#385: The World's Largest Psychedelic Research Center

Tim Ferriss (0:24)

Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to a very exciting edition of The Tim Ferris Show. This is an in-between-isode, and that means that the format is a little weird. It's not a long-form interview, but it's a very, very important announcement. This is something I've been working on for around a year and a half, very intensely, and something diligent scientists have been working toward for 20 plus years, multiple decades.

This episode features a recording of a press conference that I did last week, announcing the launch of the world's largest psychedelic research center and the first psychedelic research center in the US. It is called the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, or research if you prefer, at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Among other things, they'll be investigating the effectiveness of psychedelics as a new therapy for opioid addiction, Alzheimer's disease, specifically the depression that often accompanies Alzheimer's disease, but they'll be looking at secondary outcomes, which will track cognitive effects, which is of great interest to me. Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, formerly known as chronic Lyme disease, anorexia nervosa, which has the highest mortality rate, i.e. fatality rate of any psychiatric disorder, and alcohol use in people with major depression.

The researchers hope to create precision medicine tailored to individual patients' specific needs. It's super exciting. I couldn't be happier and it wouldn't have happened without generous support from Steven and Alexandra Cohen. At Cohen give COHENGIVE on Twitter, Matt Mullenweg at Photomat, M-A-T-T on Twitter, Blake Mycoskie at Blake Mycoskie, M-Y-C-O-S-K-I-E on Twitter, and Craig Nerenberg. Many thanks also to Benedict Carey of the New York Times for investigating and reporting on this from multiple perspectives as he's done for many, many years. He is at Ben Carey, C-A-R-E-Y-N-Y-T on Twitter.

As some of you know, I shifted most of my focus from startup investing to this field around 2015, and it's incredibly important to me that this watershed announcement helps to catalyze more studies, more ambitious centers, more scientists entering the field, and more philanthropists and sources of funding taking a really close look at psychedelic science. To that end, it's critical that more people realize there is much more reputational upside, much more reputational reward than reputational risk in supporting this important work in 2019 and beyond. My hope is to broadcast this as widely as possible. There are a few different ways to do that.

One is to share the New York Times pieces that have come out, and there are a few different New York Times pieces that have come out covering this.

One of them can be found at tim.blog forward slash NYT, or New York Times, spelled however you want, will forward to one article. So I would sincerely ask that if you're interested in this space, or if you find value in exploring this space, which I think holds the potential to treat what are considered untreatable or intractable conditions, then please share that URL and the announcement itself. I'm joined in the press conference with Dr. Roland Griffiths, and you'll hear intros later, so I'm not going to get into it right now, but Dr. Roland Griffiths, who is incredible, Dr. Matthew Johnson, who is incredible, and then also Audrey Huang, PhD, who is the moderator, and I will keep it short for now. A couple of time markers. This is maybe a little drier than some of my interviews that bounce around, and can be very kind of fun-loving. This one's pretty serious, but a couple of time markers. So if you want to skip the initial introductory remarks, you can jump to about four minutes and 30 seconds from when this intro ends. If you want to go directly to my comments, if you're interested in why I would focus so much on this space, my personal reasons, my macro level big picture reasons, you can jump to about 11 minutes and 10 seconds after I stopped talking in this intro. Then if you want to get straight to the Q&A where we're fielding questions from people in attendance, then you can go to 15 minutes and 30 seconds after I stopped talking. So without further ado, please enjoy this incredibly important, incredibly exciting announcement of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Audrey Huang (5:05)

Welcome everybody and thank you for joining us today. My name is Dr. Audrey Huang. I am Director of Media Relations at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Today, we're announcing a new research center at Johns Hopkins, the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Joining us today are Dr. Roland Griffiths, Dr. Matthew Johnson, and Mr. Tim Ferris. Dr. Roland Griffiths is a Professor of Behavioral Biology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience here at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and he is founding Director of this new center. Dr. Griffiths is one of the nation's leading psychopharmacologists whose research focuses on better understanding the effects of mood-altering drugs. He directs the psilocybin research initiative here at Johns Hopkins, which has run many studies over the years, including examining the mystical experience imparted by psychedelics on healthy people and how psychedelics might decrease depression and anxiety. Psilocybin, the active compound found in so-called magic mushrooms or shrooms, for those more familiar, will be one focus of the new center. It was first purified and then made synthetically in the 1950s. At the time, psilocybin was legal and was among the psychedelics that rose to the center of the 1960s counterculture.