Introduction to Psychedelics
- Matthew Johnson, a leading researcher in psychedelics, provides an overview of various psychedelics, including classic ones like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT. For a deeper understanding of how these substances interact with the brain, you may want to explore Understanding the Brain: The Link Between Neuroanatomy and Personality.
The Science Behind Psychedelics
- Psychedelics primarily alter perception and sense of self through receptor-level events in the brain. Johnson explains how classic psychedelics are remarkably safe physiologically, with no known lethal overdose potential for most users. This safety profile is crucial when considering their therapeutic applications, which are further discussed in Unlocking Your Potential: The Power of Transcendent Awareness and Self-Discovery.
Therapeutic Potential
- Johnson discusses the promising results of using psilocybin to help individuals quit smoking, with high success rates in initial studies. He highlights the importance of preparing participants for their psychedelic experiences to maximize therapeutic outcomes. For more on the therapeutic aspects of psychedelics, see Exploring the Reality of Magic: Insights from Dr. Dean Radin.
The Nature of Consciousness
- The conversation touches on the hard problem of consciousness and how psychedelics may provide insights into the nature of self and reality. Johnson speculates on the possibility of consciousness being a fundamental aspect of the universe, aligning with panpsychism. This topic resonates with discussions in Exploring Neuralink: The Intersection of Technology and the Human Experience.
Personal Reflections on Mortality
- Johnson shares his thoughts on death, the fear of dying, and the meaning of life, emphasizing the beauty found in both suffering and joy. He reflects on the importance of human connection and the potential for psychedelics to facilitate profound personal insights. For those interested in the spiritual dimensions of such experiences, Consorting with Spirits: A Guide to Magical Engagement offers valuable perspectives.
Conclusion
- The discussion concludes with a hopeful outlook on the future of psychedelic research and its implications for understanding the human experience 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
followed by some thoughts related to the episode thank you to a new sponsor brave a fast
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and cash app the app i use to send money to friends please check out the sponsors in the
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
of the scientific method if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple
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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
thank you to our sponsors brave a fast browser that feels like chrome but has
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connect with me on twitter at lex 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
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