Exploring the Mind: Insights from Matthew Johnson on Psychedelics and Consciousness

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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description to get a discount and 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

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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