Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
matthew johnson a professor of
psychiatry and behavioral science at
john hopkins
and is one of the top scientists in the
world conducting seminal research
on psychedelics this was one of the most
eye-opening
and fascinating conversations i've ever
had on this podcast
i'm sure i'll talk with matt many more
times quick mention of his sponsor
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episode
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support this podcast as a side note let
me say that psychedelics
is an area of study that is fascinating
to me
in that it gives hints that much of the
magic of our experience
arises from just a few chemical
interactions in the brain
and that the nature of that experience
can be expanded
through the tools of biology chemistry
physics
neuroscience and artificial intelligence
the fact that a world-class scientist
and researcher like matt
can apply a rigor to our study of this
mysterious
and fascinating topic is exciting to me
beyond words
as is the case with any of my colleagues
who dare to venture out into the
darkness
of all that is unknown about the human
mind with both an
openness of first principle thinking and
the rigor
of the scientific method if you enjoy
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lex friedman and now here's my
conversation
with matthew johnson can you give an
introduction
to psychedelics like a whirlwind
overview
maybe what are psychedelics and
what are the kinds of psychedelics out
there and
in whatever way you find meaningful to
categorize yeah
you can categorize them by their
chemical structure
so phenethylamines tryptamines
ergolines um that
is is less of a meaningful way to
classify them i think that they're
pharmacological
activity their receptor activity is the
best way
well let me let me start even broader
than that because there i'm talking
about the classic psychedelics
so broadly speaking when we say
psychedelic
that refers to for most people a broad
number of compounds that work in
different pharmacological ways
so it includes the so-called classic
psychedelics
that includes psilocybin
and salosine which are in mushrooms lsd
dimethyltryptamine or dmt it's in
ayahuasca people can smoke it too
mescaline which is in peyote and san
pedro
cactus um
and those all work by hitting a certain
uh
subtype of serotonin receptor the
serotonin 2a receptor
it's they act as agonists at that
receptor
other compounds like pcp
ketamine mdma
ibogaine they all are more broadly
speaking
called psychedelics but they work by
very different ways pharmacologically
and they have
some different effects including some
subjective effects even though there's
enough of an overlap in the subjective
effects
that you know people informally refer to
them
as psychedelic and i think what that
overlap is you know compared to say
you know caffeine and cocaine and you
know ambien
etc um other psychoactive drugs is that
they have strong effects in altering
one's sense of reality and including the
sense of self
and i should throw in there that that
cannabis more historically like in the
70s has been called a minor psychedelic
and i think with that latter definition
it
it does fit that definition particularly
if one doesn't have a tolerance
so you mentioned serotonin so most of
the effect comes from something around
like the the chemistry
around neurotransmitters and so on so
it's uh
chemical interactions in in the brain or
is there other kinds of interactions
that have this kind of
perception and self-awareness altering
effects
well as far as we know all of the the
psychedelics of all the different
classes
we've we've talked about
their major activity is caused by
receptor level
events so either acting at the post
receptor side of the synapse in other
words neurotransmission operates by
you know one neuron releasing
neurotransmitter into a synapse a gap
between the two neurons and then the
other neuron
receives they have it has receptors that
receives and then there can be an act
activation
um you know caused by that so it's like
a pitcher and a catcher
so all of the major psychedelics work by
either acting as a pitcher mimicking a a
a
a a pitcher or a catcher so for example
the classic psychedelics
they fit into the same catcher's mitt on
the post receptor
uh post-synaptic receptor side as
serotonin itself
but they do a slightly different thing
to the to the cell to the neuron
than serotonin does um there's a
different signaling pathway after that
initial activation
something like mdma works at the
presynaptic side
the pitcher side and basically it floods
the synapse or the gap between the cells
with a bunch of serotonin the natural
um neurotransmitter so it's like the the
pitcher in a baseball game all of a
sudden just starts throwing balls like
every
every second everything we're talking
about is it
uh often more natural meaning
found in the natural world you mentioned
cacti
cactus or is it uh chemically
manufactured like
artificially in the lab so the classic
psychedelics there's
um what are the classics so yeah
using terminology that's not chemical
terminology not like the terminology
you've seen titles of papers
academic papers but more sort of common
parlance right
it would be good to kind of define their
you know their effects like how they're
different
and so it includes lsd psilocybin which
is in mushrooms
masculine dmt which one is masculine
mescaline is in
the different cacti so the one most
people will know is
is peyote but it also shows up in san
pedro or peruvian torch
and all of these classic psychedelics
they have at the right dose you know and
typically
they have ex very strong effects on one
sense of reality and
one sense of self what some of the
things that makes them different than
other more broadly speaking psychedelics
like mdma
and and others is that they're um
at least the the major examples there
are some exotic ones that differ
but the ones i've talked about are
extremely safe at the physiological
level
like there's like lsd and psilocybin
there's no known lethal overdose
unless you have like really severe you
know um
heart disease you know because it
modestly raises your blood pressure so
right same person might be hurt
shoveling snow or going up the stairs
you know that could have a car they
could have have a cardiac event
because they've taken a um one of these
drugs but for most people
you know someone could take a thousand
times what the effective dose is and
it's not gonna cause any organ damage
affect the brain stem make them stop
breathing so in that sense
you know it's they're freakishly safe at
the physiology i would never call any
compound safe because there's always a
risk they're freakishly safe
at the physiological level i mean you
can hardly find anything over the
counter
like that i mean aspirin's not like that
caffeine is not like that most drugs
you take five ten twenty
maybe takes a hundred but you get to
some times the affected dose and it's
gonna kill you
yeah or cause some serious damage and so
that's that's something that's
remarkable
about these most of these classic
psychedelics that's incredible by the
way that you can
go on a hell of a journey in the mind
like probably transformative potentially
in a like deeply transformative way and
yet
there's no dose that in most people
would have a
lethal effect that's kind of fascinating
there's this duality between the mind
and the body
it's like uh it's the okay sorry if i
bring him up way too much but david
goggins it's like uh
you know the kind of things you go on on
the long run
like the hell you might go through in
your mind your mind can take a lot and
you can go through a lot with the mind
and the body will just be its own thing
you can go through hell
but uh after a good night's sleep be
back to normal
and the body is always there so bringing
it back to goggins it's like you can do
that without even destroying your knee
or whatever
coming close and riding that line that's
true so the unfortunate thing about the
running which he uses running to test
the mind
so the the aspect of running
that is negative in order to test the
mind you really have to
uh push the body like take the body
through a journey
i wish there was another way of uh doing
that in the physical exercise space
i think there are exercises that are
easier on the body than others but
running sure is a hell of an effective
way to do it
and one of the ways that where it
differs is that
you're unlike exercise you're
essentially
you know most exercise to really get to
those intense levels
you really need to be persistent about
it right i mean it'll be intense if
you're really out of shape just
you know jogging for five minutes but to
really get to those intense levels you
need to you know have the dedication and
so
some of the other ways of of altering um
subjective effects or states of
consciousness take that type of
dedication psychedelics though i mean
someone takes the right dose
they're strapped into the roller coaster
um and some
something interesting is going to happen
and i really like what you said about
that
that that that distinction between the
mind or the contrast between them
the mind effects and the the bodily
uh the body effects because um
i think of this i i do research with all
the drugs
you know caffeine alcohol
methamphetamine cocaine
alcohol legal illegal most of these
drugs
um thinking about say cocaine and
methamphetamine
you can't give a to a regular user you
can't
safely give a dose where the
regular cocaine user is going to say oh
man
that's like that's the strongest coke
i've ever had
you know um because you know you get it
past the ethics committee
and you need approval and i wouldn't
want to give someone something that's
dangerous so
to go to those levels where they would
say that you would have to give
something that's
physiologically riskier
yeah you know psilocybin or lsd
you can give a dose at the physiological
level that is like
a very good chance it's going to be the
most intense
psychological experience of that
person's life yeah and have zero chance
for most people if you screen them
of killing them the big the big risk is
behavioral toxicity which is
a fancy way of saying doing something
stupid i mean you're really intoxicated
like if you
wander into traffic or you fall from a
height just like playing people
on high doses of alcohol and the other
kind of unique thing about
about psych classic psychedelics is that
they're not addictive
which is pretty much unheard of when it
comes to
so-called drugs of abuse or drugs that
people at least
at some frequency choose to take
you know most of what we think of as
drugs um
you know even caffeine alcohol cocaine
cannabis
most of these you can get into alcohol
you can get into a daily use
pattern and that's just extreme
so unheard of with psychedelics most
people have taken
these things on a daily basis it's more
like
they're building up the courage to do it
and then they build up a tolerance or
yeah they're in college and they do it
on a dare can you take
take acid seven days in a row that type
of thing rather than a self-control
issue
yes where you have and say oh god i
gotta stop taking this i gotta
stop drinking every night i gotta cut
down on the coke whatever
so that's the classic psychedelics uh
what are the
uh what's a good term modern
psychedelics or more maybe
psychedelics that are created in the lab
what else is there
right so mdma is the big one and i
should say that that with the classic
psychedelics that lsd is sort of
you can call it a semi-synthetic because
there's there's there's
natural you know from from both ergot
and in certain seeds
um uh morning glory seeds is one example
there's a very close
there are some very close uh chemical
relatives of lsd so
lsd is close to what occurs in nature
but not quite it's
but then when we get into the the other
um
non-classic psychedelics probably the
most prominent one is mdma
people call it ecstasy people call it
molly
and it is uh it differs from
classic psychedelics in a number of ways
it can be
addictive but not so it's like you can
have cocaine on this end of
the continuum and classic psychedelics
here
continuum of addiction continuum of
addiction you know so it's certainly no
cocaine
it's pretty rare for people to get into
daily use patterns but it's possible
and they can get into more like you know
using once a week pattern
where they can find it hard to to stop
but it's
it's somewhere in between mostly towards
the to the
classic psychedelic side in terms of
like relatively little addiction
potential um
but it's also more physiologically
dangerous i think that the
certainly the therapeutic use it's
showing really promising effects for
treating ptsd and the models that are
used i think those are
extremely acceptable when it comes to
the risk benefit ratio that
you see all throughout medicine but
nonetheless that we do know that at a
certain
dose and a certain frequency that mdma
can cause long-term
damage to the serotonin system in the
brain so it doesn't have that level of
kind of freakish bodily safety that
that the classic psychedelics do and it
has more of a heart load
a cardiovascular i don't mean kind of
emotion i mean
in this sense although it is very
emotional and that's something unique
about its uh
subjective effects but it's more of a
oppressor and uh the terminology using
sort of uh
like a freakish capacities allowing you
from a researcher perspective but a
personal perspective too of taking a
journey with
uh some of these psychedelics that is
um the heroic dose as they say so like
these are tools that allow you to take a
serious mental journey whatever that is
that's what you mean and with mdma
there's a little bit
it starts entering this territory where
you got to be careful about the risks
uh to the body potentially so yes that
in in the sense that you can't kind of
push the dose up as high
as you safely um as one can if they're
in the right setting like in our
research
as they can with the with the classic
psychedelics but probably more
importantly
the just the nature of the effects with
mdma aren't the full
on psychedelic it's not the full journey
you know so it's sort of a psychedelic
with rose-colored glasses on
psychedelic that's more of it's been
called more of a heart trip than a head
trip
the nature of reality doesn't unravel
as frequently as it does with classic
psychedelics
but you're able to more directly sense
your environment so your perception
system still works it's not completely
detached
from reality with mdma that that's true
relatively speaking that said at most
doses and of classic psychedelics you
still have a tether
to reality changes a little bit when
you're talking about smoking dmt or
smoking 5 methoxy dmt
um which are some interes interesting
examples we could talk more about but
with um yet with mdma
it it's for example it's it's very rare
to have a a
what's called an ego loss experience or
a sense of transcendental
unity um where one really
seemingly loses the psychological
construct of the self
you know but um mdma it's very common
for people to have this
you know they still are perceiving
themselves as a self but
uh it's common for them to have this
this warmth
this empathy for humanity and for their
friends and loved ones
so it's more it's and you see those
effects under the classic psychedelics
but if that's a subset of what the
classic psychedelics do so i see mdma in
terms of its subjective effects
is if you think about um venn diagrams
it's sort of
mdma is all within the classic
psychedelic so okay
everything that you see on a particular
mdma session
sometimes a psilocybin session looks
just like that
but then sometimes it's completely
different with psilocybin it's a little
more
narrowed in terms of the variability
with mdma is there something general to
say about
what the psychedelics do to the human
mind
you mentioned kind of an ego loss
experience in the space of van diagrams
if we're to like draw a big circle
what can we say about that big circle
in terms of people's report of
subjective
experience probably one of the
most general things we can say is that
it it expands
that range so many people come out of
these sessions
saying that they didn't know it was
possible to have an experience like that
so there's an emphasis on the subjective
experience that
um is is there words that people put it
put to it that capture that experience
or is it something that just has to be
experienced
yeah people like as a researcher that's
an interesting question because you have
to kind of
measure the effects
of this and uh how do you convert that
into numbers
right that that's that's the ultimate
child so how is that even
is that possible to one convert it into
words
and the second convert the words into
numbers somehow so we do a lot of that
with questionnaires you know some of
which are very psychometrically
validated so they've
lots of numbers have been crunched on
them and there's always a limitation
with
with questionnaires i mean subjective
effects are subjective effects
ultimately it's what the person is
reporting
and and that doesn't necessarily point
towards
a ground truth um what what they're
so for example if someone says that it
they felt like they touched another
dimension or they felt like they
they sensed the reality of god or if
they
um you know um i mean just you name it
people's
ontological views can sometimes shift i
think that's more about where they're
coming from and i don't think it's the
quintessential way in which they work
there's plenty of people that hold on to
a completely naturalistic
viewpoint and come and have profound and
and and helpful experiences
with these compounds but the subjective
effects can be so
broad that for some people it shifts
their
their philosophical viewpoint more
towards
idealism more towards you know thinking
of
let that the nature of reality might be
more about
consciousness than about material
that's a domain i'm very interested in
right now we have essentially zero
to say about that in terms of validating
those types of claims but it's even
interesting just to see what people say
along those lines so you're interested
in saying like can we
more rigorously study this process of
expansion like
what do we mean by this expansion of
your
sense of what is possible in the
experiences in this
world right as much as what we can say
about that
through naturalistic psychology right
especially as much as we can route it to
um solid psychological constructs and
solid
neuroscientific constructs and i wonder
what the impact is of the language that
you bring to the table
so you mentioned about god or um
speaking of god a lot of people are
really into sort of theoretical physics
these days at a very surface level
and you can bring the language of
physics right you can talk about quantum
mechanics
you can talk about general general
relativity and
curvature space-time and using just that
language
without a deep technical understanding
of it to somehow start
thinking like sort of visualizing atoms
in your head
and somehow through that process because
you have the language
using that language to kind of dissolve
the ego
like realize like that we're just all
little bits
of physical objects that behave in
mysterious ways
and so that that has to do with the
language like if you read a sean carroll
book or something recently
it seems like as a huge influence on the
way you
might experience my perceive the world i
might experience
the alteration that psychedelics brings
to the um to the your perception system
so i wonder like the language you bring
to the table how that affects
the journey you go on with the
psychedelics i think
very much so and and i think there's i'm
a little concerned some of the science
is going a little too far in the
direction of
of around the edges you know speaking
about
it changing beliefs in this sense or
that sense
about particular in particular domains
and i think what really what
a lot of what's going on is what you
just discussed it's it's
the priors coming into into it so if
you've been reading a lot of
you know um physics then you might
you know um bring up you know like you
know space-time and interpret the
experience
in that sense i mean it's not uncommon
for people to come out talking about
visions of the it's not the most typical
thing but it's come up in sessions i've
guided um
the big bang um and the
you know this sort of nature of reality
i i think probably the the best way to
think about these
experiences is that and the best
evidence even though we're in our
infancy and understanding it
the they really tap into more general
psychological mechanisms
i think one of the best arguments is
they they they
they reduce the influence of the of our
priors
of what we bring into the all of the
assumptions that we all that
you know we're essentially especially as
adults we're riding on top of heuristic
after heuristic to get through life
and you need to do that and that's a
good thing and that's extremely
efficient and evolution has shaped that
but that comes at an expense and i
it seems that these experiences
will will allow someone greater
mental flexibility and openness and so
one can be both less
influenced by their their prior
assumptions but still nonetheless
the nature of the experience can be
influenced by what they've been exposed
to
in the world and sometimes they can get
it at a deep in a deeper way
like maybe they've read i mean i had a
philosophy professor one time as a
participant yeah in a high-dose
psilocybin study and he's like
i remember him saying my god it's like
hegel's
opposites defining each other like i get
it i've taught this thing
for years and years and years like i get
it now
and so like that you know and and even
at the
psychological emotional level like the
cancer patients um we worked with
you know they told themselves a million
times or this people trying to quit
smoking i need to quit smoking
oh i'm ruining my life with this cancer
i'm still healthy i should be getting
out i'm letting this thing defeat me
it's like yeah you told yourself that in
your head but sometimes they have these
experiences
and they kind of feel it in their heart
like they really get it
so in some sense that
you bring some prize to the table but
psychedelics allow you to
acknowledge them and then throw them
away so like
one popular terminology around this in
the engineering space is first
principles thinking
that elon musk for example espouses a
lot
let me ask a fun question before we
return to a more
serious discussion with elon musk
as an example but it could be just
engineers in general
do you think there's a use for
psychedelics
to uh take a a journey
of rigorous first principles thinking so
like throwing away
we're not talking about throwing away
assumptions about the nature of reality
in terms of like our philosophy of the
way we live day-to-day life but we're
talking about like
how how to build a better rocket or how
to build a better car
or how to build a better uh social
network or all those kinds of things
engineering questions i absolutely think
there's huge potential there
and it's there was some research in the
um late 60s early 70s that were it was
very early and not very rigorous in
terms of um
methodology but um it was consistent
with the
i mean there's just countless anecdotes
of folks i mean people have argued that
just you know silicon valley was was
largely influenced by psychedelic
experience
i remember the i think the the person
that came up with the concept of
freeware or shareware it's like it kind
of was generated
you know out of uh or influenced by
psychedelic
experience you know so to this i i think
there's incredible potential there and
we know
really next there's no rigorous research
on that but is there anecdotal stuff
like with steve jobs they think their
stories right
in your exploration of the is there
something a little bit more than just
stories is there like a little bit more
of a solid data points
even if they're just experiential like
anecdotes is there something that you
draw inspiration from like in your
intuition
because we'll talk about it you're
trying to construct studies that are
more rigorous around these questions
but is there something you draw
inspiration from from the past from the
80s and the 90s
in silicon valley that kind of space
or is it just like you have a sense
based on everything you've learned
and these kind of loose stories that
there's something worth digging at
i am influenced by the gosh the the
the just incredible number of anecdotes
surrounding these i mean
um uh kerry mullis he
he invented pcr i mean absolutely
revolutionized
biological sciences he says he wouldn't
have won the nobel prize from it said he
wouldn't have come up with that had he
not had psychedelic experiences
um you know now he's an interesting
character people should read his
autobiography because
he could point to other things he was
into but but i think that speaks to the
the casting your nets wide and this
mental flex
more of these general the these general
mechanisms
where sometimes if you cast your nets
really wide and it's going to depend on
the person
and their influences but sometimes you
come up with false positives
you know um you know you connect the
dots where maybe you shouldn't have
connected those dots but it
i think that can be constrained and
and so much of our not only our personal
psychological suffering but our
our limitations um academically
and in terms of technology are because
of
these self-imposed limitations and and
heuristics
the these entrenched ways of thinking
you know like
those examples throughout the history of
science where someone has come up with a
a rat the paradigm coons paradigm shifts
it's like here's something completely
different you know this doesn't make
sense by any of the previous models
and like we need more of those we i mean
you know and then you need the right
balance between that because so many of
the
you know novel crazy ideas are just bunk
and you need that's what science is
about separating
them from from the valid paradigm
shifting ideas but we need more paradigm
shifting
ideas like in a big way and i think
we could i think you could argue that
we've because of the structure of
academia
and science in modern times it
heavily biases against those right
there's
all kinds of mechanisms in our human
nature that resist
paradigm shift quite sort of obviously
uh so and psychedelics there could be a
lot of other tools but it seems like
psychedelics could be one
set of tools that encourage paradigm
shifting
thinking so like the first principle is
kind of thinking
so it's a kind of um you're at the
forefront of research here
there's just kind of anecdotal stories
there's
uh early studies there's a sense that
we don't understand very much but
there's a lot of depth here
how do we get from there to where elon
and i
can regularly like i wake up every
morning i have deep
work sessions where it's well understood
uh like what dose to take
like if i want to explore something
where it's all
legal where it's all understood and safe
all that kind of stuff how do we get
from uh
where we are today to there not speaking
in terms of legality in the sense like
policy making all that like laws and
stuff meaning like
how do we scientifically understand this
stuff well enough
to get to a place where i can just take
it safely
in order to expand my uh thinking
like this kind of first principles
thinking which i'm in my personal life
currently doing like how do i
revolutionize
particular several things like it seems
like
the only tools i have right now is just
just but my mind going doing the first
principles like
wait wait okay why has this been done
this way can we do it completely
differently
it seems like i'm still tethered to the
priors that i bring to the table and i
keep trying to untether myself maybe
there's tools
that can systematically help me on
tether yeah
well we need experiments you know and
that's
that's tied to kind of the policy level
stuff
um and i should be clear i would i'd
never encourage anyone to do anything
um illicitly but yeah i you know uh in
the future we could see these
these you know compounds used for the
for
for technical and scientific innovation
what we need are
studies that are digging into that right
now most of what the
the funding which is largely fun from
philanthropy
um not from the government um largely
what it's for
is is treatment of of mental disorders
like addiction and
depression etc um but we need studies
you know one of the early initial stabs
um on this question decades ago was they
took some
architects and engineers and said what
what problems have you been working on
where you've been stuck for
months like working on this damn thing
and you're not getting anywhere like
your head's butting up against the wall
it's like come in here take and i think
it was 100 micrograms of lsd so not a
big session
and a little bit different model where
they were actually working it was a
moderate enough dose where they could
work on the problem during
the session i think probably
i'm an empiricist so i'd like to see all
the studies done but
the first thing i would do is like a
really high dose session where you're
not necessarily
in front of your you know computer you
know which you can't really do
on a on a really high dose and then the
the work has
been talked about like you take a really
high dose you take a journey and then
the breakthroughs come from when you
return from the journey and like
integrate quote unquote that experience
i think that's where the all the head
and we're again we're
we're babies at this point but my gut
tells me
yeah that that it's the it's the
so-called integration the aftermath we
know that there's some
form different forms of neuroplasticity
that are unfolding in the days following
a psychedelic at least in animals
probably going on humans we don't know
if that's related to the therapeutic
effects
my my gut tells me it is although it's
it's only part of
of the story but but we need big studies
where we compare people like let's get
100 people like that
scientists that are working on a problem
and then randomize them
too and then i think you you need a uh
um
even more credible you know active
controls or active placebo conditions
to can kind of tease this out um
and then also in conjunction with that
and you can do this in the same study
you want to combine that with
more rigorous sort of um
experimental models where we actually
get their problem solving tasks that we
know for example that you
tend to do better on after you've gotten
a good night's sleep versus not
and my my sense is there's a
relationship there
you know people go back to first
principles you know questioning those
first principles they're operating under
and um you know getting away from their
priors in terms of
creative problem solving and so you i
think wrap those things and you could
speak a little more rigorously about
those because ultimately
if everyone's bringing their own problem
that's
that's i think that's more on the face
valid side but you can't dig in as much
and and get as much experimental power
and speak to the mechanisms as you can
with having everyone do the same sort of
you know canned you know problem
solving task so we've been speaking
about psychedelics generally is there
one you find
from the scientific perspective or maybe
even philosophical perspective
most fascinating to study
therapeutically i'm most interested in
psilocybin and lsd and i think we need
to do a lot more with lsd because it's
mainly been psilocybin in the modern era
i've recently gotten a grant from the
hefta research institute to do an lsd
study so i haven't started it yet but
i'm going through the paperwork and
everything and
uh therapeutic meaning there's some
issue and you're trying to treat that
issue
right right in terms of just like what's
the most
fascinating you know understanding the
nature of these experiences if you
really want to like wrap your head
around what's going on when someone has
a completely altered sense of reality
and sense of self
there i think you're talking about the
the
the high-dose either smoked vaporized or
intravenous injection which
all kind of um they're very similar
pharmacologically
of dmt and 5-methoxy dmt
this is like when people this is what i
don't know if you're familiar with
terence mckinney he would talk a lot
about smoking dmt joe rogan
has has talked a lot about that people
will say that and there's a close
relative called five meth oxy dmt
most people who know the terrain will
say that's
that's an order of magnitude or orders
of magnitude beyond
i mean anything one could get from even
a high dose of psilocybin or lsd
um i think it's a question about whether
you know how therapeutic
i think there is a therapeutic potential
there but it's
probably not as sure of a bet because
one goes so far out
it's almost like they're not
contemplating their relationship
and their direction in life they are
like reality is ripping apart
at the seams and the very
nature of the of the self and of the
sense of reality
and the amazing thing about these
compounds and
same to a lesser degree with the you
know with oral cell cybin and lsd is
that
unlike some some other drugs that that
really throw you far
out there um you know anesthetics and
even even alcohol like it as reality
starts become different at higher higher
doses there's there's this
numbing there's this sort of um
there's this ability for the sense of
being the center having a conscious
experience that's memorable
that is maintained throughout these
classic psychedelic experiences like one
can go as far
so far out while still
being aware of the experience and
remembering the experience
interesting so being able to carry
something back
right can you uh dig in a little deeper
like what is
uh dmt how long is the
trip usually like how much do we
understand about it is there's
something interesting to say about
just the the nature of the experience
and what we understand about it
one of the common methods for people to
use is to is to smoke it or vaporize it
and it usually takes and this is a
pretty good kind of description of what
it might feel like on the ground
um the caveat is it's it's
it's a completely insufficient
description and someone's going to be
listening who has done this it's like
nothing you could say is going to come
close
but it'll take about three big hits
inhalations in order to have what people
call a breakthrough dose
um and there's no great definition of
that
but basically meaning moving away from
you know not just having the typical
psilocybin or lsd experience where
like things are radically different but
you're still basically
a person in this reality to go in
somewhere else
and so that'll typically take like three
hits and this stuff comes on like a
freight train
so one takes a hit and around the time
of the first exhalation
so we're talking about a few seconds in
or maybe just
you know sometime between the first and
the second hit
like it'll start to come on and they're
already up to
say um you know what they might get from
a 30
milligram or or 300 microgram lsd trip a
big trip
they're already there when at the second
hit but it's they're going their
consciousness is gear this is like
acceleration not speed to speak of
physics okay it's like
you just those receptors are getting
filled like that and they're going from
zero to 60 in like you know tesla
time yeah and at the second hit again
they're at this maybe the strongest
psychedelic experience they've ever had
and then if they can take that third hit
even some people can't
they're i mean they're
they're propelled into this other
reality and the nature of that other
reality
it will will differ depending on who you
ask but
you know folks will talk often talk
about and and we've done some survey
research on this
entities of different types elves
tend to pop up yeah all the caveat is i
i strongly presume all of this is
culturally influenced you know
but thinking more about the psychology
and the neuroscience
there is probably something fundamental
you know like
for someone that might be colored as
elves others it might be
colored as um terence mckenna called
them self dribbling basketballs
for someone else it might be little
animals or someone else it might be
aliens
um i think that probably is dependent on
who they are and what they've been
exposed to but just the fact that one
has a sense that they're surrounded by
autonomous entities right intelligent
autonomous entities
right and people come back with stories
that are just
astonishing like there's communication
between these
entities and often they're telling them
things that that that the person says
are self-validating but it seems like
it's impossible
like it really seems like and again this
is what people say
oftentimes that it's
it really is like downloading some
intelligence from a higher dimension or
some whatever metaphor
you want to use sometimes these things
come up in dreams where it's like
someone is exposed to something that
i've had this in a dream you know where
it seems like what they are being
exposed to is
physically impossible but yet at the
same time
self-validating it seems true like that
they really are figuring something out
of course the challenge is to say
something
in in concrete terms after the
experience that
where you could um you know verify that
in any way and i i'm not familiar of any
examples of that well there's a there's
a sense in which
i suppose the experience like um
you uh you're you're a limited cognitive
creature that knows very little about
the world
and here's a chance to communicate with
much wiser
entities that in a way that you can't
possibly understand
are trying to give you hints
of deeper truths right and so there's
that kind of sense
that you you can take something back but
you can't
where uh our cognition is not capable to
fully grasp the truth
we'll just get get a kind of sense of it
and somehow that
process is mind expanding that there's a
greater truth out there
right that seems like what from the
people i've heard
talk about that's that seems to be what
uh
it is and that's so fascinating that
there's um
there's fundamentally to this whole
thing is the communication between
an entity that is other than yourself
entities so it's not just like a visual
experience
like uh like you're like floating
through the world
is there's other beings there which is
kind of
i don't know i don't know what to sort
of uh from a person who
likes freud and carl jung i don't know
what to think about that
that being of course from one
perspective it's just you looking in the
mirror
but it could also be from another
perspective like actually
talking to other beings yeah you
mentioned young and i think that's
he's particularly interesting and it
kind of points to something i was
you know thinking about saying is that
that i think what might be going on
natural
from a naturalistic perspective um so
regardless
you know whether or not there are you
know it doesn't depend on
autonomous entities out there what might
be happening
is that just the associative net
the the the level of learning the
the comprehension might be so
beyond what someone is is used to that
the only way
for the nervous system for for the for
the aware
sense of self to orient towards it is
all by metaphor
and so i do think you know when we get
into these realms
as as a strong empiricist i think we
always got to be careful and be as
grounded as possible but i'm also
willing to speculate and and sort of
cast the nets wide
with caveat but you know i think of
things like archetypes
and you know you know it's plausible
that there are certain stories there are
certain
you know we've gone through millions of
years of evolution
it may be that we have certain um
characters and stories that are sort of
that our central nervous system are sort
of wired to tend to
yeah those stories that we carry those
stories in us right and this unlocks
them in a certain kind of way
and we think about stories like our
sense of self is basically narrative
self is a story
and we think about the world of stories
this is why metaphors are always more
powerful than
um you know sort of laying out all the
details all the time you know
speaking in parables it's like if you
really get so you know this is why
as much as i hate it you know if you're
presenting to congress or something and
you have all the
the best data in the world it's not as
powerful as that one anecdote as
as as the mom dying of cancer that had
the psilocybin session
and it transformed her life you know
that's a story
that's meaningful and so when this kind
of
unimaginable kind of change and
and and experience happens with a
dmt um ingestion
it these stories of entities they might
they might be that you know
stories that are constructed that is the
the closest
which is not to say the stories aren't
real i mean i think we're getting to
layers where
what it doesn't yeah yeah but it's the
closest we can come
to making sense out of it because i do
what we do know
about these psychedelics one of the
levels beyond the receptor is that the
brain is communicating it with itself in
a massively different way
there's massive communication with areas
that don't normally communicate
and so it i think that comes with
both it's casting the nets wide i think
that comes with the insights
and helpful novel ways of thinking i do
think it comes with
false positives you know that could be
some of the delusion
um and so
you know when you're so far out there
like with dmat experience like maybe
alien is the the best way
that the mind can wrap some arms around
that
so uh i don't know how much you're
familiar with joe rogan
he does bring up dmt quite a bit it's
almost a meme
uh it is a name have you ever uh what is
it have you ever tried dmt
uh i mean he i think he talks about this
experience of um
having met other entities um
and uh they were mocking him i think if
i remember the experience correctly
like laughing at him and saying f-u-f-u
or something like that
i may be misremembering this but but
there's a general mockery
and uh the the what he learned from that
experience is that he shouldn't take
himself too seriously
so it's the dissolution of the ego and
so on like what do you think about
uh that experience and maybe if you have
more general things about the
joe's infatuation with dmt and if dmt
has
that important role to play in
um popular culture in general i'm
definitely familiar with it i remember
telling you all flying that when i first
the first
time i learned who joe rogan was
probably 15 years ago and i came up on a
clip and i realized
there's another person in the world
who's into both dmt
and brazilian jiu jitsu and i think both
those worlds have grown
dramatically since and it's probably not
such a special club these days so
he definitely you know got onto my radar
screen quickly
you you were into both before it was
cool right i mean you know
this is all relative because there's
people that were you know before the
late 90s and early 2000s who are into it
that say you know you're a johnny come
lately but
but yeah compared to where we're at now
but yet
one of the things i always found
fascinating by by joe's
you know um telling of his experience
experiences i think is that they
resemble very much
terence mckenna's experiences with dmt
and joe has talked very much about
terence mckenna
and his experiences if i had to guess i
would guess that probably just having
heard terence mckenna talk about his
experiences
that joe's that that influenced the
coloring
yeah it's funny it's funny how that
works because i mean that's why
mckenna hasn't i mean poets
and uh great orders give us the words
to then like start to describe our
experiences because
our words are limited our language is
limited and it's always nice to get some
kind of nice poetry into the mix
to allow us to put words to it right
but i also see some elements that that
that seem to relate to joe's psychology
get just
from what i've seen in him you know from
hours of watching him on his podcast is
that
you know he's a self critical guy
yes and i think with always this
positive ben i'm always struck
being a behavioral pharmacologist and he
no one else really says it about
cannabis i'll get back to the dnt thing
about
he likes the kind of the paranoid side
of things he's like that's you radically
examining yourself
yeah it's like that sounds just a bad
thing that's you need to like look hard
at yourself
yeah and something's making you
uncomfortable like dig into that
and like that's his it's sort of along
the lines of goggins with
exercise and it's like yeah like things
learning experiences aren't supposed to
be easy
like take advantage of these
uncomfortable experiences it's why we
call in our research
in a safe context with psychedelics
they're not bad trips they're
challenging experiences
yes so yeah it's fascinating just a tiny
tangent
it's always cool for me to hear him talk
about um marijuana like weed
as the paranoia the anxiety or whatever
that you experience
is actually the the the fuel for the
experience like i think he talks about
smoking weed when he's writing that's
inspiring to me because
then you can't possibly have a bad
experience
i'm a huge fan of that like every
experience is good
um right which is very goggins yeah it's
very good
is it bad okay all right great you know
well see goggins is one side of that he
wants it bad
i like he wants the experience to be
challenging always
but uh i mean like both are good like
the the few times of uh taking mushrooms
the experience was
uh like i everything was beautiful
there's zero challenging uh aspect to it
it was just like the world is beautiful
and it gave me this deep appreciation of
the world
i would say so like that's amazing but
also
ones that challenge you are also amazing
like all the times i drink vodka but
uh but that's another let's not so back
to dmt
um yeah and joe's treating you know
cannabis as a psychedelic which is
something that i'd say like not a lot of
a lot of people treat it more like xanax
or like beer
yes you know or vodka um but he's really
trying to
delve into those the miners it's been
called a minor psychedelic so with dmt
you know as you brought up it's like the
the entity's mocking him
and it's like you're not i mean this
reminds me of him you know
him describing his like you know writing
his
or just just his entire method of
of comedy it's like watch the tape of
yourself
you know don't just ignore it like
that's where i screwed up
that's where i need to do better this
like sort of radical self-examination
which i think our society is kind of
getting away from because like you know
all the children win trophies type of
thing you know it's like no no
don't go overboard but like recognize
when you've messed up
yes and so like that's a big part of the
psychedelic experience like people come
out
sometimes saying my god i need to say
sorry to my mom
yeah you know like it's so obvious
like or whatever you know interpersonal
issue or like my god i don't i'm not
pulling enough weight
around the house and helping my wife and
you know you know these things that are
just obvious to them
the self-criticism that can be a very
positive thing if you act on it
you've mentioned addiction maybe we
could take a little bit detour
into a darker aspect of things or
not even darker it's just an important
aspect of things
what's the nature of addiction you've
mentioned
some things within the big umbrella
of psychedelics may be usually not
addictive but maybe
mdma i think you said might have some
addictive properties but
the the point is stuff outside of the
psychedelics umbrella can often be
highly addictive so you've studied
addiction from several angles one of
which is behavioral economics
what have you understood about addiction
what is addiction from the biological
physiological level to the psychological
to
whatever is an interesting way to talk
about addiction yeah and i
the lenses that i view addiction through
very much are
behavioral economic but i also think
they converge
on i think it's beautiful at the other
end of the spectrum sort of just a
completely
um humanistic psychology perspective
um and i it converges on what people
come out of
you know 12-step meetings talking about
can you uh can you say what is
behavioral economics and what is
humanistic psychology
uh like what do you mean by that and
more importantly behavioral economics
lens
what is that yeah so behavioral
economics my definition of it is the
application
of economic principles mostly
microeconomic principles so
understanding
the the behavior of of individual
agents um surrounding you know
commodities and in the marketplace
applying microeconomic types of analyses
um to non-economic behavior
so basically at one point uh like
psychologists figured out that
there's this whole other discipline
that's been studying behavior just
happened to be all focused on
monetary behavior spending and saving
money etc
but it comes with all of these like
principles that can be wildly
and and fruitfully applied to
understanding behavior so
so for example i've studied things like
um
demand curve analysis of drug
consumption so i look at um
for example the the tobacco ci