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 cigarettes
and nicotine products through the lens
of
of of demand curves and
in other words at different prices if
there's different work requirements
for um being able to smoke cigarettes
sort of modeling
price within that price data there is
some
indication of addiction how much you the
habits that you form around these
particular
uh yeah it's one one important dimension
so i think a particularly important one
there is elasticity or inelasticity
you know um two ends of the spectrum so
that's the the price sensitivity
so so for example you could have
something that's pretty
price um uh inelastic
like like gasoline so the price of gas
at times can keep going up and americans
are just going to
pretty much you know buy the same amount
of gas or maybe you know the price of
gas doubles but their consumption only
decreases by 10 percent so it's a
subproportional reduction so that's
an inelastic and and and that changes
like you push the price up high enough i
mean if it was 100
a gallon it would eventually turn the
curve would turn um
and and go downward more more
drastically and it would be
elastic but you can apply that to
someone you know someone who
a regular cigarette smoker who um
who is working for cigarette puffs who
has who's gone six hours without smoking
and you're asking questions like
you know how many times are they willing
to pull this knob
in the lab during this three-hour
session i do a lot of work like this
in order to earn a cigarette how does
the how does the content of nicotine in
that
effect it has the availability of
nicotine replacement products like
nicotine gum or
e-cigarettes affect those those
decisions so you can it's a certain lens
of
it's sort of a way to take the kind of
the classic
behavioral psychology definition of
reinforcement
and which is just basically reward you
know how much is this a good thing and
it kind of breaks that apart into
a multi-dimensional um space
so it's not just the ideas reward or
reinforcement is not unidimensional
so for example you can unpack that with
demand curves
at a cheap price you might prefer one
good to another
you know so the classic example is
luxury versus necessity so diamonds
versus toilet paper
so at those cheap prices you can look at
something called intensity of demand
you know if it was basically as cheap as
possible or essentially zero
how much would you buy of this good but
then you keep jacking up the price
and you'll see so diamonds will look
like the better
reward at that at that low price of
intensity demand
side of things but as you keep jacking
up the price you got to have some toilet
paper
yes okay we can get into the whole like
bidet thing but forget that you know
like
uh i know joe's been pushing that too
but
you know you're gonna you're gonna hang
on and keep buying the toilet paper to a
greater
degree than you will the diamonds yes so
you'll see a crossing of demand curves
so what's the better reinforcer what's
the better reward depends on your price
you know and so that's one that's an
example of one way
to and that a of look at addiction so
specifically drug consumption which is
isn't all of addiction but it's like
in order for something to be addictive
it has to be a a reward
and it has to compete with
other rewards in in your life and and
one of the two main aspects of addiction
in my in my view and this doesn't map on
to how the
you know the dsm the psychiatry bible
defines addiction which i think is
largely bunk you know but
there's some value to have some common
description but it's
you know how rewarding is it from this
multi-dimensional lens
and specifically how does it how does
that rewarding value compete
with other rewards other consequences
in your life so it's
it's not a problem if if the use of that
substance
is rewarding you know okay yeah you like
to have a couple beers every once in a
while
it's like not a problem i mean um
but then you have the alcoholic who is
drinking so much that they they're it
tanks their career
it ruins their marriage it's in
competition with these
pro-social aspects to their life it's
all about
comparing to the other choices you're
making the other activities in your life
and if it you evaluate as a much higher
reward
than anything else that becomes an
addiction right right
and so it's not just the rewarding value
but it's the relative rewarding value
and
in the other major asp again from
behavioral economics the
the the thing that makes addiction is
something called delayed discounting um
so in economics sometimes it's called
time preference
it's this is it's what compound interest
rates are based upon
it's the idea that delaying a good
access to a good or a reward
comes with a certain decrement to its
value so we'd all rather have things
now than later and we can study this at
the individual level of you know would
you rather have
nine dollars today or or ten dollars
tomorrow um and you get when you do that
you get huge differences between
addicted populations
and non-addicted not just heroin and
cocaine but like just
cigarette smokers like normal everyday
cigarette smokers
and even when you look at something like
monetary
rewards and and so you can go into the
rabbit hole with
with this delay discounting model so
it's not only those huge differences
that seem to have a face valid
aspect to it like the cigarette smoker
is choosing this thing that's
rewarding today but i know it comes with
increased risk of
having these horrible consequences down
the line so it's this competition
between what's good for me now
and what's good for me later and the
other aspect about delayed discounting
is that
if you quantitatively map out that
that discounting curve over time so you
don't just do the you know
you know how much you know that ten
dollars tomorrow how much is it
worth to you today so you can say what
about nine what about eight what about
seven dollars and you can
titrate it to find that indifference
point and so we can say aha six dollars
um you know ten dollars tomorrow is
worth six dollars to you uh
today so it's by the one day it's
decreased by 40 percent
we can do that also at one week and one
month in one year
and 10 years and map out that curve
get a shape of that curve and one of the
fascinating things about this is that
whether you're talking about pigeons
making these types of choices between a
little bit of food now or a little bit
of food a minute from now or rats
or every like dozens of species of
animals tested including humans
the tendency is pretty consistently that
we
we discount hyperbolically rather than
exponentially what exponentially means
is that every unit of time
is associated with the same proportional
reduction every unit of delay is
is associated with the same causes the
same proportional reduction in value
and that's the way the compound interest
rate you know
works you know you know that there's you
know compound
every day you know you get this sort of
out of whatever values in there at the
beginning of that day you get
this you know um will give you this
amount of extra money to compensate you
for that
delay but then the way that all animals
tend to function is of this very
different way
where the reductions the initial
that initial delay so like one day's
worth of delay you see a much stronger
um discounting rate or reduction in
value than you do
over those um so you see the super
proportional then it changes to
these lesser rates and so the
implication of that i know i've gone
like really into the weeds
quantitatively but what that means is
that
there's these preference reversals when
you have curves of that nature
the the the decay that's hyperbolic
it maps on to this phenomenon we see um
both in terms of how people deal with
future rewards but also how perception
works
um when two things are far away whether
it's
physical distance or whether in terms of
perception or whether it's in terms of
time
when you're really far away the value
the subjective value
for that further that delayed reward
is is larger so so for example like
let's say we're talking about 360 um
364 days from now you can get nine
dollars or 365 days a year
now you get 10 and you're like dude it's
like it's a year like
no difference like i'll take why not get
one more dollar
yeah you bring that same exact set of
choices closer nothing's changed other
than the time
to both rewards and it's like would you
rather have nine dollars
today or ten dollars tomorrow and plenty
of people would say ah
just about the sounds go ahead and take
it today yeah so you see this preference
reversal
and so that is that's a model of
of addiction in the sense that
consistently with with true addiction i
would argue you see this
this competition between molar and
molecular
um utility um it's like inter
intrapersonal like within the person
competing agents
someone sometimes has control of the bus
that wants to do what's
in good for you in the short term and
someone's
at other times that is in control of
driving the bus and they're they want to
do what's
good for you and the long term so
you tell the you know you're trying to
quit and you see a doctor you see your
you know 12-step therapist and say god i
know this stuff is killing me
like i'm really i'm on the path i'm like
i'm done
and that's when you're kind of in their
office or wherever you're not you know
it's not around you and then later on
that day your buddy says that hey man i
just scored
i got it right here do you want it and
that reward is right in front of you
that's like bringing those two choices
right
in front of you and it's like hell yeah
i want to use yes
and then you can go through that cycle
for like years of the person telling
themselves
i want to quit but then other times that
same person is saying
i don't want to you know functionally
they're saying i don't want to because
they're saying
yeah yeah give me some so in the moment
it's very difficult to quit
and this isn't just something this is
something that has has huge clinical
ramifications with addiction but it's
like
all humans do it anyone who's had hit
the snooze alarm in the morning like
yeah the night before they realize
oh i got to get up extra early tomorrow
that's what's ultimately better for me
so i'm going to set the alarm for
you know 5 a.m um
and they they it goes off at 5 00 a.m
you know and then so now those two
consequences have come
sooner and it's like what the hell and
they hit the snooze alarm
and something's not just once but then
five minutes later and then five minutes
later
you know and so and it's why it's easier
to exercise self-control
at the grocery store compared to in your
fridge like
if that snack is like 30 seconds away
in your fridge you're gonna more likely
yield to temptation than if it is
further away
so then just take a step back to
something you brought up earlier the
inelasticity of pricing
is it uh from a perspective of the
dealers
whether we're talking about cigarettes
or maybe
venturing slightly into the illegal
realm
you know of people who sell drugs
illegally they also have an economics to
them
that they set prices and all those kinds
of things
does addiction allow you to mess with
the nature
of pricing like so
i i kind of assume that you meant that
there's a correlation between
things you're addicted to and the
inelasticity of the price
so you can jack up the price is there
something interesting to be said
both for legal drugs and illegal drugs
about the kind of price
games you can play
because the consumers of the product are
addicted
right i mean i think you just described
it yeah you can jack up the price
and you know some people are going to
drop off
but the people you know and it's not
dichotomous because you could just
consume less
but some people are going to consume
less and the people that are most
addicted are going to keep
you know um i mean you see this they're
going to keep you know purchasing so you
see this with cigarettes and so
it's interesting when you interface this
with policy like in one respect
heavily taxing cigarettes is a good
thing we know it keeps
you know um adolescents particularly
price sensitive so
you definitely people smoke less and
especially kids smoke less when you keep
cigarette prices high and you tax the
hell out of them
um but one of the downsides you've got
to balance and keep in mind is that
you disproportionately have working
class poor people
and then you get into a point where
someone's spending you know order their
paycheck on so they're gonna smoke no
matter what
and uh basically because they're
addicted they're gonna smoke no matter
what and you're just
yeah you're taxing their existence right
so you're making it worse for
if if they don't if they are completely
inelastic you're actually making that
person's life worse
yeah because we know that that by by
interfering with the amount of money
they have
you're interfering with the other um
pro-social the potential
competitors to smoking you know um and
we know that
when someone's in more impoverished
environments and they have less sort of
non-drug
alternatives you know the more likely
they're gonna stay
addicted so you know is there data
this is interesting from a scientific
perspective
of those same kind of games in illegal
drugs
sort of uh because that's where most
drug
i was i mean i don't know maybe you can
correct me but it seems like most drugs
are currently illegal and so
but they're still in economics to them
obviously right that's the drug war and
so on
is there data on the setting of prices
or like how good are the business people
running
the selling of drugs uh that are illegal
are they
all the same kind of rules apply from a
behavioral economics perspective
i think so i mean they're basically that
whether they're crunching the numbers or
not they're basically sensitive to that
demand curve
and they're doing the the the same thing
that businesses do
in in a legal market and you know you
want to sell as much of
a product to get as much money you're
looking more at the total income so if
you jack the price
a little bit you're going to get some
reduction in consumption but it may be
that the total amount of money that you
rake in is going to be more than then
it's gonna overcompensate for that so
you're willing to take okay i'm gonna
lose 10 of my customers
but i'm getting more perce you know more
than enough to compensate from that
from the extra money from the people who
still are buying so i think they're more
you know and especially when we get to
the lower i wouldn't be surprised if
people are
crunching those numbers and looking at
demand curves maybe at the
you know at the really high levels of
the you know up the chain where the
cartels and one i don't know
i that wouldn't surprise me at all but i
think it's probably more implicit
at the lower levels where um
something he brought up drug policy i
will say that i for
for years now it's been this kind of
unquestioned
goal um by for example the the drug
czar's office
um in the u.s to make the price of
illegal drugs as high as possible
without this kind of nuanced approach
that um
yeah if you make you know for some
people if you you know if you make the
price
so high you're actually making things
worse i mean i'm all about
reducing the problems associated with
drugs and drug addictions and part of
that is the
are more direct consequences of those
drugs themselves and but a whole
lot is what you get from indirectly
and and you know sort of the inc both
for the individual and for society
society so
like making a poor person who doesn't
have enough money for their kids making
them even poorer so now you've made
their their chil children's future worse
because they're growing up in deeper
poverty because you've essentially
levied a tax
on to this person who's heavily uh
addicted
um but then it's at the societal level
you know so
everything we know about the drug war in
terms of the the heavy criminalization
and filling up
prisons and reducing employment and
educational opportunities
which in the big picture we know are the
things that
in a free market compete against some of
the worst problems
of addiction is actually having
educational and employment opportunities
but when you get give someone a felony
for example um
you're pretty much guaranteeing they're
never going to go very high on the
economic ladder
and so you're making drugs a better
reward
for that person's future so this is
a quick step into the policy realm and i
think
for both you and i i'm not sure you can
correct me but i'm more comfortable into
studying
the effects of drugs on the um
human behavior in human psychology
versus like policy it seems like a whole
giant mess but yeah there's some
libertarian
candidates for president and just
libertarian thinkers
that had a nice thought experiment
of possibly legalizing i was spoken
about possibly legalizing
basically all drugs in your intuition
do you think a world where all drugs are
legal
is a safer world or a less safe world
for the users of those drugs it really
depends on what we mean by legalization
so this is one of my beefs with
this you know how these things are
talked about i mean we have very few
completely laissez-faire you know
legal drugs so even caffeine is one of
the few examples so for example caffeine
and tea and coffee
is in that realm like there's no limits
no one's testing there's no laws
regulation at any level of how much
caffeine you're allowed to buy or how
much in the price but even like with
this um
starbucks like nitro there are rules
with soda
and with canned products you can only
put so much in there yeah
yeah so there's this is fda regulated
and it's kind of weird because there's a
limit to sodas that's not there for
energy drinks and other things so
but you know so even caffeine it depends
on what product we're talking about
like if you're like nodos and other
caffeine products over the counter like
you can't just put 800 milligrams in
there the pills are like one or 200
milligrams
and so it's fda regulated as an
overcounter drug some of the most
dangerous drugs in society
i would say arguably one of the most
dangerous classes of drugs is the
volatile anesthetics huffing
people huffing gasoline and you know
airplane glue toluene
whatnot severely damaging to the nervous
system
pretty much legal but there's some
regulation in the sense that there's a
warning label like it's illegal to do it
for
not that it neces people they're busting
people for this
but you know it's against federal law to
use this in a way other than
intended type basically saying like yeah
don't huff this you know
um your paint thinner whatnot at least
keeps people from
selling it for that like no because
they're gonna they're gonna go after
that person they're not gonna be able to
find the 12 year old who's huffing
yeah so anyway just as some extreme
examples at
at the end and then you know even the
the so-called illegal
like schedule one drug psilocybin we do
plenty and
in terms of schedule two which is
ironically less restrictive than
psilocybin but methamphetamine and
cocaine i've done human research with
my research has been legal so they're
scheduled compounds but they're not
completely illegal like you can
do research with them with the
appropriate licensees and
um uh approval so there really is no
such thing and like alcohol
well it's illegal if you're 12 years old
or 18 years old or 20 years old
and for anyone it's illegal to to be
drinking it while you're driving so
there's always a nuance there's rules
not dichotomy
and i actually should admit it's been on
my to-do list for a while to buy
in massachusetts some like edible or
buy weed legally i um
yeah haven't done that messages let's
put it this way
and i i wonder what that experience is
like because i get i think it's fully
legal
in massachusetts and so i wonder what
legal drugs look like
to me you know i grew up with even weed
being like
you know not it's like this forbidden
thing you know not not forbidden but
it's illegal you know
most people of course i never partook
but most people i knew
would attain it illegally and so
that big swish that's been happening
across the country
there's like federal stuff going on to
make a marijuana
legal federation i'm half paying
attention there's some movement there i
mean the house passed bill that's not
going to be passed by the
by the senate but yeah it's it's but
there's
clearly a change in right it's moving in
a trend so that's the example of a drug
that
used to be illegal and now becoming more
and more and more legal
um so like i wonder what like uh
cocaine being legal looks like right
what a society with cocaine being legal
looks like
the rules around it the
you know the processes in which you can
consume it in a safer way
and be more educated about its
consequences be able to control dose
and like purity much better be able to
get
help for overdose i don't know all those
kinds of things
i it does in a utopian sense
feel like legalizing drugs
at least should be talked about and
considered versus uh
keeping them in the dark i agree but
yeah so that in your sense
it's possible that in 50 years uh we
legalize all drugs
and uh it makes for a better world the
way i like to talk about it is that
i would say that we it's possible and it
would probably be a good thing if we
regulate
all drugs how would you regulate uh like
cocaine for example is there is there
ideas there
so yeah and you were already you know
going you know
where i was going with that kind of
first i described how there's always new
ones and even like
the cannabis in massachusetts federally
illegal so for example if i was like
and i you know colleagues that do
cannabis research where they
get people high in the lab like you're a
federal funded researcher with nih funds
you can't get that
that stuff from the dispensary because
you're breaking a federal law
even though the feds don't have the
resources to go after they don't want
the controversy at this point to go
after the individual users or even the
the sellers in those legal states so
there's always this nuance but it's
it's about right the right regulation so
i think we already know enough that
for example like i think safe injection
sites for hard drugs
um makes a lot of sense like i wouldn't
want um
heroin and cocaine at the convenience
stores and i don't think maybe there's
some extreme libertarians that want that
i think even the folks that identify as
libertarians probably
most of them don't well i don't know
like not all of them want that
you know um i think you know that as a
form of regulation like look
if you're using these hard drugs on a on
a regular basis
you're putting yourself at risk for
lethal overdose you're putting yourself
at risk for catching
um hiv and and hepatitis
um if you're gonna do it if you're doing
it anyway
come to this place where at least you're
not like you know
like pulling the the water out of like
you know
the puddle on the side of the street
yeah so it's done by professionals and
those professionals are able to educate
you also
so like a 7-eleven clerk may not be
both capable of of helping you to uh to
inject the drug properly but also it
won't
be equipped to educate you at but the
negative consequences all those kinds of
things that's a huge part of it the
education but then i
i think with the opioids like the big
part of it is just like
with naloxone which is an antagonist it
goes into the
um the receptor it's called narcan
that's the trade name but
it's what they revive people on an
opioid overdose that's almost completely
effective
like if there's a medical professional
there and someone's odin on an opioid
they're virtually guaranteed to live
like that's remarkable
that if a hundred percent at the opioid
crisis
you know if all of those people right
now that are dying we're doing that in
the presence of a medical professional
like even like a nurse
with narcan there'd be basic almost no
deaths there's always some exceptions
but
you know almost no deaths like that's
staggering to me so the idea that people
are doing this
you know that we could have that level
of positive effect
without encouraging the drug and this is
where like you get into this like
terrain of like sending the wrong
message and it's like
no you can do that you can say like
we're not
encouraging this in fact probably one of
the greatest advertisements
for not getting hooked on heroin is like
visiting a methadone clinic
visiting a safe injection site like like
this is not
like an advertisement for getting hooked
on this drug but
knowing that we can save people now you
have a landscape here because a lot of
times it's just like
supervised injection but you bring your
own stuff you know you bring your own
heroin which could still be
you know dirty and and filled with
fentanyl and fentanyl derivatives which
because of the incredible potency and
the more difficulty measuring it it's
and
some differences at the receptor like
you may be more likely
you are more likely on average to
lethally overdose on it
you know so you you could the the level
that's been more explored in switzerland
is uh in some places is is
you actually provide the drug itself and
you supervise the injection so i don't
like that idea yeah i the public health
data are completely on the side of
there's really no credible evidence
to this if we allow that we're sending
the wrong message and everyone's going
to be i mean
i'm not showing up like you know and
it's different by drug like yeah you you
legalize you set up cannabis shops and
some people are going to say so you come
and go there
i don't think a whole lot of people are
going to go to one of these places
and say i'm going to shoot up heroin for
the first time because and even if like
you know it's a country of 300 million
people like even if someone does that
you have to compare this to the everyday
people are
dying from opioid overdoses like
people's kids
people's uncles peoples like these are
real lives that are being shattered so
you just look at that and then the other
thing and i know this from having done
residential even like non-treatment
research where we just have a cocaine
user or something
stay on our inpatient word for a month
and you really get to know them and
sometimes you see
like oftentimes that's the first time
this person has had a discussion
with a medical professional any type of
professional in their entire life around
their drug use
yeah even if they're not looking to quit
and it's like i
i you know you could imagine that in in
these safe injection settings where
it's like it might be a year into
treatment and they're like you know
doc i know you're not the cops like you
really care for me like
i think i'm ready to try that methadone
thing i think i'm really
i think i want to be conversation about
it yeah yeah they get to trust
the people and and realize that they're
they're there because they truly like
they have a compassion a love
for for this community like as human
beings and they don't want people to die
and you get real human connections and
that and again like
those are the conditions where people
are going to ultimately seek treatment
and not everyone always will but you're
go you're going to get that
and then you're you know you're going to
get people like looking into treatment
options sometimes
you know maybe it's years into to the
treatment so it's like they're just
all of these indirect benefits that i
think at that level
i don't know if you'd call that
legalizing you know i think again ra at
least
well regulated right whatever that word
is
yeah well regulated but uh out in the
open
right minimizing as many harms as we can
um while not
encouraging i mean we don't encourage
people to drink all the i mean people
die every year from
caffeine overdose like you know there's
different ways to like you know just by
allowing something doesn't mean we're
sending the message that
you know by saying we're not going to
give you a felony which is actually
often the the the the the penalty for
for psychedelics i just actually
testified for the judiciary committee
the
the senate the assembly in in new jersey
and um just to move psilocybin from a
felony to misdemeanor
they use different language in new
jersey it's weird but like the
equivalent of felony missed me and that
was like
two people didn't vote for that on the
on this committee
because it was might one of them said it
might be sending the wrong message and
it's like
a felony i mean there's real harms like
that's the scarlet letter the rest of
your life
you're stuck at the lower ends of the
employment ladder you're not going to
get you know loans for education
all of this maybe because of a stupid
mistake you made once as a 19 year old
yeah doing something that like you know
a presidential candidate could have done
and admitted to and
had no problem you know yeah what
drug is the most addictive the most
dangerous
in your view not maybe spec
like not technically like specifically
which drug but more like
in our society today what is a highly
problematic drug we talked about
psychedelics not being that addictive
on the other flip side of that you
mentioned cocaine is that
is that the top one is there something
else that's a concern to you
it depends and you've already alluded to
this nuance it depends on how you define
it if we're talking about on the ground
today
yes in you know modern society i'd i'd
say
nicotine tobacco oh i should think um
i mean in terms of mortality it kills
it kills far more than any other drug
known to humankind
four times more than alcohol like a half
million deaths in the us
every year and about five to six million
worldwide due to tobacco
that's four times more in the us than
alcohol
and if you graph all of the the drugs
legal and illegal like
you know um put all of the illegal drugs
in like one
category on that figure and you put
alcohol and tobacco on that figure
all the illegal drugs combined barely
they're a
barely visible blip to this incredible
like it's there's no even all of the
opioid epidemic rolled up
along with cocaine and everything else
the meth barely shows up compared to
tobacco that's one of those
uncomfortable truths that's
that i don't know what to do with it's
like uh where everybody's freaking out
about
coronavirus right
[Laughter]
and nobody's relative it's all relative
if you look at the relative thing
it's like well why aren't we freaking
out about
now cigarettes which which we are
increasingly so over the
historically speaking right right it's
like terrorism versus swimming pools i
remember that being
back in the after the war on terror
started i was like yeah
there's not even comparison okay so
you know that's a little sobering truth
there because i was thinking like
cocaine i was thinking about all these
hard drugs but the reality is relatively
nicotine
is the is the big one and you didn't ask
about mortality or deaths you asked
about um
addiction but that's that really is hard
to hard to evaluate it gets into those
nuances i spoke of before about there's
not a uni-dimensional
way to measure reinforcement it kind of
depends on the situation
and and what measure we're looking at
but
you know more people have access to
tobacco
and i'm not i'm not advocating that we
make it an illegal drug i think that was
a heart would be a horrible mistake
although there is a very credible push
to to mandate the reduction of nicotine
in cigarettes which i have most
scientists that study it are for it
i think there's some real dangers there
because i see that in the broader
history of drug use it's like when has
drug
prohibition worked broadly speaking and
and it's it's uh to me that would that
that path would only make sense in
very good conjunction with e-cigarettes
which once they're fully regulated
can be a safer not safe but much safer
alternative and if we don't if we tax
the hell out of e-cigarettes
and ban every attractive feature like
like flavors and everything
then that's gonna push people to a black
market if they can't get the real thing
from real sick like some people would
just quit straight out
but i think with the regulators and what
a lot of scientists that study tobacco
like myself it's a big part still what i
study
um they're not used to thinking about
the
like tobacco really as a drug largely
speaking in terms of
you know for example the history of
prohibition and i think of like we
already know there's an illicit market a
black market for
tobacco to get around um you know taxes
i mean and for selling even loose
cigarettes that's what initially caused
in staten island the police to approach
uh was it
eric garland who was selling loose
cigarettes and he got choked out
i mean the thing that caused that police
contact was he was selling well
i think report it to sell individual
cigarettes for like you know you can
sell them for court it happens in
baltimore and it's like that's
technically illegal
it's but you know are you not going to
have
massive boats of you know supplies
coming over from china and elsewhere of
real deal cigarettes if you ban you know
the sale
nicotine like it's obviously going to
happen and you have to weigh that
against
you know you're going to create a black
market one size or another and your
intuition that really hasn't worked
throughout the history when we've tried
it
right but i see a potential path forward
but only if it's well
if it's not in conjunction with
e-cigarettes if there's a clear
alternative that's a positive
alternative that you it kind of
stares the population that right
towards an alternative yeah the
difference here the the unique thing
that could be taken advantage of here is
nicotine is by and large not what causes
the harm
it's the the aromatic hydrocarbons it's
the the carcinogens in
in in tobacco it's burning tobacco smoke
it's not the nicotine
so um that it's not like alcohol
prohibition
where like you know you couldn't create
the adults
the the near beer is not going to have
the alcohol and so people like like
here you do have the possibility of
giving an
another medium the ability to deliver
the drug which still
aren't to a lot of people isn't
preferred to the tobacco but nonetheless
again if you over regulate those and
make them less attractive like if you
aren't thoughtful about the nicotine
limits and thoughtful about whether
you're allowing flavors and everything
and if you
over tax them you're actually decreasing
the ability to compete with the more
dangerous um
products so i feel that like there is a
potential path forward but i don't have
a lot of confidence that that's going to
be done in a
thoughtful analytical way and i'm afraid
that it could
decrease the increase of black market
cause all of the
harms like every other drug we're moving
away from the heavy from
the prohibition model slowly but the big
barge ship is like
making a a very slow turn and like okay
we really had to step back and question
if we went with nicotine tobacco are we
moving into that direction like yeah the
picture
it doesn't quite make sense you uh
you've done a study on
cocaine and sexual decision making
uh can you explain
can you explain the findings i mean in a
broad
sense how do you do a study
that involves cocaine and
the other how do you do a study
involving this
sexual decision making and then
how do you do a study that combines both
yeah sex and drugs too i'm just missing
the rock and roll
the two controversial rock and roll
isn't very controversial anymore
yeah so the cocaine you know lots of
hoops to jump through you got to have a
lot of medical
support you got to be at a basically an
institution a research
unit like i'm at that has a long history
and the ability to
to do that and
get ethics approval get fda approval but
it's possible and
whenever you're dealing with something
like cocaine you would never want to
give that to a
not someone who hasn't already used
cocaine and you want to make sure you're
not giving it to someone who's an active
user who wants to quit
so the idea is like okay if you're if
you're using this type of drug anyway
and you're we're really sure you're not
looking to quit
hey use use a couple times in the lab
with us so we can at least learn
something and part of what we learn is
maybe to help people not use
and it'll reduce the harms of of cocaine
so
there's hoops to jump through with the
sexual um
decision making i looked at the main
thing i looked at was this model of
i applied delayed discounting to what we
talked about earlier than now versus
later
that kind of decision-making that goes
along with addiction i applied that to
condom use decisions
um and and i've done probably published
about 20 or so papers with this and
different drugs and
and uh so the the primary metric is
whether you do or don't use a condom
that's the most right
oh hypothetical so this is using
hypothetical decision making but i
published
some studies looking at um showing a
tight correspondence to
self-report it um in correlational
studies to self-reported behavior
so this is like so like how do you did
you do a questionnaire kind of thing
right so it's a it's not quite a
questionnaire but but it's a it's it's a
it's a behavioral task
requiring them to to respond to so you
show pictures of a bunch of individuals
and it's it's kind of like one of these
fun behavioral like a lot of them you
get like
numbers are born but it's like okay hot
or not like which of these 60 people
would you have a one night stand with
men women so pick whatever you like yeah
a little bit of this a little bit of
that whatever you're into it's all
variety there out of that group you pick
some subsets of people who you think is
the
you know the one you most want to have
sex with the least he thinks most likely
have an sti or at least
likely a sexually transmitted disease by
sti
and then you could do certain decision
making questions so what i've done is
asked
say this percy read a vignette this
person wants to have sex with you now
you've met them to get along
um casual sex scenario like a one-night
stand
with a condom's available just rate your
likelihood from 1-100 on
this kind of scale would you use it but
then you can change your
your scenario to say okay now imagine
you have to wait five minutes to use a
condom
so the the choice is now instead of
using condom versus not in terms of your
likelihood scale
it now it ranges from um have sex now
without a condom
versus on the other end of the scale is
wait five minutes to have sex with a
condom so you rate your likelihood
of where your behavior would be along
that continuum and then you could say
okay well what about an hour
what about three hours what about you
know what about 24 hours
i'm misunderstanding uh
now without a condom or five minutes
later with a condom
right isn't the so what
what's supposed to be the preference for
the person
like is like what like there's a lot of
factors coming into play right there's
like
uh like there's like pleasure and
personal preference and then there's
also the safety
those are two like are those competing
objectives
right and so we do get at that through
some individual measures and and this
task is more of a face valid task where
there's a lot underneath the hood
so for most people sex with the condom
is the better reward
but underneath the hood of that is just
at the purely physical level they'd
rather have sex
with without the condom it's going to
feel bad what do you mean by reward like
when they calculate their trajectory
through life
and try to optimize it then sex with the
condom is a good idea
well it's it's it's it's really based on
i mean yeah
yeah presumably that's the case that
that that there's
but it's measured by like what would
really that first question where there
is no delay
most people say they would be at the
higher net scale a lot of times 100
percent they said they would definitely
use
use economy a condom not everybody and
that we know that's the case see it's
like
that that some people don't like com
some people say yeah i i want to use a
condom but
you know a quarter of the time ended up
not because i guess getting lost in the
passion of the moment
so for the people i mean the only reason
that people
so behaviorally speaking at least for a
large number of people in many
circumstances condom use is a reinforcer
just because people do it
like you know why are they doing it
they're not because it makes the sex
feel better
but because it makes that it allows for
at least the same
general reward even if actually even if
it feels a little bit not as good
yeah you know with the condom
nonetheless they get most of the benefit
without the concurrent oh my gosh
there's this risk of either unwanted
pregnancy or getting hiv
or way more likely than hiv you know
herpes
you know in general awards etcetera all
the all the lovely ones
um and we've actually done research
saying like where we
gauge the probability of these
individual s different sdi's and it's
like what's the heavy hitter in terms of
what people are using to judge you know
to evaluate they're going to use a
condom
so that's why the condom use is the
delayed thing five minutes or more
and then uh yeah because it would
normally be the larger later reward like
the ten dollars versus the nine it's
like the ten dollar which is
counterintuitive if you just think about
the physical pleasure so that's a good
that's a good thing to measure so condom
use is a really good concrete quantity
quantitative quantifiable thing that you
can use in a study and then you can add
a lot of different elements like
the presence of cocaine and so on yeah
you can get people loaded on
like any number of drugs like cocaine
alcohol and methamphetamine are the
three that i've done and published on
and it's interesting that these are fun
studies
man right i love to get people loaded in
in a safe context and like but to really
it started like there was some early
research alcohol i mean the psychedelics
are the most interesting but it's like
all of these drugs are fascinating the
fact that all these are keys that
unlock a certain like psychological
experience in
in the head and so there was this work
with alcohol that showed that it didn't
affect those monetary
delay discounting decisions you know
nine dollars now versus ten dollars
later and i'm like
getting people drunk and i thought to
myself are you telling me
that that you know getting someone that
people being drunk
is does not cause people at least
sometimes to make
to choose what's good for them in the
short term
at the expense of what's good for them
to uh yeah in the long term it's like
you know bullshit you know like yeah we
see it like
but in what context does that happen so
that's what
that's something that inspired me to go
in this direction of like
aha risky sexual decisions is something
they do when they're drunk
they don't necessarily go home and and
even though some people have gambling
problems and
alcohol interacts with that the most
typical thing is not for people to go
home
and log on and change their their
allocation in their retirement account
or something like that you know like but
but they're more likely risky sexual
decisions they're more likely to not
wait the five minutes for the condom
right instead go no condom no right
that's a big effect and we see that
and interestingly we do not see with
those different drugs
we don't see an effect if we just look
at that zero delay condition in other
words the condoms right there waiting to
be used would you
how likely are to use it you don't see
it i mean people
people are by and large gonna use the
condom yeah so
and that's the way most of this research
outside of behavioral economics that
just looked at condom use decisions
um very little of which has ever
actually administered the drugs which is
another unique aspect
but they usually just look at like
assuming the condom is there
but this is more using behavioral
economics to delve in and model
something that and i've done survey
research on this
modeling what actually happens like you
meet someone at a laundromat
like you weren't planning on like you
know one thing leads to another they
live around the corner yeah
these things you know and like we did
one um
survey with with men who have sex with
men and found that uh
25 of them 24 about a quarter
reported in the last six months that
they had unprotected
anal intercourse which is the most risky
in terms of
uh sexually transmitted infection um uh
in the last six months in a situation
where they would have used a condom but
they simply didn't use one just because
they didn't have one on them
so this to me it's like if unless we
delve into this
and understand this these sub-optimal
conditions
we're not going to fully address the
problem there's plenty of people that
say yep condom use is good
i use it a lot of the time you know it's
like
where is that failing and it's under
these sub-optimal conditions which in
frank if you think about it it's like
most of the case
action is unfolding things are getting
hot and heavy someone's like
you got a condom ah no it's like do they
break the action
and take 10 minutes to go to the
convenience store or whatever
maybe everything's closed maybe they got
to wait till tomorrow
and though there's something to be uh
studied there on the
that just seems like an unfortunate set
of circumstances like what's the
solution to that
is uh i mean um
what's the psychology that needs to be
uh
like taken apart there because it just
seems like that's the way of life we
don't expect the things that
right to happen are we supposed to
expect them better to
be like be self-aware enough about our
calculations
or you see the 10-minute detour
to a convenience store as a kind of
thing
that uh we need to understand um
how we humans evaluate the cost of that
i think in terms of like how we use this
to help people
yes it's mostly on the environment side
rather on the on the
individual side yeah although those
those interact so it's like
you know in one sense if you're
especially if you're going to be
drinking or using another substance that
that
is associated with you know a stimulant
um alcohol and stimulants go along with
risky sex
you know good to be aware that you might
make decisions just to tell yourself you
might make a decision that
that is gonna that you wouldn't have
made in your sober state and so
hey throwing a condom in the in the
purse and in the pocket
you know might be you know a good idea i
think at the environmental level just
more condom of it i mean it highlights
what we know about just making condoms
widely
available something that i'd i'd like to
do is like
you know reinforcing condom use and you
know so
um you know just getting people uh
used to carrying a condom everywhere
they go because it's such once um it's
in someone's habit
if they are saying like a young single
person and you know it's
you know they occasionally have
unprotected sex like training those
people like what if you got a text
message
you know once every few days saying ah
if you show me a send back a photo of a
condom within a minute you get a reward
of
five dollars you could shape that up
like that it's a process called
contingency management it's basically
just
straight up operant reinforcement you
could shape that up with no problem
and and um i mean those procedures of
contingency management giving people
systematic rewards is like
for example the most powerful way to to
to reduce cocaine use in addicted people
and um uh but
but by is saying if you show me a
negative urine for cocaine
i'm gonna give you a monetary reward and
like that has huge effects in terms of
decreasing cocaine use
if that can be that powerful for
something like stopping cocaine use
how powerful for that could that be for
shaping up just carrying a condom
because
the primary unlike cocaine use here
we're not saying you can't have the the
main reward like you could still have
sex
and you can even have sex in the way
that you tell yourself you'd rather do
it
you know if the condom is available you
know so
you know like you're not you know it's
relatively speaking it's way easier than
like not using cocaine if you like using
cocaine
it's just basically getting in the habit
of carrying a condom so that's just one
idea of like
well there could be also the
capitalistic solutions of like there
could be a business opportunity for like
a door dash for condoms
oh yeah like delivery i thought about
this
within five minute delivery of a condom
in any location like uber for condoms
i thought about it not with condoms but
a very similar line of thinking in a
line that you're going into in terms of
of uber and people getting
drunk when they intend they into the bar
playing to have one or two they end up
having five or six and it's like
okay yeah you can take the the cab the
uber home
yeah but you've left your car there it
might get towed you might like
there's also the hassle of just you know
you want to wake up tomorrow with your
hangover and forget about it and move on
yeah like
and i think a lot of people in their
situation and they're like screw it
i'm gonna take the risk just get it you
know what if you had an uber service
where two
um you know you have uh
two so some a car come out with two
drivers
and um one of them two sober drivers
obviously
and they and and the person they
the one driver drops off the other that
then drives you home
in their car in your car yeah
so that you can i mean i think a lot of
people would pay 50 bucks
it's gonna be more than a regular uber
yeah but it's like it's gonna be done
i got the money i already i already
spent 60 bucks at the bar tonight
like just get the damn thing done
tomorrow i'm done with it my car i wake
up my car's in front of my house
i think that would be i think someone
could i'm not going to open that
business so
like if anyone hears this and wants to
take off with that like i think it could
help a lot of people
yeah definitely an uber itself i would
say helped
a huge amount of people just making it
easy to
make the decision of going home uh not
driving yourself
i read about in austin where they i
don't know where it's at now where they
outlawed uber for a while you know
because of the whole taxi cab union type
thing and
and how just yeah there were like hordes
of drunk people that were
uh used to uber that now didn't have a
cheap alternative
uh so just uh
we didn't exactly mention you've done a
lot of studies in sexual decision making
with different drugs
is there some interesting insights or
findings
on the difference between the different
drugs
so i think you said meth as well
so cocaine is there some interesting
characteristics about decision making
that these drugs alter versus like
alcohol all those kinds of things i
think and there's much more to study
with this but i think
the biggie there is that the stimulants
they create risky sex by
really increasing the rewarding value of
sex
like if you talk to people that are real
especially that have are hooked on
stimulants one of the biggies is like
sex on coke or meth is like so much
better than sex without and that's a big
part of what
why they have trouble quitting because
it's so tied to their sex life
so it's not that your decision making is
broken it's just that you
well you allocate it's a different
aspect of their decision yeah
on the reward side i think on the
alcohol it works more through
disinhibition it's like
alcohol is really good at reducing the
ability of a delayed
punisher to have an effect on current
behavior in other words there's this bad
thing that's going to happen tomorrow or
a week from now
or 20 years from now um
being drunk is a really good way and you
see this in like rats making decisions
you know a high dose of alcohol makes
someone
less sensitive to those consequences so
i think that's the lever that's being
hit with alcohol
and it's the more the just the
increasing the rewarding value of sex
um by the psycho stimulants on that side
we actually found that it
and it was amazing because like hundreds
of millions of dollars have been spent
by
nih to study the connection between
cocaine
and hiv like we ran the first study
on my grant that like actually just gave
people cocaine
under double blind conditions and showed
that like yeah when people are on coke
like their ratings of sexual desire even
though they're not in a sexual situation
yeah you show them some pictures but
you're just saying
they're horny like you get subjective
ratings about like how sex how much
sexual desire are you feeling right now
people get horny when they're on
stimulants and
um do you have a lot of people say duh
if they really know
these drugs but that's a rigorous study
that's in the lab just shows
like there's a plot right the dose
effects of that the time course of that
yeah it's not just please tell me
there's a paper with the plot
that shows dose versus uh uh
evaluation of like horniness yeah we
didn't say horniness we said sexual
arousal
yeah basically yeah there's a plot i'm
gonna find this plot right i'll send it
to you there was
one headline from uh some publicity on
the work that said
horny cocaine users don't use condoms or
something like that
like something like journalists i
wouldn't have put it that way but like
yeah that's right
i guess that's what it finds so you've
published a bunch of studies on
uh psychedelics is there
some especially favorite
insightful findings from some of these
they you could talk about
maybe favorite studies or just something
that pops to mind
in terms of uh both the goals and the
like the major insights gained
and maybe the side little curiosities
that you discovered along the way
yeah i think of the work with like using
psilocybin to help people quit smoking
and we've talked about smoking being
such a
a serious addiction and so that what
inspired me to get into that
was just kind of having like behavioral
psychology is my primary lens sort of a
a this sort of like being a kind of
radical empirical basis of
i'm really interested in the mystical
experience and the
all of these reports very interested and
but at the same time i'm like okay let's
let's get down to some
behavior change and something that we
can record
like quantitatively verify um
biologically so
to find all kinds of negative behaviors
that people practice and see if we can
turn those into positive right like
really change it not just
people saying which again is interesting
i'm not dismissing it but folks say that
say my life has turned around
i feel this has completely changed me
it's like yep
that's good all right let's see if we
can harness that and test that
into something that it's that's real
behavior change
you know what i mean it's quantifiable
it's like okay you've been smoking for
30 years
you know like that's a real thing and
you've tried a dozen times like
seriously to quit and you haven't been
able to long term
like okay and if you quit like we'll ask
you and i'll believe you but i don't
trust
everyone reading the paper to believe
you so we're going to have you you pee
in a cup and we'll test that and we'll
have you blow into this little machine
that measures carbon monoxide and we'll
test that
so multiple levels of biological
verification
like now we're getting like to me that's
where the rubber meets the road in terms
of like
therapeutics it's like can we really
shift behavior and since
and so much as we talked about my other
scientific work outside psychedelics is
about understanding addiction
and drug use so it's like you know
looking at addiction it's a no-brainer
and smoking is just a great example and
so back to your question like we've had
really high success rates i mean it
really
it rivals anything that's been published
in the scientific literature um
the caveat is that you know that's based
on our initial trial of only 15 people
but extremely high long-term success
rates
um 80 at six months per smoke free
so can we uh discuss the details so
first of all which psychedelic are we
talking about
and maybe can you talk about the 15
people and how the study
ran and what you found yeah yeah so
the the drug we're using is psilocybin
and we're using um
a moderately high and high doses of
psilocybin
and i should say this about most of our
work these are not kind of museum level
doses in other words nothing
even big fans of psychedelics want to
take and go to a go to a concert or go
to the museum
if someone's at burning man on this type
of dose like
they're probably going to want to find
their way back to their tent and zip up
and hunker down for
you know not be around strangers yeah
and by the way
uh the the delivery method so psilocybin
is
mushrooms i guess uh
what's the usual is it edible is there
some
other way like how people are supposed
to think about uh
the the correct dosing of these things
because i've heard that it's hard to
dose correctly
uh that's right that's right so in our
studies we use the the pure compound
psilocybin so it's a single molecule
you know a bunch of molecules and we and
we
give them a capsule with that in it um
uh
and so it's just you know a little
capsule they swallow what
people when psilocybin is used outside
of research it's always in the context
of mushrooms
um because they're so easy to grow
there's no market for synthetic
psilocybin there's no reason for that to
pop up um
that the
the the the high dose that we use
in research is 30 milligrams
body weight adjusted so if you're a
heavier person it might be like 40 or
even 50
milligrams um we have some data
based on that data we're actually moving
into like getting away from the body
weight
adjusting of the dose and just giving an
absolute dose it seems like there's no
justification for the body weight
based dosing but i i digress um
generally 30 40 milligrams it's a high
dose
and based on average even though as you
alluded to there's variability which
gets people into some trouble
in terms of mushrooms like silas b
cubensis which is the most common for
species in the illicit market in the u.s
this is about equivalent to five dried
grams which is right at about where
right where mckenna and others they call
it a
a heroic dose you know this is not
hanging out with your friends going to
the concert again so this is
a real deal dose even to people that
like really you know just even to
psychonauts
and even we've even had numbers yeah
yeah people that yeah
that's a great term cosmonaut you know
like
for psychedelics yeah going as far out
as possible but
even for them even for even for those
who've
flown to space before right right
they're like holy shit i didn't know the
orbit would be that
yeah far out you know like or i i
escaped the orbit i was in
interplanetary space there so these
folks in the the 15 folks in the study
they're not there's not a question of
uh dose being too low to truly have an
impact
right right very out of hundreds of
volunteers over the years we've only
seen a couple of people where there was
a mild effect of the
of the 30 milligrams and who knows that
person's their serotonin
they might have lesser density of
serotonin 2a receptors or something we
don't know
but it's extremely rare for most people
this is like
like something interesting is going to
happen put it that way you know joe
rogan
i think that jamie his producer is uh
immune to uh uh psyched
so maybe he's he's a good recruit for
the study to test
so that's interesting now i'm not the
caveat i'm not encouraging anything
illicit but
just theoretically my first question as
a far
behavioral pharmacologist is like you
know increase the dose
you know like really nobody i'm not
telling him jamie to do that but like
okay like you know you're taking the
same amount that friends might be taking
but
yeah but he was also referring to the
psychedelic effects
of edible marijuana which is is there is
there
uh rules on uh dosage for
um uh like marijuana is there limits
like what places where it's this is this
all goes it probably is state by state
right it is but most
they've gone that direction and states
that didn't initially have these
rules have not now have them so it's
like you'll get i think you know five
ten mil i think ten five or ten
milligrams of thc
yeah being a common and and like and
this is an important thing like where
they've moved from not being allowed to
say
like have a whole candy bar and have
each of the eight or ten squares on the
counter bar being 10
milligrams but it's like no the whole
thing because like you know someone gets
a candy bar they they're eating the
freaking candy bar
yeah and it's like if you unless you're
a daily cannabis user if you
if you take you know 100 milligrams it's
like
that's what could lead to a bad trip
yeah for someone and it's like you know
a lot of these people it's like oh you
used to smoke a little weed in college
they might say
they're visiting denver for a business
trip and they're like why not let's give
it a shot you know and they're like oh i
don't want to smoke something because
it's going to
so i'm going to be safer with this
edible consume this massive
you know but there's huge tolerance so a
regular like for
someone who's smoking weed every day
they might take five milligrams and
kind of hardly feel anything and they
might not make it they may really need
something like 30 40 50 milligrams to
have a strong effect
but yeah so that's they've evolved in
terms of the rules about like okay
what constitutes a dose you know
which is why you see less big candy bars
and more or if there is you're
if it is a whole candy bar you're only
getting a smaller dose like 10
milligrams or
yeah because that's is where people get
in trouble more often with edibles
yeah uh except joey diaz which i've
heard
this that's definitely something i want
to talk to out of the crazy comedians i
want to talk
about anyway uh so yeah 15 the study of
the 15
and uh the dose not being a question so
like what
was the recruitment based on what was
the
uh like how did the study get conducted
yeah so the recruitment and i really
liked this fact it wasn't people that
you know largely were you know we were
honest about what we were studying but
for most people
it was they were in the category of like
you know not particularly interested in
psychedelics but more of like
they want to quit smoking they've tried
everything but the kitchen sink
yeah and this sounds like the kitchen
sink you know
and it's like well it's hopkins so yeah
you know thinking that
sounds like it's safe enough so like
what the hell let's give it a shot like
most of them were in that category which
i really
you know i appreciate because it's more
of a
of a test you know of of
of yeah just like a better model of what
if these are approved as medicines
like what you're going to have the
average participant you know
um be like and so the the
the therapy involves a good amount of
non
psilocybin sessions so preparatory
sessions like eight hours of
of getting to know the person like the
two people who are going to be their
guides or the person in the room with
them during the experience
um uh having these discussions with them
where
you're both kind of rapport building
just kind of discussing their life
getting to know them
but then also telling them preparing
them about the
the the psilocybin experience oh it
could be scary in this sense but
here's how to handle it trust let go be
open um and also during that
preparation time preparing them to quit
smoking using really standard bread and
butter techniques that
can all fall under the label typically
of the cognitive behavioral therapy
just stuff like before you quit we
assign a target quit date ahead of time
you're not just quitting on the fly and
that happens to be the target quit date
and our study was the day
where they got the first psilocybin dose
but doing things like keeping a smoking
diary like okay
during the three weeks until you quit
every time you smoke a cigarette just
like jot down what you're doing what
you're feeling what situation that type
of thing
and then having some discussion around
that and then going over the pluses and
minuses in their life that smoking kind
of comes with and being honest about the
this is what it does for me this is why
i like it this is why i don't like it
preparing for like what if you what if
you do slip how to handle it
like don't dwell on guilt because that
leads to more full-on relapse you know
just kind of treat it as a learning
experience that type of thing
then you have the real the session day
where they come in
they they um five minutes of
questionnaires but pretty much
they jump into the we we touch base with
them and they
we we give them the capsule it's a
serious setting
but you know a comfortable one they're
in a room that looks more like a living
room than like a research lab
we measure their blood pressure they
experience but kind of minimal kind of
medical vibe to it
and um they lay down on a couch and it's
a
it's a purposefully an introspective
experience so they're laying on a couch
during most of the
five to six hour experience and they're
wearing eye shades which is a better
connotation as a name than blindfold
but like you know so they're wearing eye
shades but that's a
and and they're wearing headphones
through which music is played
um mostly classical although we've done
some variation of that i have a paper
that was recently accepted kind of
comparing it to more like
gongs and and and harmonic bowls and and
that type of thing kind of like
sound you know kind of um yo you've uh
you've also added this to the science
and have a paper on
the musical accompaniment to the
psychedelic experiences
right and we found basically that the
about the same effect even
by a trend not significant but a little
bit better of an effect both in terms of
um subjective experience and long term
whether it helped people quit smoking
just a little tiny non-significant trend
even favoring
the the the the novel playlist with the
the tibetan singing bowls and
and the gongs and didgeridoo and all of
that and um
so anyway just saying okay we can
deviate a little bit from this
like what goes back to the 1950s of this
method of using classical music as part
of this psychedelic therapy
but they're listening to the music and
they're not playing dj in real time
you know it's like you know they're just
be the baby you're not the decision
maker for today
go inward trust let go be open and
pretty much the only interaction
like that we're there for is to deal
with any anxiety that comes up so guide
is kind of a misnomer in a sense
it's we're more of a safety net and so
like tell us if you feel some
butterflies that we can provide
reassurance a hold of
their hand can be very powerful i've had
people tell me that that was like the
thing that really just grounded them
can you break apart trust let go be open
what uh what so
in a sense how would you describe
the experience the uh
intellectual and the emotional approach
that people are supposed to take to
really
let go into the experience
yeah so trust is
trust the context you know trust the
guides trust the overall
in institutional context i see it as
layers of like
safety even though it's everything i
told you about the relative
bodily safety of silicone nonetheless
we're still getting blood pressure
throughout the session just in case
we have a physician on hand who can
respond just in case
we're literally across the street from
the emergency department just in case
you know all of that you know
privacy is another thing you've talked
about just trusting that you're
and whatever happens is just between you
and and the people in the study
right and hopefully they've really
gotten that by that point deep into the
study that like they realize
we take that seriously and everything
else you know so it's really kind of
like a very special role you're playing
as a
as a researcher or guide and and
hopefully they have your your trust
and so you know and trust that they
could be as emotional everything from
laughter to tears like that's going to
be welcomed we're not judging them it's
like
it's a therapeutic relationship where
you know
this is a safe container it's a safe
space there's a lot of baggage
but it truly is it's a safe space for
that
for this type of experience and to to
like go so trust
let's see let go so that relates to the
emotional like
you feel like crying cry you feel like
laughing your ass off laugh your ass
ass off you know it's like all the
things actually that
sometimes it's more challenging with a
recreation someone has a large
recreational use sometimes it's harder
for them because
people in that context and
understandably so it's more about
holding your shit
yeah someone's had a bunch of mushrooms
at a party
maybe they don't want to go into the
back room and start crying about this
these thoughts about the relationship
with their mother and they don't want to
be
the drama queen or king that bring their
friends down because their friends are
having an experience too
and so they want to like compose you
know and also just the appearance
in social settings versus the so like
prioritizing how you
appear to others versus the prioritizing
the depth of the experience
and here within the study you can
prioritize the experience
right and it's all about like you're the
astronaut and we're there's only one
astronaut
yeah we're ground control and i use this
often with
um that's good i have a photo of the
space shuttle on a plaque in my
in my office and i kind of use often use
that as example it's like
we're here for you like we're a team but
we have different roles it's like
you don't have to like compose yourself
like you don't have to like be concerned
about our safety
like we're playing these roles today and
like yeah your job is to go as deep as
possible
or as far out whatever your analogy is
like as possible
and and we're keeping you you safe and
so
yeah and you really the emotional side
is a hard one you know because you
really want people to
like if they go into realms of
subjectively of despair and sorrow
like yeah like cry you know like
it's okay you know and especially if
someone's you know more macho
and you know you want this to be the
place where they
they can let go and and again something
that they wouldn't or shouldn't do if
someone
were to theoretically use it in a in a
social
setting and like and also these other
things like even that you get in those
social settings of like yeah you don't
have to like worry about your wallet
or being for a woman sexually assaulted
by some
creep at a concert or something because
they're you know
they're laying down millions of sources
of
anxiety that are external uh versus
internal so you just focus on your own
like
right the beautiful thing that's going
on in your mind and even the cops at
that layer even though it's extremely
unlikely
yeah for most people that cops would
come in and bust them right when
like even at that theoretical like that
one in a billion chance like that might
be a real thing psychologically
in this context we even got that covered
this is we've got dea approval
yeah like you are this is okay by every
level of society
yeah that counts you know that has the
authority so it's
so go deep trust the you know trust the
setting trust yourself
um you know let go and be open
so in the experience and this is all
subjective and by analogy but like
if there's a door open it go into it if
there's a
stair well go down it or stairway go up
it
if there's a monster in the mind's eye
you know don't run
approach it look in the eye and say you
know
let's talk about it yeah what's up what
are you doing here
let's talk turkey you know the chat okay
right right it really is that it that
really is a heart a heart of it is this
radical courage like
courage people are often struck by that
coming out like this is
heavy lifting this is hard work people
come out of this exhausted
and it's it can be extremely some people
say it's the most difficult thing
they've done in their life
like choosing to let go on a moment a
microsecond by microsecond
basis everything in their inclination is
to
is to say stop sometimes stop this i
don't like this i didn't know it was
going to be like this this is too much
and terence mckenna put it this way it's
like comparing to meditation and other
techniques it's like spending years push
trying to press the accelerator to make
something happen
high-dose psychedelics is like you're
speeding down the the mountain in a
fully loaded semi truck and you're
you're charged with not slamming the
brake
it's like you know let it happen
you know so it's very difficult and to
engage always
you know go further into it and take
that radical you know
radical courage you know throughout what
do they say
um in self-report if you can put general
words to it what is their experience
like
what do they say it's like because these
are many people like you said that
haven't probably read much about
psychedelics or they don't have like
with joe rogan
um like language or stories to put on it
so this is very raw self-report of
experiences
is what do they say the experience is
like yeah and some more so than others
because everyone has been exposed at
some level or another
but some of it is pretty superficial as
you as you're saying
um one of the hallmarks of psychedelics
is just their variability
so i'm more stressed it's like not the
mean but the standard deviation right
it's so wide that it's like it could be
like hellish
experiences and and
you know um just absolutely beautiful
and loving experiences everything in
between
and and both of those like those could
be two minutes apart from each other
yeah and sometimes kind of at the same
at the same time
concurrently so um
let's see there's different ways to
there were some jungian
psychologists back in the 60s um masters
in houston that wrote a really good
book the varieties of psychedelic
experience kind of which is a play on
varieties of religious experience by
william james
uh that they described this a perceptual
level
so most people have that you know when
you know whether they're
looking at the room without the eye
shades on or inside their their minds
eye with the eye shades on
colors you know um sounds like this as
a much richer um censorium
you know which can be very interesting
and then at another level
a master's in houston called the
psychodynamic level and i think you
could think about it more broadly than
you know that's kind of jungian but um
just the personal psychological levels
how i think of it like
this is about your life there's a whole
life review oftentimes people have
thoughts about their childhood
about their relationships their their
spouse or partner
their children their parents their
family of origin their current family
like
you know that stuff comes up a lot
including every like
like the love just people just like
pouring with tears about like
like how much like it hits them so hard
how much they love people
yeah like in a way that you know for
people that like they love their family
but like
it just hits them so hard that like
how important this is yeah and like the
magnitude of that love and like
what that means in their life so that's
those are some of the most moving
experiences to
be present for is where people like it
hits home like what really matters in
their life
and and then you have this sort of what
masters in houston called the archetypal
realm which
again is sort of viewing him with the
focus on archetypes
which is interesting but i think of that
more generally is like symbolic level
so just really deep experiences where
you have
you do have experiences that seem
symbolic of you know
very much in like you know what we know
about dreaming and what
most people think about dreaming like
there's this randomness of things but
sometimes it's pretty clear in
retrospect oh
like this came up because this thing has
been on my mind
you know recently so it seems to be
there there seems to be this symbolic
level and then they have this the last
level that they describe as the
mystical integral level which and this
is where there's lots of terms for it
but
transcendental experiences experiences
of unity
mystical type effects we often
measure um europeans use a scale that
will refer to oceanic boundlessness
this is all pretty much the same thing
yeah this is like
at some sense the deepest level of the
very sense of self
seems to be dissolved
minimize or expand it such that the
boundaries of the self
go into and here i think some of this is
just semantics but whether the self is
expanding such that there's no boundary
between the self and the rest of the
universe or whether there's no sense of
self again might be just semantics but
this radical shift
or sense of loss of sense of self or
self boundaries
and that's like the most typically when
people have that experience they'll
often report that as being the most
remarkable
thing and this is what you don't
typically get with mdma
these deepest levels of the the nature
of reality itself the subjectivity and
objectivity just
like the the the seer
and the scene become one and and it's a
process
and yeah and they're able to bring that
experience back uh and be able to
describe it
yeah but but one of the to a degree but
one of the hallmarks going back to
william james of describing a mystical
experience as the inf ability
and so even though it's ineffable you
know people try as far as they can to
describe it but when you get the real
deal they'll say
and even say that they say a lot of
helpful things to help you describe the
landscape
they'll say no matter what i say i'm
still not even coming anywhere close to
what this was
like the language is completely failing
and i like to joke that even though it's
it's ineffable and we're researchers so
we try to eff it up
by asking them to describe the
experience
i love it but to bring it back a little
bit
so for that particular study on tobacco
what was the results what was the
conclusions in terms of the uh impact of
uh
psilocybin on their addiction so when
that pilot study was very it was very
small and it wasn't a randomized study
so it was limited the only question we
could really answer was
is this worthy enough of follow-up yes
and the answer to that was absolutely
freaking lutely
because the success rates were so high
eighty percent biologically confirmed
successful at six
months that held up to sixty percent
biologically confirmed abstinent at two
at an average of two and a half years a
very long time yeah and so
i mean the best that's been reported in
the literature for smoking cessation is
in the upper 50
and that's with not one but two
medications for a couple of months
followed by regular cognitive behavioral
therapy where you're coming in once a
week or once every few weeks for an
entire
year and and so but this is what
very heavy this is just like a few uses
of uh psilocybin so this was three doses
of psilocybin over
a total course including preparation
everything a 15-week
period where there's mainly like um for
most part one
one meeting a week and then the three
sessions are within that
and so it's and we scale that back in
the more
the the study we're doing right now
which i can tell you about which is a
randomized um
controlled trial um but but it's uh
the yeah the original um
you know pilot study was you know these
15 people
so given the like the positive signal
from the first study telling us that it
was a worthy pursuit we hustled up some
money to actually
be able to afford a larger trial so it's
randomizing 80 people
to to get either one psilocybin session
when we've narrowed
we we've scaled that down from three to
one mainly because we're doing fmri
neuro imaging before and after and it
made it more experimentally complex to
have multiple sessions um but one
psilocybin session versus
uh the nicotine patch using the the fda
approved label like standard use of the
nicotine patch so it's randomized 40
people get
randomized to psilocybin one session 40
people get nicotine patch
and they all get the same cognitive
behavioral therapy for the standard talk
therapy
and we've scaled it down somewhat so
there's less a weekly meetings but
it's within the same ballpark and right
now we're still
um uh uh uh uh the study's still
ongoing and in fact we just recently
started recruiting again we paused for
covet now we're
starting back up with some protections
like masks and whatnot
but um uh right now for the 44
people who have gotten through the
one-year follow-up and so that includes
22 from each of the two groups
the success rates are extremely high for
the psilocybin group
it's 59 have been biologically confirmed
as smoke-free at one year
after their quit date and that compares
to
27 percent for the nicotine patch which
by the way is extremely good for the
nicotine patch compared to previous
research
so the results could change because it's
ongoing
but we're mostly done and it's still
looking extremely
positive so if anyone's interested they
have to be sort of be in commuting
distance to the baltimore area but
you know to participate right right to
participate
this is uh this is a good moment to
bring up something
i think a lot of what you talked about
is super interesting
and i think a lot of people listening to
this so now it's
anywhere from 300 to 600 000 people for
just a regular podcast
i know a lot of them will be very
interested what you're saying
and they're going to look you up they're
going to find your email
and they're going to write you a long
email about
some of the interesting things that
found in any of your papers
how should people contact you what is
the best way for that
would you recommend your super busy guy
you have a million things going on
what how should people communicate with
you thanks for bringing this up this is
a i'm
glad to get the opportunity to address
this
if someone's interested in participating
in a study
the best thing to do is go to the
website
of the study or of uh uh
like yeah which website so we have all
of our psilocybin studies so everything
we have is up in
on one website and then we link to the
different study
websites but hopkins psychedelic.org
so everything we do or if you don't
remember that just
you know go to your favorite search
engine look up johns hopkins
psychedelic and you're going to find one
of the first hits is going to be our
is this website and there's going to be
links to the smoking study and all of
our other studies if there's no link to
it there
we don't have a study on it now and if
you're interested in psychedelic
research
more broadly you can look up you know
like at another university that might be
closer to you and there's a handful of
them now
across the country and there's some in
europe that that um
have studies going on but you can at
least in the us you can look at
clinicaltrials.gov and and look up the
term psilocybin and in fact
optionally people even in europe can
register their trial on there
so that's a good way to find studies but
for our research
rather than emailing me like a more
efficient way
is to go straight and you can do that
first the first phase of screening
there's some questions online and then
someone will get back in touch with you
um but i do already start
you know and i i you know i expect it's
like
going to increase but i'm already at the
level where my simple
limited mind and limited capacity is
already i
i sometimes fail to get back to emails i
mean i'm trying to
respond to my colleagues my mentees all
these things my responsibilities and as
many of the people just
inquiring about i want to go to graduate
school i'm interested in this i had this
i have a daughter that took a psychoduck
and she's having trouble it's like
so i i try to respond to those but
sometimes i just simply can't get to
all of it already to be honest like from
my perspective
uh it's been quite heartbreaking
because i basically don't respond to any
emails anymore
and um especially as you mentioned
mentees and so on like outside of that
circle
it's heartbreaking to me how many
brilliant people there are
thoughtful people like loving people and
they write long emails
that are really i by the way i do read
them
very often it's just that i don't the
response
is then you're starting a conversation
and
there's the heartbreaking aspect is you
only have so many hours in the day
to have deep meaningful conversations
with human beings on this earth
and so you have to select who they are
and usually it's your family it's people
like you're directly working with
and even i guarantee you with this
conversation people will write
you long really thoughtful
emails like there'll be brilliant people
faculty from all over phd students from
all over
and it's heartbreaking because you can't
really get back to them but you're
saying like
many of them if you do respond it's more
like here go to this website if you're
in
for when you're interested into the
study it's just it makes sense to
directly go to the site
if there's applications open just apply
for the study
right right right you know but you know
as a either a volunteer or if we're
looking for
you know somebody um you know we're
going to be you know posting
um including on the hopkins university
like
website we're going to be posting if
we're looking for a position
i am right now actually looking through
and it's mainly been through email and
contacts but
should i say it because i think i'd
rather cast my network but i'm looking
for a postdoc right now
oh great um so i've mentored postdocs
for
i don't know like a dozen years or so
and more and more of their time is being
spent on
psychedelics so someone's free to
contact me that's more of a
that's sort of so close to home that's a
personal you know
that like emailing me about that but i i
come to appreciate more
the advice that folks like tim ferriss
have of like i think it's him like
five sends emails you know like you know
a a subject that gets to the point that
tells you what it's about so that like
you break through the signal to the
noise
but i really appreciate what you're
saying because part of the equation for
me is like
i have a three-year-old and like my time
on the ground
on the floor playing blocks or cars with
him is part of that equation
and even if the day is ending and i know
some of those emails are slipping by and
i'll never get back to them and i
have i'm struggling with it i'm already
and i get what you're saying is like i
haven't seen anything
yet if with the type of exposure that
like your podcast this will bring in
exposure
and then i think in terms of post docs
this is a really good podcast in the
sense that there's a lot of
brilliant phd students out there that
are looking for posts from all over from
mit probably from hopkins this is just
all over the place so this is
and i we have different preferences but
my preference would also be to have like
a form
that they could fill out proposed
because you know
it's very difficult through email to
tell who's are really going to be a
strong
collaborator for you like a strong
postdoc strong
student because you want a bunch of
details
but at the same time you don't want a
million pages worth of email
so you want a little bit of an
application process so usually you set
up a form
that helps me indicate how passionate
the person is
how willing they are to do
hard work like i i often ask a question
people of what do you think it's more
important
to work hard or to work smart and i use
that
those types of questions to indicate who
i would like to work with
because it's it's counter-intuitive but
uh anyway i'll leave
i'll leave that question unanswered
for people to figure out themselves but
maybe if you know my love for david
goggins you will understand
so anyway those are good thoughts about
the forms and everything
it's difficult and that's something that
evolves email email is such a
messy thing this uh speaking of
baltimore
cal newport if you know who that is
um he wrote a book called deep work he's
a computer science professor and he's
currently working on a book about email
about all the ways that email's broken
so this is going to be a fascinating
read
this is a little bit of a general
question but uh
almost a bigger picture question that we
touched on a little bit
but let's just touch it in a full way
which is uh
what have all the psychedelic studies
you've conducted
taught you about the human mind
about the human brain and the human mind
is there something if you look at the
human scientists you were before
this work and the scientists you are now
how is your understanding of the human
mind changed
i'm thinking of that in two categories
one kind of more
more scientific and they're both
scientific but
um one more about you know more about
the
the brain and behavior and the mind so
to speak
and and as a behaviorist always see sort
of the mind as a metaphor for
behavior so but anyway that gets
philosophical
but it's really increasing the
the so the one category is increasing
the
appreciation for the magnitude of
depth i mean so these are all metaphors
of
of human experience that might be a good
way to because you use certain words
like consciousness and what
it's like we're using constructs that
aren't well defined
and unless we kind of dig in but in
human experience
like that the experiences on these
compounds
can be so far out there or so deep
and that like and they're doing that by
tinkering with the same machinery that's
going on up there i mean i'm
my assumption and i think it's a good
assumption is that all
experiences you know there's a there's a
biological side
to all phenomenal experience
you know so there is not you know the
divide between biology
you know and and um
and experience or psychology is
is it's you know it's not one or the
other these are just two you know two
sides of the same
coin i mean you're avoiding the the word
the use
of the word consciousness for example
but the experience is referring to
the subjective experience so it's it's
the actual technical use of the word
consciousness of
of yeah subjective experience and even
that word
there are certain ways that like like
sort of like we're talking about access
consciousness or
narrative self-awareness which is an
aspect of like
you can wrap a definition around that we
can talk meaningfully about it but so
often around psychedelics it's used in
this much more
in terms of ultimately explaining
phenomenal consciousness itself the
so-called hard
problem and you know uh
relating to that question and
psychedelics really haven't
spoken to that and that's why it's hard
because like it's hard to imagine
anything
but i think what i was getting is that
psychedelics have done this by
the reason i was getting into the
biology versus mind
psychology divide is that that
just to kind of set up the fact that i
think all of our experience
is related to these
biological events so whether they be
naturally occurring neurotransmitters
like serotonin and dopamine and
norepinephrine etc
and and a whole other sort of biological
activity and kind of
another layer up that we could talk
about network activity communication
amongst brain areas like
this is always going on even if i just
prompt you to think about
a loved one you know like there's
something happening biologically
okay so that's always another side of
the coin so
and another way to put that is all of
our subjective experience outside of
drugs
it's it's all a controlled hallucination
in a sense it like this is completely
constructed our our experience of
reality is completely
a simulation so i i think we're on on
solid ground to say that that's our best
guess and that's a pretty reasonable
thing to
to to say scientifically like all the
rich complexity of the world emerges
from just some biology and some
chemicals
so in that you know in that that
definition implied a causation it comes
from and so that's
right that's we know at least there's a
solid correlation there
and so then we don't dig we delve deep
into the philosophy of like
idealism or materialism and things like
this which i'm not an expert in but i
know we're getting into that
territory you don't even necessarily
have to go
there like you you at least go to the
level of like okay we know there's there
seems to be this one-on-one
correspondence
and that seems pretty silent like you
can't prove a negative and you can't
you know it's like in that category of
like yeah me you could come up with an
experience that maybe doesn't have a
biological correlate but
then you're talking about there's also
the limits of the science so is it a
false negative but
i think our best guess and a very decent
assumption is that
every psychological event has a
biological correlate
so with that said you know the idea that
you can throw alter that biology
in a pretty trivial manner i mean you
could take like
a relatively small number of these
molecules throw them into the nervous
system
and then have a a 60 year old person
who has you name it i mean that has
hiked to the top of everest and that
speaks five languages
and that has been married and has kids
and grandkids
and has you name you know like been at
the top and say
this fundamentally changed who i am as a
person
and and the and what i think life is
about
like that's that's the thing about
psychedelics that just floors me and it
it never fails i mean sometimes you get
bogged down by the paperwork and running
studies and all the
i don't know all of the the bs that can
come with being in academia and
everything and then you
and sometimes you get some dud sessions
where it's not the fullness all the
magic isn't happening and it's you know
more or less it's
or it's either a dud or somewhere in the
i don't mean to dismiss them but you
know it's it's not like these
magnificent sort of reports but
sometimes you get the full monty
report from one of these people and
you're like oh yeah that's why we're
doing this whether it's like
therapeutically or just to understand
the mind and you're like
you're still floored like how is that
possible how did we
slightly alter serotonergic
neurotransmission
and say and this person is now saying
that they're they're
they're making fundamental differences
in the in the priorities of their life
after 60 years it also just fills you
with
uh all of the
possibility of experiences were yet to
have uncovered if if just a few
chemicals can change
so much it's like man
what if this could be up i mean like ha
because we're just like took a little
like it's like lighting a match or
something in the darkness and you can
see there's a lot more there but you
don't know
how much more and that's right
and then like where's that gonna go with
like i mean i'm always like aware of the
fact that like we always as humans and
as scientists think that we figured out
99 and we're working on that first one
and we got to keep reminding ourselves
it's hard to do like
we figured out like not even one percent
like we know nothing
yeah and so like i can't i can speculate
and i might sound like a fool but like
what are drugs even the concept of drugs
like
10 years 50 years 100 years a thousand
years if we if we're surviving
like you know molecules that go to a
specific area
of the brain in combination with
technology in combination with the
magnetic stimulation in combination with
the
you know like targeted pharmacology of
like oh like this subset of serotonin 2a
receptors
in the colostrum you know at this time
in this particular sequence
in combination with this other thing
like this baseball cap you wear that
like has you know you know has has one
of the
is doing some of these things that we
can only do with these like giant like
pieces of equipment now like
where it's going to go is going to be
endless and it becomes easy to
you know combined within virtual reality
where the virtuality is going to move
from being something out here
to being more in there and then we're
getting like we talked about before
we're already in a virtual reality in
terms of human
perception and and cognition models of
the of the universe being all
representations and you know sort of you
know color not existing and just
you know our representations of em um
wavelengths etc etc you know sound being
vibrations and all of this and so
as the the external vr and the internal
vr
come closer to each other like this is
what i think about in terms of the
future of drugs
like all of this stuff sort of combines
and
and like where that goes is just
it's it's unthinkable like we we're
probably gonna you know again i might
sound like a fool and
this may not happen but i think it's
possible you know to go completely
offline
like where most of people's experiences
may be
going into these internal worlds
and i mean maybe you through through
some
through a combination of these
techniques you create experiences where
someone could live a thousand years
in terms of maybe they're living a
regular lifespan but in over the next
two seconds you're living a thousand
years worth of experience
inside inside your mind through yeah
through this manipulation of the like
is that possible like just based on on
like first principles i suppose yes
i think so yeah like give us another 50
hundred 500 like who knows but like how
could it not
go there and a small tangent what are
your
thoughts in this broader definition of
drugs of psychedelics of
mind altering things what are your
thoughts about neural link and
brain computer interfaces sort of
being able to electrically stimulate
and read and neuronal activity
in the brain and then connect that to
the the computer which
is another way uh from a computational
perspective for me is kind of appealing
but it's another way of
altering subtly the behavior of the
brain
that's kind of if you zoom out
reminiscent
of the way psychedelics do as well right
so what do you have like what are your
thoughts about
neurolink what are your hopes as a
researcher of
mind altering devices systems
chemicals i guess broadly speaking i'm
all
for it i mean for the same reason i am
with psycheducks but it comes with all
the caveats
you know you're going into a brave new
world where it's like all of a sudden
there's going to be a dark side there's
going to be you know that
serious ethical considerations but
that that should not stop us from from
moving there i mean particularly the
stuff from an unknown expert but
on the short list in the short term it's
like yeah can we help these serious
neurological disorders like hell yeah
like and and i'm also sensitive to
something being someone that has lots of
you know neuroscience colleagues um
you know with some of the stuff and i
can't talk about particulars i'm not
recalling but you know in terms of
you know stuff getting out there and
then kind of a mocking of
of of uh you know gosh they're they're
saying this is unique we
we know this or sort of like this
belittling of like oh
you know this sounds like it's just a i
don't know a commercialization or like
an oversimply i forget what the example
was but something like
something that came off to some of my
neuroscientific colleagues as an
oversimplification or at least the way
they said it
oh from a kneeling perspective right oh
we've known that for years
yes and like but i'm very sympathetic to
like
maybe it's because of my very limited
but relatively speaking
the amount of exposure the psychedelic
work has had so my limited
experience of being out there and then
you think about someone like
mike musk who's like like really really
out there and you just get
all these arrows that like and it's hard
to be like when you're plowing new
ground
like you're gonna get you're gonna
criticize like every little word that
you like
this balance between speaking to like
people to make it meaningful something
scientists aren't very good at
yes having people understand what you're
saying and then being belittled by
oversimplifying something
in in terms of the public message so i'm
extremely sympathetic
and i'm a big fan of like what that you
know what elon musk does
like tunnels through the ground and
spacex and all this is like
hell yeah like this guy is has some he
has some great ideas
and there's something to be said it's
not just the the communication to the
public
i i think his first principles thinking
it's like
because i get this in the artificial
intelligence world it's probably similar
to neuroscience world
where elon will say something like or i
worked at
mit i worked on autonomous vehicles and
he's sort of
i could sense how much he pisses off
like every roboticist
at mit and everybody who works on like
the human factor
side of safety of autonomous vehicles
and saying like
we need we don't need to consider human
beings in the car
like the ill car will drive itself it's
obvious
that neural networks is all you need
like it's obvious that
like we should be able to uh systems
that should be able to learn constantly
and they don't really need lidar they
just need
uh cameras because we humans just use
our eyes and that's the same as cameras
so like it doesn't why would we need
anything else you just have to make a
system that learns faster and faster and
faster
and neural networks can do that and so
that's pissing off every single
community it's pissing off human factors
communities saying
you don't need to consider the human
driver in the picture you can just focus
on the robotics problem
it's pissing off every robotics pers
person
for saying lidar can be just ignored it
can be camera
every robotics person knows that camera
is really noisy that's really difficult
to deal with
but he's uh and then uh every
ai person who says who hears neural
networks
and and says like neural networks can
learn everything
like almost presuming that it's kind of
going to achieve general intelligence
the problem with all those haters in the
three communities
is that they're looking one year ahead
five years ahead
the hilarious thing about the
quote-unquote ridiculous things that
elon musk is saying
is they have a pretty good shot at being
true in 20 years
and so like when you just look at the
you know uh
when you look at the progression of
these kinds of predictions
and sometimes first principles thinking
thinking can allow you to do that
is you see that it's kind of obvious
that things are going to progress this
way and if you just remove your
the prejudice you hold about the
particular battles of the current
academic environment
and just look at the big picture of the
progression of the technology
you can usually you can usually see the
world in the same kind of way
and so in that same way looking at
psychedelics you could see like
there is so many exciting possibilities
here if we
fully engage in the research same thing
with neurolink
if we fully engage so we go from a
thousand channels of communication to
the brain
to billions of channels of communication
of the brain
and we figure out many of the details of
how to do that safely with
neurosurgery and so on that the world
would just change
completely in the same kind of way that
elon is
it's so ridiculous to hear him talk
about uh symbiotic relationship between
ai
and uh the the human brain but it's like
is it though like it's is it
because it's i could see in 50 years
that's going to be an
obvious like everyone will have like
obviously you have
like why are we typing stuff in the
computer doesn't make any sense that's
stupid
people used to type on a keyboard with a
mouse
what is that it seems pretty clear like
we're gonna be there
yeah like the only question is like
what's the time frame is that gonna be
20 or is it 250 or 100 like how could we
not
and and the thing that i guess upsets
with elon and others
uh is the timeline he tends to do i
think a lot of people tend to do that
kind of thing i'd definitely do it which
is like
it'll be done this year right versus
like it'll be done in 10 years
the timeline is a little bit too rushed
but from our leadership perspective it
inspires the engineers
to uh to do the best work of their life
to really kind of
believe because to do the impossible you
have to first believe it
which is a really important aspect of
innovation
and there's the delayed discounting
aspect i talked about before it's like
saying oh this is going to be a thing
20 50 years from now it's like what
motivates anybody if you can
and even if you're fudging it or like
wishful thinking a little bit or
let's just say airing on one side of the
probability distribution
like there's value in saying like yeah
like there's a chance
we could get this done in a year and you
know what and if you set a goal for a
year
and you're not successful hey you might
get it done in three years
whereas if you had aimed at 20 years
well you either would have never done it
at all or you would
have aimed at 20 years and then would
have taken you 10. so
there the other thing i think about this
like in terms of
his work and and i guess we've seen with
psychedelics it's like
there's a lack of appreciation for like
sort of the variability you need in
natural selection
sort of extrapolating from biological
you know from evolution like
hey maybe he's wrong about focusing only
on the cameras and not these other
things
be empirically driven it's like yeah you
need to like when he's
you know when you need to get the
regulation is it safe enough to get this
thing on the road those are real
questions and
be empirically driven and if he can meet
the whatever standard is
is relevant that's the standard and be
driven by that so don't let it affect
your ethics but
if he's on the wrong path how wonderful
someone's exploring that wrong path he's
going to figure out it's the wrong path
and like other people he's damn it he's
doing something
yeah like he's you know and
and so appreciating that variability
yeah you know that like it's
it's valuable even if he's not on i mean
this is all over the place in
in science it's like a good theory one
standard
definition is that it generates testable
hypotheses
and like the ultimate model is never
going to be the same as reality some
models are going to work better than
others like
you know newtonian physics got us a long
ways
even if there was a better model like
waiting and some models weren't
as good as you know were never that
successful but just even like
putting them out there and testing we
wouldn't know something is
a bad model until someone puts it out
anyway so yeah
uh diversity of ideas is essential for
progress yeah
so we brought up consciousness a few
times there's several things i want to
kind of disentangle there so one you've
recently wrote a paper titled
consciousness religion and gurus
pitfalls of psychedelic medicine
so that's one side of it you've kind of
already mentioned that these terms can
be a little bit misused
or are used in a variety of ways
that they can they can be confusing
but in a specific way
as much as we can be specific about
these things about the actual heart
problem of consciousness or
understanding what is
consciousness this weird thing that it
feels like
it feels like something to experience
things
have psychedelics giving you
some kind of insight on what is
consciousness
you've mentioned that it feels like
psychedelics allows you to kind of
dismantle your sense of self
like step outside of yourself
so that feels like somehow playing with
this mechanism of consciousness
and if it is in fact playing with a
mechanism of consciousness
using just a few chemicals it feels like
we're
very much in the neighborhood of being
able to maybe understand
the actual biological mechanisms of how
consciousness can emerge from the brain
so yeah there's there's a bunch there i
think my preface is that
i certainly have opinions that are
outside that i can say
here are my best speculations as a as a
as just a person and an armchair
philosopher and it's that
philosophy is certainly not my my
training and my expertise um so i have
thoughts there but that that i recognize
are completely in the realm of
speculation
that are like things that i would love
to wrap empirical science around but
that are
you know there's no data
and getting to the hard problem like no
conceivable way even though i'm
i'm very open like i'm hoping that that
problem can be cracked and i do i
as an armchair philosopher i do think
that is a problem i don't think it can
be dismissed as some people argue it's
not even really a problem
it strikes me that explaining just the
existence of phenomenal consciousness
is a problem so anyway i very much keep
that divide in mind when i talk about
these things what we
can really say about what we've learned
through science including by
psychedelics versus like
what i can speculate on in in terms of
you know
the nature of reality and consciousness
but
in terms of by and large
skeptically i have to say psychedelics
have not really taught us
anything about the nature of
consciousness i'm hopeful that they will
they
they have been used around certain i
don't even know if features is the right
term but things that are called
consciousness so consciousness can refer
to not only
just phenomenal consciousness which is
like you know
the the source of the hard problem and
what it is to be like nagel's
um description but um
the sense of self or so which can be a
sort of like the the experiential
self momentum or it can be like the
narrative self the stringing together of
story so
those are things that i think can be and
a little bit's been done
with with psychedelics regarding that
but i i think there's far more potential
like
but so like one story that unfolded is
that psychedelics acutely having
effects on the default mode network a
certain a pattern of activation amongst
a subset of brain areas that is
associated with self-referential
processing seems to be more active more
communication
between these um uh areas like uh
the posterior cingulate cortex and the
medial prefrontal cortex for example
being parts of this that are
and and others that are um tied with
sort of
thinking about yourself remembering
yourself in the past projecting yourself
into the future
and so that it's an interesting story
emerged when
it was found that when psilocybin is on
board
you know in the person system that
there's a d there's less communication
amongst these
these areas so with resting state fmri
imaging that there's
there's less synchronization or
presumably communication between these
areas and so i think it was it has been
overstated into
ah we see this is like this is the
dissolving of the ego
this is it the story made a whole lot of
sense but
there's several i think that story is
really being challenged like one we see
increasing number of drugs that are
that that decouple that network
including ones like that
aren't psychedelic so this may just be a
property
frankly of being like you know screwed
up you know like
you know being out of your head being
like like you know anytime you mess with
the perception system maybe
it screws up some some uh just our
ability to just function in the
holistically like we do
in order yeah for the brain to perceive
stuff to be able to map it to memory to
connect
things together to their their whole
recur mechanism
that that could just be messed with
right and it couldn't i'm speculating it
could be tied to more if you had to
download a language everyday language
like
not feeling like yourself like so
whether that be like really drunk or
really hopped up on
amphetamine or you know on like we found
it like decoupling of the default mode
network on salvan ornay which is a
smokeable
psychedelic which is a non-classic
psychedelic but another one where
like dmt where people are often talking
to entities and that type of thing that
was a really fun study to run but
nonetheless
most people say it's not a classic
psychedelic and doesn't
have some some of those phenomenal
features that people report from classic
psychedelics
and not sort of the clear sort of
ego loss type not at least not in the
way that people report it with classic
psychedelics so you get it with all
these different drugs and so
and then you also see just broad broad
changes in network activity with other
networks and so
i think that story took off a little too
soon although so i think
in the story that the dmn the default
mode network
relating to the self and i know some
neuroscientists it drives them crazy if
you say that
it's the ego and that's just like
but self-referential processing if you
go that far
like that was already known before
psychedelic psychedelics didn't
really contribute to that the idea that
this
type of brain network activity was
related to a sense of self
but it is absolutely striking that
psychedelics that people report with
pretty high reliability these unity
experiences that
where people subjectively like like they
report losing
or again like the boundaries of the
however you want to say it like
like these these unity experiences i
think we can do a lot with that in terms
of figuring out the nature of
the sense of self now i don't think
that's the same as the hard problem or
or the existence of phenomenal
consciousness because you can build an
ai system and you correct me if i'm
wrong that like
we'll pass a turing test in terms of
demonstrating the qualities of like uh
a sense of self it will talk as if
there's a self and there's probably a
certain like algorithm or
whatever like computational like you
know scaling up
of computations that results and somehow
and i think this is the argument with
with humans but some have speculated
this why do we have this illusion of the
self that's that's evolved that
and we might find this with a.i that
like it works
you know having a sense of self or
and that stated wrong incorrectly like
acting
as if there is a an agent
at play and behaviorally acting like
you know there is a there is a self that
might kind of work
and so you can program a computer or a
robot
um to basically demonstrate
have an algorithm like that and
demonstrate that type of behavior and i
think that's completely silent on
whether there's an actual experience
inside there
i've been um struggling to find the
right words and how i feel about that
whole thing but
because i've said it poorly before i've
before said that there's no difference
between the appearance
and the actual existence
of consciousness or intelligence or any
of that what i really mean
is the
the more the appearance starts to be
look like
the thing the more there's this area
where it's like
i don't think i don't
our whole idea of what is real
and what is just an illusion is um
not the right way to think about it so
the whole idea is like if you create a
system
that looks like it's having fun the more
it's realistically able to portray
itself as having
fun like there's a certain gray area
which it's the system is having fun uh
and same with intelligence same with
consciousness and we humans want to
simplify like it feels like the way we
simplify the existence
and the illusion of something uh is
is uh missing the whole truth of the
nature of reality which we're not
yet able to understand like it's the one
percent we only understand one percent
currently so
we don't have the right uh physics to
talk about things we don't have the
right science to talk about things but
to me like the um uh
faking it and actually it being true
is um
the the difference is much smaller than
what humans would like to imagine
that's my intuition but philosophers
hate that because
and uh guess what it's philosophers what
have you actually built
uh so like to me is that's the
difference between philosophy and
engineering
it feels like if we push the creation
the engineering
like fake it until you make it all the
way which is like fake consciousness
until you realize holy crap this thing
is conscious
fake intelligence until you realize holy
crap this is intelligence
and from the my curiosity with
psychedelics
and just neurobiology neuroscience
is like it feels i'm i love the armchair
i love sitting in that armchair because
it feels like at a certain point you're
going to think about this problem
and there's going to be an aha moment
like that's what the armchair does
sometimes science prevents you from
really thinking
right wait like it's really simple
there's something really simple like
there's some that could be
some dance of chemicals that we're
totally unaware of not from
not from aspects of like which chemicals
to combine
with which biological architectures but
more like we were thinking of it
completely wrong
that uh just just
out of the blue like maybe the human
mind
is just like a radio that tunes into
some other medium
where consciousness actually exists like
those uh
weird sort of hypothetical like maybe
we're just thinking about the human mind
totally wrong maybe there's no such
thing as individual
intelligence maybe it is all collective
intelligence between humans
like maybe the intelligence is possessed
in the communication
of language between minds and then in
fact consciousness is a property
of that language uh versus
a property of the individual minds and
somehow the
neurotransmitters will be able to
connect to that so uh
then ai systems can join that common
collective intelligence that common
language
you know like just thinking completely
outside of the box i just said how much
a crazy thing
i don't know but but thinking outside
the box uh
and there's something about subtle
manipulation of the chemicals of the
brain
which feels like the best
or one of the great chances of the
scientific
process leading us to an actual
understanding of the hard problem
so i am very hopeful that and so i
i mean i'm a radical empiricist which
i'm i'm very strong with with that like
that's what
you know so you know science isn't about
ultimately being
a materialist it's like it's about being
an empiricist in my view
and so for example i'm very fascinated
by the so-called psi phenomenon
you know like stuff that people just
kind of reject out of hand um
you know i kind of orient towards that
stuff with with an idea of um
you know hey look you know what we
consider like anything
exist is natural and so but the boundary
of what what what we observe in nature
like what we recognize as in nature
moves like
what we do today and what we know today
would only be described as magic 500
years ago or even 100 years
ago some of it so there will surely be
things that
like you explain these phenomena that
just sound like completely
they're supernatural now where there may
be for some of it
like some of it might turn out to be a
complete bunk and some of it might turn
out to be
um it's just another layer of nature
whether we're talking about
multiple dimensions that are invoked or
something we have don't even have the
language towards
and what you're saying about the moving
together the model
and the real thing of conscious like i'm
very sympathetic to that so that's that
part of like
on the arm share side where i i want to
be clear i can't say this as a scientist
but just terms of speculating
i i find myself attracted to these um
more of the the sort of the the pan
psychism ideas and that
kind of makes sense to me i don't know
if that's what you meant there but it
seemed like related the sense that
ultimately if
if if you were completely modeling like
it's like if you completely modeling
unless you dismiss like the the idea
that there is a phenomenal consciousness
which i think is hard given that we all
i seem like i have one that's really all
i i know but
if that's so compelling i can't just
dismiss
that like if you're if if you take that
as a given then
the only way for the model and the and
the real thing to merge
is if there is something baked into
the nature of reality you know sort of
like in the history of like there are
certain just like fundamental forces or
fundamental like and that and that's
been useful for us and sometimes we find
out that that's pointing towards
something else or sometimes it's still
seems like it's a fundamental and
sometimes it's a placeholder for someone
to figure out but there's something like
this is just a given
you know this is just you know and
sometimes something like gravity seems
like a very good place holder and
there's something better that comes to
replace it
so so you know i kind of think about
like consciousness and i didn't i kind
of had this inclination before i knew
there was a term for it um
resalient monetism the idea that which
is a
a form of pain again i'm not i'm an
armchair philosopher
not a very good one broadly pansexism by
the way is the idea that sort of
consciousness permeates all matter
in or it's a fundamental
part of physics of the universe kind of
thing so right
and there's a lot of different flavors
of it as as you're as you're alluding to
and something that struck me as like
consistent with some just
you know inclinations of mine just total
speculation
is is this idea of um
everything we know in science and with
most of the stuff we think of physics
you know
really describes it's all interactions
it's not the thing itself like there's a
there
there is something to this
and this sounds very new agey which is
why it's it's very difficult and i have
a
high bullshit like meter and everything
but like in is-ness i mean i think about
like huxley aldous huxley with his
mescaline experience and doors of
procession like there's an is-ness
there in know alan watson like there is
a
a nature of being again very new age
sounding but maybe there is something to
in and when we say consciousness we
think of like this human experience but
maybe that's just
that's so processed and so
that's so far so it's so derivative of
this kind of basic thing
that we wouldn't even recognize the
basic thing but the basic thing might
just be
this is not about the interaction
between particles this is what it is
like to exist as a particle and maybe
it's not even particles maybe it's
like space-time itself i mean again
totally in the speculation
and something out very space-time so
it's funny because we don't have this
neither the science nor the proper
language to talk about it
all we have is kind of uh little
intuitions about
there might be something in that
direction of the darkness
right to pursue and that that that in
that sense i find pan psychism uh
interesting in that like it does feel
like there's
something fundamental here that
consciousness is it's not just like
okay so the flip side consciousness
could be just a very
basic and trivial symptom
like like a little hack of nature that's
useful
uh for like survival of an organism
it's not something fundamental it's it's
just
very basic boring chemical thing
that somehow has convinced us humans
because we're very human-centric we're
very self-centric
that this is somehow really important
but it's actually pretty obvious
but or it could be something really
fundamental to the nature of the
universe so
both of those are to me pretty
compelling and
i think eventually scientifically
testable it is
so frustrating that it's hard to design
a scientific experiment currently
but i think it's that's how noble prizes
are won
nobody did it right right until they do
it
and the reason i lean towards and again
armchair speaking if i had to bet
like a thousand dollars on which one of
these ultimately be pro
i would i would head i would lean
towards i'd put my bets on
on something like pan psychism rather
than the
the emergence of phenomenal con
consciousness through complexity or
computational complexity because
although certainly what if there is some
underlying
fundamental consciousness it's clearly
being processed
and you know in this way through
computation um in terms of resulting in
our
experience and the experience presumably
of other animals but the reason i would
blend on
pansysm is to me occam's razor
it just in terms of truly the hard
problem like this at some point you have
an inside looking out
and even looking refers to vision and it
doesn't that's just an example but just
there's an inside experiencing something
at some point of complexity all of a
sudden
you know you start from this objective
universe and all we know about is
interactions between things and things
happen
and at this certain level of complexity
magically there's an
inside that to me doesn't pass occam's
razor
as easily as maybe there is a
fundamental property of the universe
of you know there's both subjective and
objective there's both
interactions amongst things and there is
the thing itself yes but but yeah
so i i'm of two minds i agree with you
totally on
half my mind and the other half as i've
seen looking at cellular automata a lot
which is complete it sure does seem
that we don't understand anything about
complexity like the emergence
the just the property in fact that could
be a fundamental
property of reality is something within
the emergence
from simple things interacting somehow
miraculous things
happen and like that i don't understand
that
that could be that could be fundamental
that like
something about the uh layers of
abstraction
uh like layers of reality like really
small things interacting and then
on another layer emerges
actual complicated behavior even the
underlying thing is super simple
like that process we don't really don't
understand either
and that could be bigger than any of the
things we're talking about
that that's the the basic force behind
everything that's happening in the
universe
is from simple things complex
phenomena can happen and the thing that
gives me
pause is is that i'm concerned about
a threshold there like how is it likely
that now there may be and there may be
some
qualitative shift that in the realm of
like we don't even we don't even
understand complexity yet like you're
saying like so maybe there is
but i do think like if it if it is a
result of the complexity well
you know just having helium versus
hydrogen is a form of complexity
having the existence of stars versus
clouds of gas is a complexity the
the the entire universe has been this
increasing complexity
and so that kind of brings me back to
then the other of like
okay if there's if it's about complexity
then we should then
it exists at a certain level in these
simple systems like a star
or or uh you know they all have more
complex
psychism that's right but we humans uh
the qualitative shift
we might have evolved to appreciate
certain kinds of thresholds
right yeah i do think it's likely that
this idea that
whether or not there's an inner
experience which is phenomenal it's the
hard problem
that acting like an agent
like having an algorithm that basically
like operates as if there is an agent
that's clearly a thing that i think has
worked
and that there is a whole lot to figure
out there
that that um and i think psychedelics
will be extremely
helpful in figuring more out about that
because they do seem to
a lot of times eliminate that or
whatever radically shift that sense of
of self let me ask the craziest question
indulge me for a second oh uh
this is a joke look at what we've been
talking about like okay no all the
seatbelt on
all of this is assigned all of that
despite the
the caveats about armchair i think is
within the reach of science
uh let me let me ask one that's kind of
um also with the nursing science but
as joe likes to say uh it's entirely
possible right
uh is it possible
that uh with these dmt trips when you
meet entities
is it possible that these entities are
extraterrestrial life forms
like our understanding of little green
men with aliens that show up
is totally off i often think about this
like
what would actual extraterrestrial
intelligence
look like and my sense is it will look
like
very different from anything we can even
begin to comprehend and how would it
communicate and how would it communicate
would it be necessarily spaceships
right travel or could it be
communicating through
chemicals through if there's the pan
psychism situation
if there's something not if i almost
for sure no we don't understand you know
a lot about the function of our mind
in connection to the fabric of uh
the physics of the universe a lot of
people seem to think we have theoretical
physics pretty figured out
i have my doubts because i'm pretty sure
it always feels like we have everything
figured out until we don't
right but i mean there's no grand
unifying theory yet right but even
widely recognized we could be missing
out like the concept of the universe
just can be completely off
like how many other universes are there
all those
all those kinds of things i mean just
the the basic nature of information the
uh time time all of those things yeah
well yeah what yeah whether that's just
like a thing we assign value to or that
whether it's fundamental or not that's
whole shank
i could talk to chunkier forever about
whether time is emergent or fundamental
to the reality
but is it possible that the entities we
meet
are actual alien life forms do you ever
think about that
yeah yeah yeah yeah i do and and i've
to somebody relayed my cards out with by
identifying as a radical empiricist
you know it's like so the answer is it
possible and i think you know ultimately
if
if you're a good scientist you got to
say now that's at the extremes it's a
like yes yes you know and it might get
more interesting when you had to
you you're asked to guess about the
probability of that is that a one in a
one in a million one in a trillion one
in a one in uh
more than the number of atoms in the
universe uh probability
and this one empiricist is like what
what is a good testable
like how would you know the answer to
that question well how would you be able
to validate it
i mean well can you get some information
that's verifiable like
like um information that about some
other planet that that or some aspect
some and gosh it would be an interesting
range but what range of discovery that
we can anticipate we're gonna know
within
um you know whatever a few years next
five ten twenty years um and seeing if
you can get that predict
that information now and then over time
it might be verified
you know the type of thing like you know
part of einstein's
work was ultimately verified not until
decades and decades later at least
certain aspects through the
um through empirical observations um but
but it's also possible that the the
alien beings
have a very different value system and
perception of the world where all of
this
little capitalistic improvements that
we're all after like
predicting the concept of predicting the
future too
is like totally useless to
to other life forms uh that have
that perhaps think in a much
different way maybe a more transcendent
way i don't know but
so they wouldn't even sign the consent
form to be a participant in our
and they wouldn't understand the nature
of these experiments i mean that
um maybe it's purely in the realm of
uh the the consciousness the thing that
we uh talked about so communicating in
in a way that
is totally different than the kinds of
communication that we think of
as on earth like what's the purpose of
communication for us
for us humans the purpose of
communication is sharing ideas
it feels like like converging
like it's the dawkins like memes it's
like
we're sharing ideas in order to figure
out
how to uh collaborate together to get
food into our systems and
procreate and then like murder everybody
in the neighboring tribe
because they they'll steal our food like
we are all about sharing ideas
maybe uh it's possible to to have
another alien life form that's
more about sharing experiences you know
like it's less about ideas i don't know
and maybe that'll be us in a few years
yeah how could it not like
instead of explaining something
laboriously to you like having people
describe the ineffable psychedelic
experience like if we could
record that and then get the near a link
of
50 years from now like oh just plug this
into your just transferring these yeah
it's like oh now you feel what it's
what it's like and like in one sense
like how could we not go there and then
you get
into the realm of especially when you
throw time into it are the aliens us
yeah in the future or even like a
transcendental temporal
like the us beyond time like i don't
know like you get into this world
there's a lot of possibilities yeah
but i think you know there's one
psychedelic researcher that's who did
high-dose dmt
um research in the 90s who speculated
that
um that and there was a lot of alien
encounter experiences like maybe these
are
like entities from some other dimension
or
he labeled it as speculation but you
know do you remember the name
oh rick straussman who did yeah yeah the
the dmt work
he labeled it as speculation but you
know i think that
yeah i think we'd be wise to kind of you
know find it's always that balance
between
being empirically grounded and skeptical
but also not being and i think in
science well often we are
too closed yeah which relates to like
you're talking about elon like
in academia it's like often like i think
you're punished for thinking or even
talking about 20 years from now because
it's just so
far removed from your next grant or for
your next paper
that you're it's easy pickings yeah and
you know that you're not allowed to
speculate so i think though
i'm a huge fan of i think the the best
way
to me at least to practice like science
or to practice good engineering is to
like
do two things and just bounce off like
spend most of the time
doing the rigor of the day-to-day of
what can be accomplished now in the
engineering space or in the science like
what can
actually what can you construct an
experiment around
do like that the usual rigor of the
scientific process
but then every once in a while on a
regular basis to step outside and talk
about aliens
and consciousness and uh we just walk
along the line of things that are
outside the reach of science currently
uh free will the the
illusion the illusion or the perception
or the experience of free will
of anything just just the the entirety
of it
being able to travel in time through
warm holes it's like it's really useful
to do that
especially as a scientist like if that's
all you do
you go into a land where you're not
actually able to think rigorously
there's something
at least to me that if you just hop back
and forth
you're able to i think do exactly the
kind of
injection of out of the box
thinking to your regular day-to-day
science
that will ultimately lead to
breakthroughs
but you have to be the good scientist
most of the time
and that's consistent with what i think
the great scientists of history
like like in most of the
the history you know the greats you know
the newtons and
uh you know einsteins i mean they were
there was less of an in this change i
think as time marched on but less of a
separation between those realms
it's like there's the inclination alpha
it's like
as a scientist and this is like
you know this is science this is my work
and then this like my inclination
to say oh lex don't take me too
seriously because this is my arm chair
i'm not speaking as a scientist
i'm bending over backwards you say you
know
to divide that self and maybe there's
been less of there's been that
evolution and and that's and like the
greats like didn't
see that i mean newton and you go back
in time and it's like that obviously
like connects to
than religion especially that is the
predominant world where newton like how
much
you know like how much time did he spend
trying to like decode the bible and
whatnot you know
maybe that was a dead end but it's like
if if you really believe
in that in that particular religion and
you're this mastermind
and you're trying to figure things out
it's not like oh this is what my job
description is and this is what the
grant wants it's like
no i've got this limited time on the
planet i'm going to figure out as much
stuff as possible
nothing is off the table and you're just
putting it all
together so this is kind of the
trajectories maybe related to this
the siloing in science like again
related to my like oh i'm not a
philosopher
you know going whether you consider
science or not not empirical science but
like
going to these different disciplines
like you know the greats you know didn't
yeah observe the
yeah uh so speaking of uh
the finiteness of our existence on
on in this world uh so
on the front of psychedelics and
teaching you lessons
as a researcher as a human being
what have you learned about death about
mortality
about the finiteness of our existence
are you yourself
afraid of death and how has your
view do you ponder it and has your view
of your mortality changed
with the research you've done yeah
yeah so i do ponder it and uh are you
afraid of death
probably on a daily basis i ponder it i
would i'd have to pick it apart more and
say
yeah i am afraid of dying like the
the process of dying um i'm not afraid
of being dead
i mean i'm not afraid of i think it was
penn jillet that said uh
and he may have gotten it from someone
else but like i'm not afraid of the year
you know 1862 before i existed i'm not
afraid of the year
2262 after i'm gone like
it's gonna be fine but yeah you know
dying
like i'd i'd be lying if i said i wasn't
afraid of
you know dying and so there's both like
the process of dying like yeah it's
usually not good
it'd be nice if it was after many many
years and just sort of
you know i'd rather not fall you know
die in my sleep i'd rather kind of be
conscious but sort of just die fade out
with old age maybe but but like
you know just being in an accident and
like you know horrible diseases i've
seen
enough loved ones it's like yeah this is
not good this is enough to be
you know i'd like to say that i'm i'm
peaceful and sort of balanced enough
that i'm not concerned all but no like
yeah i'm afraid of dying
um but i'm also concerned about um i
think about family like i
i'm really i'm afraid or at least con
you know concerned about
like not being there like with a
three-year-old not being there not being
there for
for him and my wife and my mom the rest
the rest of her life
i'm concerned about not i'm concerned
more about like the harm that it would
cause if i left prematurely
and then kind of even bigger along the
lines of some of the stuff that ford
thinking we've been talking about
i i think maybe way too much about just
like
and i'll never know the answer so even
if i live to
you know 120 like but like i want to
know as much as i can but like
how is this gonna work out like as
humans
are we and a big one i think is are we
gonna and i don't think unfortunately
i'm gonna
learn it in my lifetime even if i
lived to a ripe old age but well i don't
know is this gonna work out like
are we gonna escape the planet i think
that's one of the biggies like are we
gonna like
the survival of the speed like i think
the next like the time we're in now
it's like with the nuclear weapons with
pandemics and with
um uh i mean we're gonna get to the
point where anyone can
can build a hydrogen bomb like you know
it's like
you just like the exact or engineer like
the you know something that's a million
times worse than covet and then you
spread it it's like yeah we're getting
to this period of and then
not to mention climate change you know
it's like although i think that's not
there's probably going to be surviving
humans with that regard you know but
it could be really bad but these
existential threats i think the only
real guarantee that we're going to get
another
you name it thousand million whatever
years is like
diversity diver diversify our portfolio
get get off the planet
you know um don't leave this one
hopefully we keep you know but like
and i you know it's like either we're
gonna get snuffed out
like really quickly or we're gonna like
if we
if we reach that point and it's gonna be
over the next like 100 200 years like
like we're probably going to survive
like
like until like i mean you know like our
sun
like and even beyond that like like
we're probably going to be talking about
millions and millions of years it's like
and we're we're i don't know in terms of
the planet 4 billion years into this
and depending on how you count our
species you know we're
you know we're millions of years into
this and it's like it's this is like the
point of the
relay race where we can really screw up
so that would make you feel pretty good
when you're on your
death bed 120 years old and there's
something hopeful about
there's a colony starting up on mars and
it's like
yeah titan like whatever you know like
yeah like that we have these colonies
out there that would tell me like
yeah then at least we'd be good until
like the
you know hopefully probably until the
the
the sun goes red giant you know what i
mean yeah rather than oh
like 20 years from now when there's some
someone with their finger on the nuclear
button that just you know misperceives a
you know the radar you know like the
signal they
they think russia's attacking they're
really not or
china and like that's probably how a
nuclear accident
war is going to start rather than eating
or the like i said these other horrible
things
does it not make you sad that uh you
won't be there
if uh we are successful uh proliferating
throughout the
observable universe that you won't be
there to experience any of it
just yeah you go death right it's the
death because you're still gonna die
and it's still gonna be over right
that's uh
you know ernest becker and those folks
really emphasize
the the terror of death that if we're
honest we'll discover if we search
within ourselves which is like
this thing is going to be over most of
our existence
is uh based on the illusion
that is going to go forever and when you
sort of realize it's actually going to
be over
like today like i might murder you at
the end of this conversation
uh it might be over today or like you
go on going home this might be your last
day in this earth
and it's
i mean uh like pondering that and i i
suppose
i suppose one thing to be me i i
if i were to push back it's interesting
is you actually i think you see
comfort in the sadness of how
unfortunate unfortunately would be for
your family to not have you
because the really even even the deepers
yes but that's the simple fear even the
deeper terror is like
like this this thing doesn't last
forever
like i think uh i don't know they're
like if it's hard to put the right words
to it but it
feels like that's not truly acknowledged
by us by each of each of us
yeah i think this is the i mean getting
back to the psychedelics in terms of the
people in our our work with cancer
patients who
um we had psilocybin sessions to help
them and it did substantially help them
um
the vast majority um in terms of dealing
with these existential issues and i
think
you know it's something we i could say
that i really feel that i've come along
in that
both like being with folks who have died
that are close to me
and then also that work i think are the
two biggies and sort of like
you know i think i've come along and
that that sort of acceptance of this
like like it's not gonna last
um any whether at the personal level or
even at the species levels like at some
point all the stars are going to fade
out
and it's going to be the realm of which
is going to be the vast majority if it
can
unless there's a big crunch which
apparently doesn't seem likely
like most of the universe there's this
blink of an eye that's happening right
now that life is even possible
like the era of stars so it's like we're
going to fade out at some point
like you know and you know then we get
at this level of consciousness and like
okay maybe there is life after death
maybe there's maybe times an illusion
maybe
like that part i'm ready for like i'm
i'm like
you know like strap that that would be
really great and i'm looking
i'm not afraid of that at all it's like
even if it's just strange like if i
could
push a button to enter that door i mean
i'm not gonna you know die you're not
gonna kill myself but it's like
if i could take a peek at what that
reality is or choose at the end of my
life if i could choose of
entering into a universe where there is
an afterlife of something completely
unknown versus one where there's none i
think i'd say well let's see what's
behind that
that's a true scientist way of thinking
if there's a door
you're excited about opening and going
in right
but i am attracted to this idea like
like you know it's and i recognize it's
easier said than done
to say i'm okay with not existing yeah
it's like the real test is like okay
check me on my deathbed
you know it's like it's oh yes i'll be
all right it is beautiful thing and the
humility of surrendering and
i really hope and i think i'd probably
be more likely to be in that realm right
now than i would like or check me when i
get
a terminal cancer diagnosis and i really
hope i'm more in that realm but i
i know enough about human nature to know
that like i don't want to
i can't really speak to that because i
haven't been in that situation
and i think there can be a beauty to
that and the transcendence of like yeah
and you know it was it was beautiful not
just despite all that but because of
that
because ultimately there's going to be
nothing and because we came from nothing
and we dealt with all this shit the fact
that there was still beauty and truth
and connection like that you know
like it just it's a beautiful thing
but i i hope i'm in that it's easy to
say that now
like yeah do you think there's a a
meaning to this thing
we got going on uh life
existence on earth to us individuals
a psychedelic's researcher perspective
or from just a human perspective
those those merge together for me
because it's it's just heart i've been
doing this research for
almost 17 years and and like not just
the cancer study but so many times
people
like i remember a session in this
in one of our studies someone who wasn't
getting any treatment for anything but
one of our healthy normal studies where
he was
contemplating the the suicide of his son
um and just these i mean just like the
most intense
human experiences that you can have in
the most vulnerable
situations sometimes like people
like you know and it's just like you
have that have a
and you just feel lucky to be part of
that process that people trust you to
let their guards down like that um
like i don't know the meaning i think
the meaning of life is
is is to find meaning and i think i
actually i think i just described it a
minute ago it's like that transcendence
of everything
like the it's the beauty despite the
the absolute ugliness it's the it's the
and as a species and i think more about
this
like i think about this a lot it's the
fact that
we are i mean we're we come from filth i
mean
we're we're you know we're animals we
come from
like we're all descendant from murderers
and rapists
like we despite that background we
are capable of this the self-sacrifice
and the connection and and and
figuring things out you know true
science and other forms of truth you
know
seeking and and an artwork just the
beauty of
of of music and and other forms of art
it's like
the fact that that's possible is the
meaning
of of life i mean and ultimately that
feels to be creating
uh more and richer experiences
the from a russian perspective uh both
the dark
the you mentioned the cancer diagnosis
or losing a child to suicide or
all those dark things is is still
rich experiences and also the
the beautiful creations the art the
music the science
that's also rich experience so somehow
we're figuring out
from just like psychedelics expand our
mind to the possibility of experiences
somehow we're able to
figure out different ways as a society
to expand
the realm of experiences and from that
would gain meaning somehow
right and that's part of like this we're
going across different levels here but
like the idea that
so-called bad trips or challenging
experiences are so common in psychedelic
experiences it's like
that's a part of that like yeah it's
tough and most of the important things
in life are really really tough and
scary
and most of the things like like the
death of a loved one like
it told like the greatest learning
experiences the things that make you who
you are
are are the horrors and you know it's
like yeah we try to minimize them we try
to avoid them
but and i don't know i think we all need
to get into the mode of like giving
ourselves a break both personally
and society societally i mean i went
through like the the
i think a lot of people do these days in
my 20s like
oh the humans are just kind of a disease
on the planet
and like and then in terms of our
country in terms of the united states
it's like oh we have all these horrible
you know sins in our past and it's like
i think about that like the
i think about it like my my
three-year-old it's like yeah you can
construct a story
where this is all just horrible you can
look at that stuff and say this is all
just horror
you know where yard is like there's no
logical answer to our
you know rational answer to say we're
not a disease on the planet from one
lens we are
you know you know and like there's
you could just look at humanity as that
like nothing but this horrible thing you
can look at any you and you name the
system
you know you know modern medicine
western medicine
you know the university system and it's
like you can dismiss everything so
you know big farm like hopefully these
vaccines work and then like
yeah i'd like to you know like i'm kind
of glad big pharma was a part of that
like
you know it's like the united states you
can like point to the horrors
like any other country that's been
around a long time that has these
legitimate horrors and kind of dismiss
like these beautiful things like yeah we
have this like
modifiable constitutional republic that
just
like i still think is the best thing
going you know um
that that that as a model system of like
how humans
have to figure out how to work together
it's like it's
how there's no better system that i've
come across
yeah there's uh if we're willing to look
for it there's a
there's a beautiful court to a lot of
things we've created uh
yeah this country is a great example of
that but most of the human experience
has a beauty to it even the suffering
right so the meaning is fine is is
choosing
to focus on that positivity and not
forget it beautifully put yeah
speaking of experiences this was one of
uh
my favorite experience on this podcast
talking to you today
matthew i hope we get a chance to talk
again i hope to see you on joe rogan
it's a huge honor to talk to you can't
wait to read your papers
uh thanks for talking today likewise i
very much enjoyed it thank you
thanks for listening to this
conversation with matthew johnson and
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friedman
and now let me leave you with some words
from terence mckenna
nature loves courage you make the
commitment
and nature will respond to that
commitment by removing impossible
obstacles
dream the impossible dream and the world
will not
grind you under it will lift you up this
is the trick
this is what all these teachers and
philosophers who really counted
who really touched the alchemical gold
this is what they understood
this is the shamanic dance in the
waterfall
this is how magic is done by hurling
yourself
into the abyss and discovering it's a
feather bed
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you