little differently.” What are things that come to mind for you?

Tania de Jong: There’s so many things really. It was really challenging. I mean, though my husband have set up so many charities, and very successfully, this was very difficult. Because it’s a very nuanced area, the whole area of mental health care. There’s a lot of people that have a lot of views and there’s a lot of vested interests in the space that we hadn’t fully appreciated. So there was vested interest from researchers that we were not aware of, where researchers were wanting to just keep researching for many, many more years.

We had people literally confront us and we had a lot of conflict with researchers saying, “Well, we need to research for another five or 10 or more years.” And we’re arguing, but there’s patients out there who are going to take their own lives if they don’t get other solutions for their mental health conditions. So there was that sort of thing.

Tim Ferriss: Can you say more about that?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: When you say vested interest, did they feel, because they are researchers and in the business of conducting science, did they simply feel that the burden of proof had not been addressed, therefore we need more data? Or was it, “Hey, we are receiving funding from,” I don’t know the equivalent of the NIH is in Australia, “but we want to continue to receive funding to research these things. Therefore, the longer the runway we have, the more my job security is assured and therefore—” I mean, when you say vested interest, what do you mean?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. That was the main reason. I mean, that was.

And look, we understand, we’ve supported a lot of—we’ve actually invested ourselves, as we know you have, in trials that are for innovative new uses for psilocybin, for example. So we’ve just, for example, part funded a trial that was for eating disorders and another one I think for obsessive compulsive disorder and other things like that. And we very much believe in supporting new research, novel research, but we were not fans of replicating trials that had already been undertaken at least five to 10 or more times in other markets overseas. For example, end of life anxiety and stress.

Or there was a particular researcher who did a trial with MDMA just for four patients and it took, I don’t know, more than five years to complete. Things like that. We just though, “Well, that’s statistically insignificant.” And one of those researchers was one of the people that really attacked us really strongly. It was very, very vicious and personal. And because Peter and I were not clinicians, that was another reason that people though, “Well, who are these people? How dare they come into our space as nonmedical people and start thinking that they could actually change the regulations and how dare they think that?”

There was a lot of that pushing back like, “Go back into your box, please. You don’t belong here.”

Tim Ferriss: So mistakes, though. Mistakes.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe that was a mistake.

But we had a lot of clinicians around us so that we were also constantly having clinicians presenting with us on webinars and things like that. And we did that deliberately because we didn’t want people to say, “Well, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” And so that we had clinicians always appearing with us when we’re presenting, especially if we’re presenting to clinicians, governments and things like that.

I think other mistakes we made was that we had a lot of people wanting to work for us who had lived experience of mental illness. And look, we all carry trauma and I’m no stranger to trauma. I’m the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. And we all are carrying some kind of trauma, whether it’s our own, our families, our lineage collective trauma, we’re carrying that. But we were attracting a lot of people to work with us who didn’t fully disclose all their conditions upfront. And so all of a sudden there might be somebody who was taking alcohol or would turn up to work in a completely drunk state. And this was something we’d never seen before in our other charities. And I think people were coming to us ’cause they wanted to heal their condition. 

And to begin with, we wanted to be as inclusive as possible with the people we had working with us. And we still believe in that, but we did have some very difficult experiences early on where I guess we were attracting people who still needed to do more work on themselves rather than working in a high-powered, high stress environment. And this is a high-powered.

When you’re trying to change the law, you need people around you that are very strong and who are resilient because we got knocked down over and over. So I would say you just have to be so resilient and you can’t let it all affect you. And even the personal attacks, I found them very hurtful and I’m quite a sensitive person. And there were times where I was literally lying on the carpet crying because it was just too personal. It was just too much.

I thought I was tough and had a thick skin before this, enough of a thick skin, but I didn’t. So I had to bring in all the resilience of my forefathers, and my maternal grandmother who’d fled the Holocaust and all of that started to become very useful when this was all going on. You can sort of see that anyone who’s a pioneer who’s trying to drive change is going to be attacked. And I hadn’t really appreciated that fully before.

Tim Ferriss: Does anything else come to mind? So I will underscore what you just said. Very common in the, broadly speaking, psychedelic space, which is incredibly understandable, but it is the last or viewed as the last hope for a lot of people for whom every other intervention has failed. Right?

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And for that reason, a lot of people who want to help are in fact, and this is again understandable, interested in trying to mitigate some of their own suffering, but are not in a position where they can sustain the type of intensity or stress or volatility in some of the work that is being done. It’s just not the right timing for them, not the right circumstance.

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: I would also say that for those who haven’t been exposed to the science, it’s another reason why the effect sizes of these drugs on even a small cohort, say 12 people, 15, whatever it might be, when you see these dramatic reductions in HAM-D or whatever assessment might be used for depression or PTSD, what makes it all the more mind-boggling is when you consider how long people have had these diagnoses and how resistant they have been to, in some cases, dozens of interventions.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: And when you look at some of this data, I think it was the phase II data from MAPS looking at complex PTSD, but the average, and again, I might be misspeaking, but I’m directionally right. The average length of diagnosis of severe complex PTSD was something like 16 years, 17 years.

Tania de Jong: Yes. Correct.

Tim Ferriss: And then you see for a subset of that group complete remission.

Tania de Jong: Correct. 

Tim Ferriss: After two or three sessions, it’s—

Tania de Jong: 68%.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Which also, and I’m pulling from memory, so this is a dangerous business. But when I did the MAPS. I kind of audited. I didn’t do it for any type of practice myself, but I sat in on the MAPS international therapist training in Israel, which was the first time actually that any, to my knowledge, any federal government had paid for or supported at least, financially supported this type of training. And my recollection is, this was quite a few years ago, that after the last administered medicine, the remission rate was something like 54 and then six months later it climbed to 68.

Tania de Jong: Yes. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It went up, and again, we’re painting with kind of a rough brush here, maybe it was 65%, who knows? But the point is that people who no longer met the clinical diagnosis of PTSD, they went from blind shut can’t work a job to asymptomatic, grew over time. It did not go up.

Tania de Jong: Yes, that’s remarkable. That is a remarkable feature. Yes.

Tim Ferriss: It’s just crazy to think about. The durability is so wild. And also it’s not a panacea, to your point. It’s like if you go back into the same circumstances with the same temptations and the same problems and the same abuse or the same fill in the blank, it’s not a magic bullet. And I really agree, I’m taking us a little, sorry, off on a tangent, but with say Gul Dolen, who’s now at UC Berkeley, used to be at Hopkins, and I’m paraphrasing, she can certainly speak for herself. I’ve had her on my podcast, but—

Tania de Jong: We did too, yeah—

Tim Ferriss: —I believe these psychedelics open a critical—

Tania de Jong: Critical window—

Tim Ferriss: —period, a critical window within which you can change longstanding beliefs and behaviors. So I think—

Tania de Jong: That’s right—

Tim Ferriss: —the integration, and I’m working on a bunch of stuff related to this right now actually outside of psychedelics, but when you induce neuroplasticity, so suddenly you’ve warmed up the clay and you can shape it in a new way.

Tania de Jong: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: The question is how do you do that? And it becomes a lot of the questions relate to behavioral change. How do you set up—

Tania de Jong: They do—

Tim Ferriss: —the systems? How do you set up the nudges? How do you create the incentives? How do you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: Because it’s not a foregone conclusion that you take these things and you turn out better. It just isn’t.

Tania de Jong: No, no, it’s not. Though it is, to your point about the increased remissions, when I started presenting on this and I saw that was that New York, I think it was New York Uni or Johns Hopkins trial that showed these increasing remissions over time, that is not something that would ever happen with an antidepressant. Usually what happens with an antidepressant is you get an original improvement perhaps then it plateaus. Then the doctor says, “Well, we might have to try different antidepressant or increase the dose.”

Whereas in this case you have those two or three doses maximum, then you’re having the psychotherapy and your remission is increasing if you engage well with the integration sessions. And that means making those changes in your life that you’ve just talked about that are really important, whether that means exercise, nutrition, connecting with people who are important for you to connect with that are not going to bring you back into the old patterns that you were in before. All sorts of stuff about community and social connection I think is really important at that stage as well. 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

What do you think contributed to the TGA agreeing to the offer to have David Nutt speak to their employees? Why would they say us? ‘Cause sitting here in the US, if I were just to ring up the 800 number, the FDA and be like, “You know what? I got a pitch for you,” I don’t think it would go anywhere. Now, sure, I wouldn’t call the 800 number, but even still, it would not be easy for me to get a yes to create a webinar.

Tania de Jong: Look, I had the mobile number of the head of the TGA. I was lucky to have that. Somehow I got that.

Tim Ferriss: Sure he or she loved that.

Tania de Jong: I don’t think he loved me having his number. I didn’t bug him too much, but if things started to get roadblocked and we could see they were getting roadblocked, we might give him a call and say, “What’s going on here now?” Or there was all sorts of governance things that would happen. It was really important, for example, that they publish all the submissions, but it took them a while to do so.

At the moment, by the way, we have a new submission in. You can see our submission for end of life stress and anxiety with psilocybin. We’re trying to extend the psilocybin to end of life stress and anxiety because virtual assisted dying is legal in Australia. So if people can do that, then why can’t they find peace through psilocybin in Australia? So that’s part of our argument. You can see our argument on the TGA page. And in fact, on our website on Mind Medicine Australia, you can see all our submissions for these medicines to the TGA.

But I think really we were speaking to him, it was getting to the really pointy end of the final, really probably what would’ve been the final chance to get there. And we’d put in the opposing submission to the interim decision. So the interim decision said no. We’d put it in. We asked him if we could present that we were bringing David Nutt to Australia, so he said, “Yeah.” And then as I said, 10 to 15 people he thought would turn up and then it was 140.

Tim Ferriss: 140.

Tania de Jong: And not a dry eye in the room after Vanessa spoke. Literally everyone was in tears. I think it was really her. I mean, David was brilliant. Of course he was brilliant, but I think it was her. I think it was the fact that people could see a real life example. Well, this is what’s going to happen. If we keep denying people access to these treatments, then we could have many more Francos occur. And of course, there’s many people who are taking their own lives because they’ve given up hope. And we want to give people hope and we want to give them their lives back. That’s the most important thing in the world we could have ever achieved.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the biggest challenges still—

Tania de Jong: Now?

Tim Ferriss: In current day or that you foresee in the next year or two? I just don’t know what the picture currently looks like.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So it seems like there’s a grand kind of real world experiment afoot in Australia, which is like, okay, we’ve allowed these authorized psychiatrists and medical professionals to prescribe and supervise sessions with MDMA and psilocybin. Is the jury still out in the sense that the government’s like, “After X period of time, we’re going to review all this data and determine whether we want to continue this or not”? Or is that not the case? Is it open-ended?

Tania de Jong: I mean, I believe it’s open-ended. So we do still keep having an ongoing dialogue with the TGA. So we write periodically to the TGA about some of the bureaucratic roadblocks. So there are some bureaucratic roadblocks. For example, for quite a while until a few months ago, there was a rule in place that only clinical psychologists could be the lead therapist. So there’s two therapists that usually sit in the dosing with a patient. Well, there was this criteria that it could only be a clinical psychologist.

So we then put in a letter saying all the reasons why it shouldn’t just be a clinical psychologist, why it should be other psychologists, but also other practitioners. And so then that did get widened. And every time there’s a roadblock, we write letters to the TGA showing the evidence and research why that should not be the case. And if necessary, we’ll have a call and we’ll keep just trying to open the door, not to open it fully. That’s not our goal at all.

We believe that these treatments should be done in very careful ways because some of the patients going in for these treatments, in fact, the majority going in for these treatments above ground in clinical environments are very sick and they need to be very well cared for. And so they need to have proper screening. They need to have the top most well-trained clinicians sitting with them, and they need to have extremely good integration processes and tools to go back into their lives and to get real remissions.

But we don’t believe that there should be overly onerous constraints. So now we’ve also got a situation in Australia where all of the clinics are videoing the sessions. So there could be an argument in the future that says that one clinician with a patient, if there’s a video there as well, might be sufficient.

There’s also group therapy that we’re looking at and we’ve already started to look, and I think some authorized prescribers might have put in protocols that might have group integration in their protocol. So we are very supportive of that.

Other roadblocks, of course, is the cost. So there’s still a lot of patients who can’t afford the upfront costs, so we need to let them know about our patient support fund. We need to let them know that Medibank is providing their gold members who qualify for these treatments with pretty much the full cost of the treatment, which is really significant.

Tim Ferriss: How much is the cost off the rack at the moment?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, so at our clinic, so we’ve started a clinic too with another listed company called Incannex, and our clinic is called Mind Medicine Australia.

Tim Ferriss: Listed publicly traded company?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. So we as a charity have a half share in this clinic with a publicly traded company and it’s called Mind Medicine Australia Clinic, and it’s in Abbotsford, a suburb of Melbourne. And we’re using that as a real test case to see how to build a best practice clinic. So what do we need to do? How much supervision needs to be supplied? We also use it as a wonderful resource where some of our clinicians that we’ve graduated through our training course can go and gain supervision and experience as well as in the other 20 clinics around Australia. So it’s like we’re developing this sort of clinic in a box protocol, I guess.

Tim Ferriss: How much does that cost per person depending on the compound maybe?

Tania de Jong: So it starts at about—so we actually at our clinic only start with people at one dose. So if a person decides after one dose that it’s really not for them, they can withdraw because in speaking with our authorized prescribers, they preferred that protocol and we don’t want to force people through it if they really don’t want to do it and money is an issue. So it starts at about 8,000 Australian dollars, which is about 5,000, let’s say US dollars for one treatment, including the screening. Then the next one, yeah, probably up to about 15,000 US dollars for three doses and integration.

Tim Ferriss: And that’s the same for either compound?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, I think MDMA might be slightly more because it may be up to three doses where psilocybin’s up to two, and that includes the three to four months of integration following the medicine treatments as well. So it’s about a three to four month course that is costing maybe up to about 25,000 Australian dollars, about say 15,000 US dollars, something like that. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive, but it’s not insane. I know it’s out of reach of a lot of people, but if people view it, if they think of it as a pill, I’m taking one pill and it costs me $5,000 and it’s like, okay, their reference point is walking into a pharmacy, let’s just say here in the US, they have their insurance and the copay is 5 bucks or 10 bucks and they get their 30-day supply. So they’re like, “Wait a minute, how is it possible?” But when you realize, if it were to be framed, I’m not saying this is the way to frame it, but it’s like this is three to four months of very well-designed therapy. And by the way, you also happen to get a few powerful drugs along the way.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Yeah, okay, great.” But when they think of the drug first, they’re anchored to a reference they understand, which is probably some very low cost prescription that they get 90 days at a time.

Tania de Jong: Yeah. No. Well, I mean, it is really important to say that the majority of that cost is therapeutic time. The medicine, so we’ve enabled the medicines to come into Australia at the cheapest possible price. The medicine is a tiny little percentage of the cost that I’ve just mentioned. It’s all about therapeutic time. And because there’s two therapists involved for some periods of that time, that’s even more, which is why one of the reasons that we, and not only we, others around the world also say, “Well, if there’s a video in the room, does it always have to be two therapists? I mean, but it is a long treatment time as we know, so a dosing session can take five to six hours, so maybe there needs to be some overlap there.

Tim Ferriss: Is there anything in process or have you guys thought about methylone? Transcend Therapeutics was recently acquired. I don’t know what the parent company is now planning with methylone, but methylone is, for lack of a better descriptor, it’s like the softer, gentler cousin of MDMA who just comes in for a quick hello as opposed to sitting down for dinner, right? It’s like a—

Tania de Jong: I love that.

Tim Ferriss: 45 to 60 minute hello as opposed to four to six hours. And as you mentioned, it’s like the cost of—well, my opinion, the cost of synthesizing and purchasing these things should not be exorbitantly high.

Tania de Jong: It’s not.

Tim Ferriss: There are certain—

Tania de Jong: It’s not at all.

Tim Ferriss: And depending on where you are in the world, there are some companies that would like to make that as expensive as possible, but that’s a whole separate conversation.

Tania de Jong: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: But putting that aside, putting pharma shenanigans to the side, the pills shouldn’t be expensive, the materials.

Tania de Jong: Not at all.

Tim Ferriss: But the therapist time is expensive.

Tania de Jong: Very.

Tim Ferriss: So if you could look at comparing, say, methylone and its effects, which have been quite impressive looking at non-psychotherapy coupled dosing, because MAPS, Lykos at the time, got itself into all sorts of tangles because the FDA on our side does not know how to think about standardizing or regulating psychotherapy. So if the drug is inextricably tied to psychotherapy, the FDA is kind of on some level forced to respond with, “We don’t know how to deal with this, so we’re going to say no.”

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, there’s much more story—

Tania de Jong: Because that’s not their expertise. They’re a medicine scheduling bureau.

Tim Ferriss: Right. So then Transcend said, “Well, let’s just look at what happens with the dosing of the medication.” And even if you had though a therapist in the room, which is not a bad idea, then you have something that is possible within a 60 minute, or let’s just call it 60 to 120 minute window, which should ostensibly lower the cost really substantially. And I know this probably wouldn’t convince the TGA, but my perspective too is like, look, you’re not tripping your balls off when you’re on methylone or MDMA, frankly.

Tania de Jong: Not at all.

Tim Ferriss: Most people could have a conversation. They’re probably not going to want to work on a computer, but there’s not as much distortion as you would experience on something like psilocybin. So when you have, let’s just say, six people in a room plus one therapist or two therapists, you also, for each patient, have five other witnesses.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Yes, they’re in an altered state, but it’s not like they’re seeing goblins doing jumping jacks all over the room. It’s not that kind of perceptual distortion. 

Tania de Jong: Well, I’m all for that, Tim. So one of the things that I think I recently mentioned to you that I went to Dave Asprey’s BEYOND Event in Austin, Texas, and there happened to be a stand there for Kanna. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Kanna—

Tim Ferriss: Kanna, African, I believe.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it’s an African medicine. It’s not cannabis, but it’s like an African leaf or something. 

Tim Ferriss: With a K.

Tania de Jong: Anyway, and I came across through a friend of mine who was there, a substance called Kanna Lift, I think it’s called Lift, and it’s like MDMA, but it’s shorter lasting. It only lasts a couple of hours, maybe 90 minutes to two hours. And I just thought actually, and it’s natural as well, which I really like. I thought to myself, “Wow, this is really good.”

I agree with you. I mean, obviously ketamine is being used a lot and people go in and have a ketamine session, certainly in the US. It’s not as common in Australia, but a lot of therapists in the US are using ketamine for depression. But the problem about ketamine is that it needs to be used over and over in most cases.

Tim Ferriss: Even bigger problems. It has very, very high addiction potential.

Tania de Jong: Correct.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen a lot of lives to unravel because of ketamine. It has its place. If there’s acute suicidality, I do think that IV or intramuscular ketamine has a place, but it is very easy to abuse. Very, very easy to abuse.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The Kanna I’ll check out. I took a look at it.

Tania de Jong: Check it out.

Tim Ferriss: Quite a few years ago.

Tania de Jong: I’ll send you a link.

Tim Ferriss: The synthetic all natural thing is an interesting conversation, just because I would say that I am interested in all natural to the extent that you might be throwing some of the baby out with the bath water when you move to say ibogaine from Iboga. And I certainly know a number of researchers and certainly plenty of practitioners who would take that side of things.

Simultaneously, part of the reason scientists and pharma like to isolate is because you have, in some instances, a less muddied picture of things. You have fewer variables. But in the US, for instance, I don’t know what the status is in Australia, Kratom or Kratom, depending on who you ask, was viewed as this savior of the people who want to get off of opioids and prescription drugs. But mitragynine or mitragynine, which is found in Kratom, lo and behold, if you use it chronically, can put you into a dependent state where you need rehab to get off of Kratom.

Tania de Jong: Crazy, right?

Tim Ferriss: Right. And I know people who run rehabilitation clinics and so on. And if there were, maybe there is a chart, I don’t know where you would find it, but anecdotally talking to people who run these type of clinics or people who run clinics offering different services, part of which is detoxing from various types of drug dependencies, Kratom is up and to the right. It’s like AI stocks. They’re matched.

I would tell people all natural can be very powerful and it also can be, in some cases, poorly understood because there aren’t as many financial incentives if there isn’t something that can be patented. We get into very slippery territory here.

But I would also say in the case of ketamine, I’m not a doctor, I’m not giving medical advice, but if you look at, say, Johnson & Johnson and Spravato, sure, it’s esketamine, but they’ve created a maintenance model with this drug. But I would say if you suffer from a serious diagnosed mental illness, then obviously follow the advice of your doctor. But if you are considering different options and you happen to be in the US and one of the few legal options available is ketamine, I would encourage with the input of your doctor to look at less chronic use as an option, right?

Tania de Jong: Definitely.

Tim Ferriss: And you’ve got Phil Wolfson and others who have certainly written a lot about this. You have John Krystal at Yale has looked also at IV and intramuscular use of ketamine where you may just need a few rounds. You may just need one round.

Tania de Jong: Or you might just need to have psilocybin therapy instead.

Tim Ferriss: Well, there’s that too. Yeah, we have some legal checks.

Tania de Jong: Oh no, I get that at the moment, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, at the moment, for sure. I mean, look, ketamine would not be in my top five list.

Tania de Jong: Nor mine.

Tim Ferriss: However, there are two huge caveats there. Look, it is one of, I believe it’s still on the World Health Organization’s most essential medicines list. This is a very useful drug as an anesthetic. I mean, it’s a dissociative anesthetic. So for instance, if you have any history of using alcohol, even to take the edge off, certainly if you have alcoholism or alcoholism in your family, ketamine is the dissociative turning off of feelings you don’t want that you get from alcohol times 100. Ketamine, that is part of the reason why it can be so addictive. However, if you have chronic pain, this is I know not within the sphere of mental health, but for certain types of chronic pain, ketamine is incredible in terms of very few rounds with very durable benefits.

And in fact, I really dislike the ketamine in general. Subjectively, personally, it’s not really my thing. But I was getting so many questions about ketamine, this is 10 years ago, and I decided, “Well, look, I’m going to follow basically the Yelp protocol and I’ll get the, whatever it is, 0.5 milligrams per kilogram,” or whatever the magic doses that everybody took as gospel, even though it’s an informed guess on the part of John Krystal’s colleagues, whatever became the dogma. I was like,” All right, I’ll do at least one, probably two, two week sequences of infusions, so at least I can speak firsthand to the subjective effects and the experience, the phenomenology of the experience. I’ll be able to answer some questions about it.” And went in and the clinicians were good, this was in Austin, and you have to be careful, there are a lot of fly-by-night operations, but I did my homework, I kind of know how to vet this stuff. And the clinicians were so baffled by me because I went in and I had no anxiety, no depression. And each time I went in, which was multiple times a week, they would ask me to fill out this assessment to determine my current state, how they would score me for anxiety and depression. And I just kept getting more anxious, not really depressed, but more and more anxious and maybe mildly more depressed. And the reason was, I had a really, really busy two weeks. So it’s like I’m preparing for a podcast with LeBron James, but then I have ketamine and then I forget my backpack and my short-term memory’s fucked and I’m misplacing all this shit and then have constipation, so it’s hard to sleep and I’m like, “This stuff is terrible.”

So every time I went in, I was getting more anxious and they were like, “This is very confusing for us. We really don’t know how to make any sense of this.” And I got to the end of it and I was like, “God, that stuff is weird and it is not for me.” I was just like, “Look, I can handle it.” I pushed it with a lot of clinical supervision. The IV allows you to do some very interesting things that you can’t do with—

Tim Ferriss: —with intramuscular. Intramuscular, you hit the golf ball and the golf ball’s hit and you’re gone. But with the IV, you can dial it up and down and experiment with things like interacting with a therapist at different dosages.

Tania de Jong: Have you heard about IVD 5-MeO?

Tim Ferriss: I know quite a bit about IV and NDMT where they extend it out to about one hour. There’s been some research at Imperial College London. Would I do it? I think I’d be open to it. I don’t think that’s automatically a free lunch. I mean, that’s going to be pretty intense.

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But I’d be open to it.

On the ketamine side though, the reason I brought up this whole story, preparing for podcasts and getting anxious and being kind of annoyed that I had to go in and do this thing because I’d committed to this experiment is I finished my first series of infusions and I was like, “All right, never doing that again. That was a total waste of time.”

And then I noticed about a week later that I had this really horrible pain in the middle of my thoracic musculature in my mid-back. And this had been from a horrible injury 15 years ago, something like that, where I basically almost tore my lat off my back, really bad accident. And it had plagued me ever since. And I would sit there and I’d be like, “Oh, oh, oh.” And sometimes I couldn’t turn, sometimes I couldn’t cough, sometimes it would hurt to breathe deeply. I mean, it was really this chronic plaguing injury. And after I had that, whatever it was, week or two weeks of infusions, that went away, never came back.

Tania de Jong: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And that is one of the indications for ketamine is certain types of chronic pain. And I was like, “Holy shit, amazing.” I was like, “Okay, there’s a place for it. That was worth it.”

Tania de Jong: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: I really didn’t like that experience, but it was worth it. And I do know multiple people who were like, “I’m going to blow my head off tomorrow.” And they go in and they have an infusion or intramuscular injection, and at the end of the session they’re like, “I don’t know what I was so upset about.” I mean, they’re able to look at it in a dispassionate, more dissociated, obviously, capacity. They’re almost an observer of their own state and the stories they were telling themselves. So for that also, I think it’s useful. But, yeah, personally, it wouldn’t be on my top five.

Tania de Jong: No, no. Well, it’s not being used much in Australia, but I feel there’s going to be huge shifts globally over the next few months and that there’s going to be psilocybin probably through Compass Pathways and Usona will be registered. I think, is it Resilience? What’s the name of MAPS now? I can’t remember now.

Tim Ferriss: They keep changing names. I think it’s Resilient.

Tania de Jong: Resilient. I think that’s going to come through as well, especially given that the president’s given that executive order. I think that potentially by mid next year, who knows what’s going to be registered and the whole landscape’s probably going to change and a lot more countries hopefully are going to be following Australia and hopefully Australia there’ll be less bureaucracy and we can have way more people being treated.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. A lot of people may not realize that Australia is a very fascinating landscape when it comes to conducting certain types of science. And globally, a lot of clinical trials from companies around the world have gone to Australia and China. Those are the two places you want to do it. That’s fun for people to check out if they weren’t aware. There is a global market for conducting clinical trials and Australia is one of the best places.

I wanted to come back to advice for advocates in other countries and things you might do differently. And you were mentioning that you’re very persistent, which you are, you and your husband. And so here’s another quote from, this is abc.net.au, and I think you’ll get a good chuckle out of this. All right. Here’s the quote. “I actually had to on several occasions say to staff, ‘Look, I know they’re driving you crazy. Put their approaches in the way they work to one side. Think about the medical criteria and the scientific criteria and the regulatory issues only.’ And I also counseled Mind Medicine at some stages that they were perhaps working against their own case by frankly being so aggressive. I lost count of the number of emails that would’ve sent staff here.” I think this is Professor Skerritt—

Tania de Jong: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: —told Background Briefing that he did provide MMA with the names and public phone numbers of the chief health officers in each state.

Tania de Jong: He did.

Tim Ferriss: Hilarious. The committee of experts and state regulators that advised TGA were similarly displeased by MMA’s outreach according to a TGA, et cetera. So you’re a force of nature. You guys have accomplished some amazing things. Were there any cases of pushing too hard? Because there are cases when people push with me. If they hit me from 17 different directions, I’m like, “Don’t like it. Too brute force.”

Tania de Jong: No.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m like, “Blacklist. I won’t engage.” Right?

Tania de Jong: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: Which is not to say that you should have done anything differently, but I am curious, are there cases where you’re like, “I should have waited an extra week. I should have approached that slightly differently.”? How do you think about that?

Tania de Jong: I think in this case, I mean, certainly I know that me personally can be too pushy at times and I’ve had to really scale that back. And one of the things that the medicine has taught me is to just be more accepting, and I have become more accepting. So if a door or something doesn’t seem as open as I first thought it was, or if it really feels really shut, I just don’t go back and knock on the door as much anymore. And I just go, “Okay, there’s other opportunities. I’ll go to them instead and I’m going to go for the lower hanging fruit.” So that’s just me personally nowadays. I’m much less driven about that than I was, and I think it’s better.

But in terms of this particular campaign, I don’t really think that anything less would’ve been enough. And I feel that we had to keep pushing. And even my husband, who’s less pushy than me, he’s English, I’m Jewish, I’ve got a lot of chutzpah. I was brought up with a grandmother who invented the first foldable umbrella. She was a woman in the 1920s doing stuff that was way ahead of her time. But even he says that we had to do what we had to do. We had to just keep pushing and moving forwards. And we did have to knock on every door and we had to use every bit of the networks that we developed over decades to achieve what we achieved. But it was all done because of the data and science. It wasn’t done because we pulled some favor. That was not the case at all. 

And we all have this in our lives. We all have people in our lives who are suffering immensely and we owe it to them to push for the most safe and effective options available. And a lot of safe and effective medical options are not available. They’re being withheld from the public. And this is only one example of that. And so we all have to push, as I say, we all have to become our own chief medical officers. We have to work out what’s going to work for us, what’s going to make us whole and healed so that we can live our best lives possible. And for me, that’s the reason why I’m here. I saw an article by you, I read it, I immediately felt inspired, and that has led to everything else that we’ve created. So we blame you entirely for all of this and all the flack that we coughed. But I can say this now because to see the—

Tim Ferriss: Part of the journey.

Tania de Jong: It’s just extraordinary. And we receive these letters now where people are just like, “You gave us our lives back.” We’ve given people their lives back, Tim. And that’s something that you should be so proud of because if it were not for you, I wouldn’t have even known about this. Certainly not at that time. I would’ve probably discovered it at some point, but there’s always a thing about timing and that was really important timing. And we all have to just, if we really believe that something has to be done, then we just have to go for it and we can’t let anything stop us. I’ve told you the story in my TED Talk, how singing together changes the brain. I was told as a 14-year-old girl never to bother having singing lessons by my best friend, I talk about in my TED Talk, and one of the great things I learned was to never let anyone snatch your dreams away. And you can’t.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: It’s too important.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thank you for saying that, everything you just said. And man, we are here for such a short time.

Tania de Jong: Right.

Tim Ferriss: You got to get after it or not, but you got to do your thing, I suppose. Tania, so nice to spend time with you. Thank you for making the time.

Tania de Jong: My pleasure.

Tim Ferriss: Where would you like people to find you and Mind Medicine Australia? And do you have any asks of the audience? Is there anything you’re trying to accomplish at the moment where maybe there’s someone listening who may actually be able help or hold the keys to something?

Tania de Jong: Well, I have a couple of asks. So one of them is that we have our patient support fund and we’re a registered charity. So all donations to us, depending on what tax vehicle you’re giving through, can be tax-deductible. So we have full deductible gift recipient status, certainly in Australia. We also have people from overseas who donate to us regularly. And our goal is to raise, at the moment, $2.5 million so that we can really enable a lot more patients to have access to these treatments who otherwise couldn’t afford the upfront costs. So we’re talking here about helping support veterans, first responders, single moms, people who demonstrably can’t afford the upfront costs of these treatments. That’s my first ask. 

Tim Ferriss: Would people find, if they’re interested, in considering that—

Tania de Jong: Yep. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: —is that Mindmedicineaustralia.org.au? Is that the place to go or—

Tania de Jong: Yes. Yeah. Mindmedicineaustralia.org.au. And then the second thing is if you’re a clinician or therapist out there and you really would like to work in this field and you want to learn from the world’s best, well, we have the most extraordinary global faculty that is teaching our Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy. So people like Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, who I know is a great friend of yours, Tim, and mine as well, people like Bill Richards and David Nutt and Rick Doblin and all those people are on our faculty and Jim Wolfson, lots of people that you know and Wade Davis. So these people you can study with through our world-leading Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies.

And our next intakes are in February and July of 2027. Our current intake’s full. All our intakes get booked out, but we really welcome you and we have people coming from all over the world to study with us. So we’ve got people from Switzerland, Europe, the US, Canada, even from the United Arab Emirates and Asia now. We feel these huge markets potentially opening up in Asia and the UAE. And so we’re seeing quite a few clinicians coming into our training from those regions. And just look us up. We’ve got an amazing website. It’s an amazing learn section. Everything you could ever want to learn about psychedelic-assisted therapies is on our website.

Tim, I’ve got an ask for you, but you don’t have to say, “Yes,” and that is we’d love you to join our advisory panel, but we can talk about that offline. And we also have an extraordinary webinar series and it’s free. And the next one’s on eating disorders. We just had Dr. Peter Levine, and before that we had Dr. Gabor Maté. 

Tim Ferriss: Is that Peter Levine Waking the Tiger Peter Levine?

Tania de Jong: Yeah, that one. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah?

Tania de Jong: Yeah. And later in the year we’ve got Bessel van der Kolk, and I think we’ve got a Dick Schwartz one coming up as well. So we have this extraordinary faculty. We have extraordinary people working with us and just reach out. We’re really friendly. We have a huge community and we’re building a movement that’s building this massive other movement that we just need a massive movement globally that is saying, “We all need to have access to treatments that can heal us.” But bigger than that, our bigger reason for being here was to make sure that the worried well, that people like you and I, Tim, could get access to these treatments to raise our consciousness and to expand our beings and for us to really learn and become curious. Because I think one of your questions is commonly, “What would you put on a billboard?” And I would put, “Be curious.”

And these medicines really help us to be curious. And if we can awaken people’s curiosity in a world that is so dominated by AI, we just need to go back and be curious and start to ask our own questions, not just to AI, but to ourselves and to what’s here. So I would say to everyone, “Let’s just keep asking questions and not outsourcing ourselves to all of the chatbots and all of the robots.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, sometimes it’s a good idea to take a break from going outside for entertainment and go inside for intratainment.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, intratainment, intratainment that’s a—

Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot to be curious about.

Tania de Jong: There’s so much inside, so much inside. And that was probably the greatest gift of the medicines was it really taught me to explore my inner terrain. I’d always been such an extroverted—I was very introverted as a child, but then I was pretty extroverted as a performer and I still—I’m a pretty extroverted person. But for me to be able to go inside and to actually explore every single night, I lie in bed and I just explore what’s going on inside, I couldn’t have done that without these medicines. They gave me that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a category of catalysts that is very interesting, right?

Tania de Jong: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, many people who, I think, listeners would associate with meditation actually never took up meditation until they had their mind—

Tania de Jong: Changed.

Tim Ferriss: —cosmic egg cracked open by psychedelics, which is not to say you have to start with psychedelics, you don’t.

Tania de Jong: No.

Tim Ferriss: But many of them have been greatly informed by psychedelics. Ram Dass certainly being one primary example that you mentioned, and there are many, many others. 

Tania de Jong: Well, one of the great things that he said to us when we were with him, was, “We’re all walking each other home.” And I think that’s one of the really most important things that these medicines teach you, that really we’re all here together. We’ve come from whatever that place is, we’re going back to whatever that place is, and we’re here for a really short time to your point. And so why can’t we all just reach out of hand, get out from behind our boxes and screens and start walking each other home? And so I write songs about that.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing. Yeah. It’s too bad I never got to meet him. I did watch the documentary about the last chapters in his life. What an incredible human.

Tania de Jong: Amazing. Becoming Nobody. Have a look at that one. It’s beautiful.

Tim Ferriss: Becoming Nobody. Exactly. Tania, thank you so much for the time and thank you for doing what you do. Please say the same to your husband for me. And the website, I’d like you to add anything else that you’d like to, but mindmedicineaustralia.org.au that’s for the trainings, for the resources. If you want to consider donating and supporting this nonprofit, you can find everything, my understanding is, at that website. Tania—

Tania de Jong: Yep. I have a personal website too. So that’s Taniadejong, T-A-N-I-A-D-E-J-O-N-G.com. It’s my personal website. Please feel free to reach out on any platform. I like LinkedIn, but there’s lots of others. And I just want to just really say to you, Tim, that I just want to say a huge shout out to you for everything that you’ve done, not just in this field, but for your willingness to try to question, to be curious, and to really try to hack yourself and to find things that you can share with others that are going to work for everybody. And honestly, if it were not for you, and you can see this in multiple interviews that I’ve had, probably we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation. Australia probably would not be leading the world in this field. And I just want to thank you for all the resources that you give to people every single week. I love your 5-Bullet.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you.

Tania de Jong: It’s the first thing I open each week. And just a huge testament to you. And, as you said, when we first met, you never know where these things are going to end up, but I want you to know that your work helped change a whole nation, and not only a whole nation, but because our nation has changed, that has changed the whole world. And there’s a real possibility now, there’s a real hope for everyone that we can actually heal some of the immense suffering in our world, and that brings tears to my eyes just even saying it because we’ve seen the suffering and we have seen, as you would all the time, the most devastating letters and emails from people who’ve they just deserve a chance.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I do.

Tania de Jong: And that was the reason we did this. And I think in spite of us being pushy, our hearts were always in it for the right reasons, and I think people realize that.

Tim Ferriss: Well, thank you, Tania. Thank you for saying that. And you’re right that oftentimes, the 5-Bullet Friday, I’ve been writing this newsletter for, God, I don’t know, 10, 15 years, however, and I do it every week. And sometimes I’m just like, “Is anybody reading this?” I’m not sure. It just gets fired off. And because of the format, I’m just kind of like, “I really have no idea what is resonating, what is landing.” So I have to just follow my own curiosity. And it’s like if I find it compelling, if for whatever reason, even if I can’t justify, it’s tugging on me in some way. I’m like, “All right, look, maybe there’s at least one other person out there who might resonate in the same way. Let me give it a shot. I’m in there eight, nine billion, whatever the number is, people on this planet. There has to be one other person who speaks English this might get to.”

And thank you for saying all of that. Really admire you and what you’ve done with your husband and everybody associated with MMA and the people who also said, “Yes,” at the TGA and everybody involved. It’s such a beautiful story. And the fact that you were an outsider, that you weren’t steeped in this from day one, and you were able to just experiment and test and cold email and offer to sing and fly to fricking Wisconsin, the land of cheese, most people are like, “Wisconsin, isn’t that where people eat a lot of cheese?”

And to move mountains bit by bit by picking the right place to stick that Archimedes lever. It’s a really inspiring story. And part of the reason I wanted to, and I’ve already said this in one way, but have you on this podcast was because I think there are many people out there who underestimate how much they can do if they just grease the elbows and get after it. And it’s like, yeah, you’re going to make tons of mistakes. Yeah, I’m sure you’ll piss somebody off. Yes, yes, yes and but you might also just make a huge thing happen.

Tania de Jong: Exactly. And do you know what? You never know until you ask, and most people never ask. And you know what? All you have to do is ask, and it’s amazing how many people say, “Yes.” Literally just about no one has said, “No,” to us to join our advisory panel. Literally just about no one we’ve ever asked to do a webinar has said, “No.” People want to support good causes and good pioneering efforts. We so need this. We are living in a world that is becoming more and more boxed in.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Tania de Jong: So we need all of you out there to just grab your dreams, ask for help, and then set them on fire. Not in a bad way, sorry, set them on fire in a really good way.

Tim Ferriss: I think they get it. Yeah, yeah. No arson endorsement on this podcast.

Tania de Jong: I’m not very good. I always mix my metaphors like that, but—

Tim Ferriss: So TLDR, get after it, folks. We’re all going to be dead and dust in no time flat so it’s time to—

Tania de Jong: Exactly. What have you got to lose? Seriously, what have you got to lose?

Tim Ferriss: Ask for it. People can find you at Mindmedicineaustralian.org.au and your personal website, which you’ve mentioned, yourname.com. And to everybody listening, we will have show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Tania, I believe you are the only Tania that I’ve had on the podcast, T-A-N-I-A, and you’ll be able to find everything we talked about, all the people, all the documentaries, all the organizations, et cetera.

Tania de Jong: Yeah, it’s all there.

Tim Ferriss: We’ll put it all in the show notes. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary. Just try to be a little bit kinder than is necessary to other—

Tania de Jong: Loving kindness.

Tim Ferriss: —but also to yourself.

Tania de Jong: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: That voice that you put out should echo if you’re being compassionate, the voice that goes in, “Do your best. I know it’s hard.” Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

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