You want to hear about something crazy? Yeah, that I've been getting really into, and this is going to get into crazy town, but you know we like getting into crazy town a little bit. So, dream engineering and anesthesia dreams.
So, I've been going down this rabbit hole related to dream engineering. So, can you modify dream content? Can you, for instance, facilitate two-way communication between scientists and dreamers while they are dreaming? And this is a long-standing interest of mine. I first read Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by someone named Stephen LaBerge at the very, very beginning of high school and became very interested in lucid dreaming, which is, just to define terms, where you train yourself, and there is a process for this, to induce lucidity while you're dreaming. That just means you become conscious of the fact that you're dreaming. And with exercises, you can get to the point where you're able to modify your own dream content.
And I used to, for instance, in high school, when I was competing in wrestling, I would do additional training sessions at night in my dreams. I'm not making this up, and I felt like there was a direct translation to improve performance. Okay. But flash forward, I ended up getting introduced to Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz, who took research out of MIT and Harvard to make dream engineering a reality. So, he has a startup called Dust, D-U-S-T, and in full disclosure, I am an investor in that.
They're going to be helping people to modify dream content to address things like PTSD.
Now, that's where the conversation started, and he knows that I have long-standing interest in psychedelic-related therapies. But psychedelics have taken a backseat for me in the last handful of years because many people will not be able to take psychedelics, whether it's for health reasons, contraindications, they have psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia in their family that mean it would be ill-advised to take them.
So I've been really focused, as you know, on neuromodulation, brain stimulation. And I still am super, super bullish.
How often are you doing that now?
I'm going to be doing it again probably in the next month. I would say every three to four months.
The update there, I did get involved with one company, and I thought very heavily about it, called Ampa Health, A-M-P-A Health. They have the smallest, most modular option on the market. Very easy to use. And I think they're the company, if I had to bet on one, that's going to get to the point where you can actually power something off of an iPhone.
They're doing some really, really interesting work. Just to touch on that, they're doing one-day protocols now. So instead of five days off of work, costs 30 grand or something, you're doing one day of treatment accelerated with this very small dose of antibiotic called D-Cycloserine, which induces plasticity in the brain much like certain psychedelics. So you basically let that dissolve in your mouth beforehand. And from, let's say, a one to ten in severity, let's say my OCD, generalized anxiety felt like an eight or nine, it has taken it to like a zero or a one.
One day. Now it gets crazier though, because you can also use it. People can check out Ampa Health.
Do they do it in LA as well or no? Where are people doing this?
All over the country. I mean, what I'm hoping is that people who are already administering things like ketamine or who are offering CBT or whatever will just offer this as an add-on, because most of the devices that are available now are like the size of a refrigerator. You have to sign like a quarter-million-dollar lease. The Ampa Health product for providers is like three grand a month. You can cancel anytime.
I think that's still accurate, and it can fit in like the trunk of a car. It's much easier to use. But what's also amazing, and I did this recently when I was traveling, met a technician and did like two hours of, I think it was stims every 30 minutes, just for a handful of minutes each stimulation.
What are we talking about, stimulation? Okay.
Different target area of the brain then?
In this case it was the same target. It's a target that they're not talking about super publicly yet. But very easy for our therapist-like technicians to find.
How do they find it? Are they just like measuring your head and [__] and looking like...
It's all based on really, really good science. They're looking at overlapping networks that are identified by looking at data from deep brain stimulation, data from lesion research.
But I mean, when they sit down with you, like if you're going to go into this place and they're like, 'Hey, I got to find this region in your brain.'
Part of what makes how they do it interesting is they're finding targets that are more uniform person to person. So certain places like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, certain areas on the front of the skull or front of the brain, front of the head, right, are a little more variable. You have to be very precise. So they're finding ways to make it very effective, very fast, and less likely to suffer from like clinician error, right? Because if you really have to thread the needle, sometimes you get no effect. That happened to me when I was using like earlier targets with other hardware. If they were off by like a half a centimeter, nothing. And you just wasted a week, right? And like 30 grand. So...
Wow.
And no downside? Like you're not getting headaches afterwards or anything weird?
Mild headache. Mild headache for like a day.
Does that not freak you out though? I mean, that's the only reason I haven't tried any of this stuff. I'm like, I don't know. It's like they're just putting magnets in your brain and [__].
Just to bust your balls. Before we started recording, you were talking about some drugs you were experimenting with.
Yeah, but that's like just, that's just a good old time. That's tried and true.
I mean, look, yeah, I'm no stranger to pharmacology. I'm just saying. In this particular case, I personally found the, I think the risk-benefit ratio is much more attractive for the general population than psychedelics, which is why I'm spending so much time looking at it. I think it is much, much, much more attractive.
