5 Questions for Brandon Goode

In 2018, Brandon Goode was in his mid-20s, living in Denmark, and working for a pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk when he first started thinking about psychedelics. He’d listened to an episode of the podcast “The Tim Ferriss Show” with trauma researcher Gabor Maté which talked about addiction and ayahuasca. After that, Goode “went rogue,” and began talking about psychedelics study design with researchers at Imperial College in London, and trying to convince Novo Nordisk to invest in that work. Months later, he’d moved back to his hometown of Toronto, Canada, as the director of strategic partnerships at psychedelic company Field Trip, best known for their North American ketamine clinics. 

Last year, Goode left the company to found an app called Houston, which allows users to track and reflect on their microdosing sessions. (Just as Houston is ground control for space missions, the app Houston, Goode says, is meant to be a guide for users’ “inner space.”) The Microdose talks with Goode about who’s microdosing, and what he hopes his company can add to their experiences.

How did you decide that what the world needed was a microdosing app? 

I just got disenchanted by the medicalization of psychedelics. I’m not ethically aligned with an overfocus on drug development in psychedelics, like patenting molecules that have been known for decades, if not millennia. When we are focusing on the safety and efficacy of these substances, I think it’s a problem for the government to have any purview over the legality of these, or anything beyond determining whether they’re safe for people to consume. I wanted to work on something that was more aligned with these views, and I saw a real cultural wave around psychedelics moving out of the echo chamber that they've historically occupied. Now they’re reaching the masses, mainly through millennials, often in the form of microdosing — that’s often the first step in a person’s ongoing practice of psychedelics.

I’m sure you know microdosing is a divisive topic within the psychedelics world; there aren’t many studies, and people disagree on the therapeutic merits of the practice. What do you make of the existing evidence (or lack thereof)?

You see a lot of talk around using microdosing for managing ADHD or depression or anxiety or chronic pain. I've also seen articles about people using it to deal with menstrual symptoms. A lot of crowdsourced information suggests that microdosing could be an adequate replacement for a lot of medications that have failed a lot of people. We've all heard about what opioids have done to patients with chronic pain, and there are perils of antidepressants, and of drugs like Ritalin, which is pretty much like microdosing meth.

Whether the effects are proven out or not, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. Before the benefits of meditation had scientific evidence, it was catching on. You can also look at CBD; in the U.S., like every other drink has CBD, often 10 milligrams or so. But there’s virtually no evidence that it has an effect; generally, you'd have to take close to a gram to have an effect.

There's also big talk around the placebo effect: is microdosing a placebo? If you look closely at that question, the definitions are hard. What is a microdose? If you notice it at all, does that mean you’re not microdosing? And is the placebo effect a bad thing? Even clinical research isn't protected from that; many studies haven’t adequately taken into account the placebo effect. Robin Carhart-Harris just shared a study on Twitter the other day looking at how the placebo effect could have accounted for the difference in outcomes among two different groups taking antidepressants. 

Robin Carhart-Harris @RCarhartHarris

@Mindlumen My v quick reading of the results is that SSRIs were x4 more effective in treating anxiety when participants knew they were taking them - likely due to the placebo effect (aka positive expectations) - and this effect may have been mediated by dopamine release.

There will be more research coming out about the placebo effect — and to bring it back to Houston, if you are getting a placebo effect from microdosing, perhaps digitally-delivered version of set-and-setting could help people maximize those benefits.

I imagine you’ve had to do some market research in advance of launching your app. Who is microdosing, and how are they getting into it?

It's definitely evolved from the biohacker productivity-hacker-type it was popular with for a while. More people are coming to microdosing for the overall mental and physical health benefits that people have been hearing about in the New York Times or The New Yorker, or in shows like “Nine Perfect Strangers.” Older people are turning to psychedelics for, you know, maintaining brain health, because there's really no adequate drug for Alzheimer's and dementia. There are now microdosing moms.

Being a millennial myself, in Toronto, and tapped into culture, I saw, particularly in Canada and the West Coast of the U.S., a lot of gray market distributors popping up. They’re approaching microdosing and psychedelics in a really modern way; you no longer have to go to these shady websites with ugly blue-light pictures of mushrooms and pay with bitcoin. 

So, I learned through these new modern stakeholders in the space, and by scouring Reddit. Reddit's great — there’s an extremely supportive and a tight knit microdosing community on Reddit. I put out some surveys there and did interviews with people to talk about their experiences with psychedelics; others were just interested in getting into microdosing. 

There has never been a more exciting – or bewildering – time in the world of psychedelics. Don’t miss a beat.

There are other microdosing apps out there. What sets Houston apart?

When you’re building a product, it’s really important to have a specific use case in mind. The ones I've seen in the Apple App Store seem to have different uses than ours. One is like putting an Excel sheet onto an app — that's good stuff, but it's just not very user friendly. There's another app called Quantified Citizen, which is mainly a digital research tool for academics doing studies. It’s very much geared towards researchers collecting data — it mainly adds value to the researcher, not the user.

What we try to do with Houston is bring some of the concepts from macrodosing into microdosing: setting intentions, reflecting through journaling and meditation, and connecting to a  community. Our app was designed by Will Simon, who was formerly at Headspace — we wanted the app to serve as a digital set and setting. It can personalize the experience with radio stations or Spotify playlists based on your intention, and the app will send you notifications to check in with how you’re feeling. 

What do you see for the future of microdosing and the future of your company? 

I think microdosing presents a responsible way to scale, versus going through full-blown tripping, because that’s a more delicate experience, with more room for error that can’t be managed through an app. Microdosing can be a way to introduce psychedelic drugs to people who might come from outside the “psychedelic space,” but are interested in the benefits. And in terms of the app, at the end of the day, it's not really about psychedelics. One of my favorite Buddhist proverbs is “Don't confuse the finger for the moon.” In other words, don’t confuse the finger for the thing it’s pointing at. People want to become the fullest versions of themselves before they die — the most effective, compassionate, fulfilled, excited versions of themselves. A lot of times, people can confuse psychedelics with being the moon, but it’s really the finger that points to the moon. It’s a tool; people can use that finger to point to the best versions of themselves.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.