Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Matthew Johnson,
00:00:02 a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science
00:00:05 at John Hopkins, and is one of the top scientists
00:00:08 in the world conducting seminal research on psychedelics.
00:00:13 This was one of the most eye opening
00:00:15 and fascinating conversations I’ve ever had on this podcast.
00:00:19 I’m sure I’ll talk with Matt many more times.
00:00:22 Quick mention of a sponsor followed by some thoughts
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00:01:00 As a side note, let me say that psychedelics
00:01:02 is an area of study that is fascinating to me
00:01:05 in that it gives hints that much of the magic
00:01:08 of our experience arises from just a few
00:01:10 chemical interactions in the brain
00:01:12 and that the nature of that experience can be expanded
00:01:16 through the tools of biology, chemistry, physics,
00:01:19 neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
00:01:23 The fact that a world class scientist and researcher
00:01:26 like Matt can apply rigor to our study
00:01:28 of this mysterious and fascinating topic
00:01:31 is exciting to me beyond words.
00:01:34 As is the case with any of my colleagues
00:01:36 who dare to venture out into the darkness
00:01:38 of all that is unknown about the human mind
00:01:41 with both an openness of first principle thinking
00:01:44 and the rigor of the scientific method.
00:01:47 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:01:49 review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
00:01:52 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
00:01:54 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
00:01:58 And now, here’s my conversation with Matthew Johnson.
00:02:02 Can you give an introduction to psychedelics,
00:02:05 like a whirlwind overview?
00:02:08 Maybe what are psychedelics
00:02:11 and what are the kinds of psychedelics out there
00:02:14 and in whatever way you find meaningful to categorize?
00:02:17 Yeah, you can categorize them by their chemical structure.
00:02:23 So, phenethylamines, tryptamines, ergolines,
00:02:29 that is less of a meaningful way to classify them.
00:02:33 I think that their pharmacological activity,
00:02:36 their receptor activities are the best way.
00:02:39 Well, let me start even broader than that
00:02:40 because there I’m talking about the classic psychedelics.
00:02:43 So, broadly speaking, when we say psychedelic,
00:02:47 that refers to, for most people,
00:02:50 a broad number of compounds
00:02:52 that work in different pharmacological ways.
00:02:54 So, it includes the so called classic psychedelics.
00:02:59 That includes psilocybin and psilocin,
00:03:03 which are in mushrooms, LSD, dimethyltryptamine or DMT,
00:03:08 it’s in ayahuasca, people can smoke it too,
00:03:10 mescaline, which is in peyote in San Pedro, cactus.
00:03:17 And those all work by hitting a certain
00:03:20 subtype of serotonin receptor, the serotonin 2A receptor.
00:03:24 They act as agonists at that receptor.
00:03:28 Other compounds like PCP, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine,
00:03:36 they all are more broadly speaking called psychedelics,
00:03:40 but they work by very different ways pharmacologically.
00:03:45 And they have some different effects,
00:03:48 including some subjective effects,
00:03:49 even though there’s enough of an overlap
00:03:53 in the subjective effects that, you know,
00:03:56 people informally refer to them as psychedelic.
00:03:59 And I think what that overlap is, you know,
00:04:01 compared to say, you know, caffeine and cocaine
00:04:04 and, you know, Ambien, et cetera, other psychoactive drugs
00:04:08 is that they have strong effects
00:04:11 in altering one’s sense of reality
00:04:15 and including the sense of self.
00:04:18 And I should throw in there that cannabis,
00:04:20 more historically, like in the 70s,
00:04:22 has been called a minor psychedelic.
00:04:24 And I think with that latter definition,
00:04:25 it does fit that definition,
00:04:28 particularly if one doesn’t have a tolerance.
00:04:30 So you mentioned serotonin, so most of the effect
00:04:34 comes from something around like the chemistry
00:04:36 around neurotransmitters and so on.
00:04:39 So it’s chemical interactions in the brain,
00:04:42 or is there other kinds of interactions
00:04:44 that have this kind of perception
00:04:47 and self awareness altering effects?
00:04:51 Well, as far as we know, all of the psychedelics
00:04:54 of all the different classes we’ve talked about,
00:05:00 their major activity is caused by receptor level events.
00:05:04 So either acting at the post receptor side of the synapse.
00:05:10 So in other words, neurotransmission operates
00:05:12 by, you know, one neuron releasing neurotransmitter
00:05:16 into a synapse, a gap between the two neurons.
00:05:19 And then the other neuron receives,
00:05:23 it has receptors that receives,
00:05:24 and then there can be an activation caused by that.
00:05:28 So it’s like a pitcher and a catcher.
00:05:30 So all of the major psychedelics work
00:05:32 by either acting as a pitcher,
00:05:34 mimicking a pitcher or a catcher.
00:05:38 So for example, the classic psychedelics,
00:05:41 they fit into the same catcher’s mitt
00:05:44 on the post receptor, post synaptic receptor side
00:05:48 as serotonin itself.
00:05:50 But they do a slightly different thing to the cell,
00:05:53 to the neuron than serotonin does.
00:05:56 There’s a different signaling pathway
00:05:58 after that initial activation.
00:06:00 Something like MDMA works at the presynaptic side,
00:06:04 the pitcher side.
00:06:06 And basically it floods the synapse or the gap
00:06:09 between the cells with a bunch of serotonin,
00:06:11 the natural neurotransmitter.
00:06:14 So it’s like the pitcher in a baseball game
00:06:16 all of a sudden just starts throwing balls
00:06:17 like every second.
00:06:20 Everything we’re talking about is it often more natural,
00:06:24 meaning found in the natural world.
00:06:27 You mentioned cacti, cactus,
00:06:31 or is it chemically manufactured,
00:06:33 like artificially in the lab?
00:06:35 So the classic psychedelics, there’s…
00:06:38 What are the classics?
00:06:39 So using terminology that’s not chemical terminology,
00:06:44 not like the terminology you see in titles of papers,
00:06:47 academic papers, but more sort of common parlance.
00:06:50 Right, it would be good to kind of define their effects,
00:06:53 like how they’re different.
00:06:54 And so it includes LSD, psilocybin,
00:06:57 which is in mushrooms, mescaline, DMT.
00:07:00 Which one is mescaline?
00:07:01 Mescaline is in the different cacti.
00:07:04 So the one most people will know is peyote,
00:07:07 but it also shows up in San Pedro or Peruvian torch.
00:07:10 And all of these classic psychedelics,
00:07:14 they have, at the right dose,
00:07:17 and typically they have very strong effects
00:07:20 on one sense of reality and one sense of self.
00:07:25 Some of the things that makes them different
00:07:26 than other more broadly speaking psychedelics,
00:07:29 like MDMA and others,
00:07:32 is that they’re, at least the major examples,
00:07:35 there’s some exotic ones that differ,
00:07:37 but the ones I’ve talked about are extremely safe
00:07:40 at the physiological level.
00:07:42 Like LSD and psilocybin, there’s no known lethal overdose,
00:07:46 unless you have like really severe heart disease,
00:07:50 because it modestly raises your blood pressure.
00:07:52 So same person that might be hurt traveling snow
00:07:54 or going up the stairs, that could have a cardiac event
00:08:00 because they’ve taken one of these drugs.
00:08:03 But for most people, someone could take a thousand times
00:08:05 what the effective dose is,
00:08:06 and it’s not gonna cause any organ damage,
00:08:09 affect the brainstem, make them stop breathing.
00:08:11 So in that sense, they’re freakishly safe at the physiolo…
00:08:16 I would never call any compounds safe,
00:08:18 because there’s always a risk.
00:08:19 They’re freakishly safe at the physiological level.
00:08:22 I mean, you can hardly find anything over the counter
00:08:24 like that, I mean, aspirin’s not like that.
00:08:26 Caffeine is not like that.
00:08:28 Most drugs, you take five, 10, 20, maybe it takes 100,
00:08:33 but you get to some times the effective dose,
00:08:36 and it’s gonna kill you or cause some serious damage.
00:08:38 And so that’s something that’s remarkable
00:08:41 about most of these classic psychedelics.
00:08:43 That’s incredible, by the way,
00:08:45 that you can go on a hell of a journey in the mind,
00:08:48 like probably transformative,
00:08:52 potentially in a deeply transformative way,
00:08:56 and yet there’s no dose
00:08:59 that in most people would have a lethal effect.
00:09:02 That’s kind of fascinating.
00:09:03 There’s this duality between the mind and the body.
00:09:06 It’s like, it’s the…
00:09:09 Okay, sorry if I bring them up way too much,
00:09:11 but David Goggins is like,
00:09:14 the kind of things you go on in the long run,
00:09:17 like the hell you might go through in your mind.
00:09:19 Your mind can take a lot,
00:09:20 and you can go through a lot with the mind,
00:09:22 and the body will just be its own thing.
00:09:25 You can go through hell,
00:09:26 but after a good night’s sleep, be back to normal,
00:09:30 and the body’s always there.
00:09:31 So bringing it back to Goggins,
00:09:32 it’s like you can do that
00:09:33 without even destroying your knee or whatever,
00:09:36 or coming close and riding that line.
00:09:37 That’s true.
00:09:38 So the unfortunate thing about the running,
00:09:40 which he uses running to test the mind,
00:09:42 so the aspect of running that is negative,
00:09:47 in order to test the mind,
00:09:48 you really have to push the body,
00:09:51 take the body through a journey.
00:09:53 I wish there was another way of doing that
00:09:55 in the physical exercise space.
00:09:57 I think there are exercises
00:09:59 that are easier on the body than others,
00:10:01 but running sure is a hell of an effective way to do it.
00:10:04 And one of the ways that where it differs
00:10:07 is that you’re unlike exercise,
00:10:10 you’re essentially, most exercise,
00:10:13 to really get to those intense levels,
00:10:15 you really need to be persistent about it.
00:10:17 I mean, it’ll be intense if you’re really out of shape,
00:10:19 just jogging for five minutes,
00:10:22 but to really get to those intense levels,
00:10:24 you need to have the dedication.
00:10:25 And so some of the other ways
00:10:27 of altering subjective effects or states of consciousness,
00:10:33 take that type of dedication.
00:10:35 Psychedelics though, I mean, someone takes the right dose.
00:10:39 They’re strapped into the rollercoaster
00:10:41 and something interesting is gonna happen.
00:10:44 And I really like what you said about that distinction
00:10:48 between the mind or the contrast between the mind effects
00:10:51 and the body effects,
00:10:55 because I think of this,
00:10:58 I do research with all the drugs,
00:11:01 caffeine, alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine,
00:11:04 alcohol, legal, illegal.
00:11:06 Most of these drugs, thinking about say cocaine
00:11:11 and methamphetamine, you can’t give to a regular user,
00:11:15 you can’t safely give a dose where the regular cocaine user
00:11:21 is gonna say, oh man, that’s like,
00:11:25 that’s the strongest coke I’ve ever had, you know,
00:11:28 because you get it past the ethics committee
00:11:30 and you need approval.
00:11:32 And I wouldn’t wanna give someone something that’s dangerous.
00:11:34 So to go to those levels where they would say that,
00:11:37 you would have to give something
00:11:38 that’s physiologically riskier, you know.
00:11:43 Psilocybin or LSD, you can give a dose
00:11:46 at the physiological level that is like very good chance
00:11:50 it’s gonna be the most intense psychological experience
00:11:53 of that person’s life and have zero chance
00:11:56 for most people if you screen them of killing them.
00:11:58 The big risk is behavioral toxicity,
00:12:01 which is a fancy way of saying doing something stupid.
00:12:03 I mean, you’re really intoxicated,
00:12:05 like if you wander into traffic or you fall from a height,
00:12:08 just like plenty of people do on high doses of alcohol.
00:12:11 And the other kind of unique thing
00:12:13 about classic psychedelics is that they’re not addictive,
00:12:17 which is pretty much unheard of when it comes
00:12:20 to so called drugs of abuse or drugs that people,
00:12:24 at least at some frequency choose to take, you know,
00:12:29 most of what we think of as drugs, you know,
00:12:32 even caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, cannabis,
00:12:36 most of these you can get into alcohol,
00:12:39 you can get into a daily use pattern.
00:12:41 And that’s just extreme, so unheard of with psychedelics.
00:12:46 Most people have taken these things on a daily basis,
00:12:49 it’s more of like they’re building up the courage to do it
00:12:53 and then they build up a tolerance or yeah,
00:12:55 they’re in college and they do it on a dare,
00:12:56 can you take take acid seven days in a row
00:12:59 and that type of thing rather than a self control issue
00:13:02 where you have and say, oh God, I gotta stop taking this,
00:13:04 I gotta stop drinking every night,
00:13:06 I gotta cut down on the coke, whatever.
00:13:08 So that’s the classic psychedelics.
00:13:11 What are the, what’s a good term, modern psychedelics
00:13:15 or more maybe psychedelics that are created in the lab?
00:13:18 What else is there?
00:13:19 Right, so MDMA is the big one.
00:13:21 And I should say that with the classic psychedelics,
00:13:23 that LSD is sort of, you can call it a semi synthetic
00:13:26 because there’s natural from both ergot
00:13:30 and in certain seeds, morning glory seeds as one example,
00:13:34 there’s a very close,
00:13:36 there are some very close chemical relatives of LSD.
00:13:40 So LSD is close to what occurs in nature, but not quite.
00:13:44 But then when we get into the other non classic psychedelics,
00:13:49 probably the most prominent one is MDMA,
00:13:51 people call it ecstasy, people call it Molly.
00:13:55 And it is, it differs from classic psychedelics
00:13:59 in a number of ways, it can be addictive, but not so.
00:14:04 It’s like, you can have cocaine on this end
00:14:07 of the continuum and classic psychedelics here.
00:14:10 Continuum of addiction.
00:14:11 Continuum of addiction, you know,
00:14:13 so it’s certainly no cocaine.
00:14:15 It’s pretty rare for people to get into daily use patterns,
00:14:17 but it’s possible and they can get into more like,
00:14:20 you know, using once a week pattern
00:14:23 where they can find it hard to stop,
00:14:25 but it’s somewhere in between mostly towards the,
00:14:28 to the classic psychedelic side in terms of
00:14:33 like relatively little addiction potential.
00:14:36 But it’s also more physiologically dangerous.
00:14:39 I think that the, certainly the therapeutic use,
00:14:44 it’s showing really promising effects for treating PTSD
00:14:47 and the models that are used,
00:14:48 I think those are extremely acceptable
00:14:50 when it comes to the risk benefit ratio
00:14:52 that you see all throughout medicine.
00:14:54 But nonetheless, we do know that at a certain dose
00:14:58 and a certain frequency that MDMA can cause longterm damage
00:15:02 to the serotonin system in the brain.
00:15:05 So it doesn’t have that level of kind of freakish
00:15:10 bodily safety that the classic psychedelics do.
00:15:13 And it has more of a heart load, a cardiovascular,
00:15:16 I don’t mean kind of emotion, I mean, in this sense,
00:15:18 although it is very emotional
00:15:19 and that’s something unique about its subjective effects,
00:15:23 subjective effects, but it’s more of a oppressor.
00:15:25 And the terminology you use instead of
00:15:28 like a freakish capacities,
00:15:30 allowing you from a researcher perspective,
00:15:32 but a personal perspective too,
00:15:33 of taking a journey with some of these psychedelics
00:15:37 that is the heroic dose, as they say.
00:15:40 So like these are tools that allow you
00:15:43 to take a serious mental journey, whatever that is.
00:15:45 That’s what you mean.
00:15:46 And with MDMA, there’s a little bit,
00:15:49 it starts entering this territory
00:15:51 where you gotta be careful about the risks
00:15:53 to the body potentially.
00:15:55 So yes, that in the sense that you can’t kind of
00:15:58 push the dose up as high as you safely as one can,
00:16:02 if they’re in the right setting, like in our research
00:16:05 as they can with the classic psychedelics.
00:16:07 But probably more importantly,
00:16:09 just the nature of the effects with MDMA
00:16:11 aren’t the full on psychedelic.
00:16:14 It’s not the full journey.
00:16:16 So it’s sort of a psychedelic with rose colored glasses on.
00:16:21 A psychedelic that’s more of,
00:16:22 it’s been called more of a heart trip than a head trip.
00:16:25 The nature of reality doesn’t unravel
00:16:28 as frequently as it does with classic psychedelics.
00:16:32 But you’re able to more directly sense your environment.
00:16:35 So your perception system still works.
00:16:37 It’s not completely detached from reality with MDMA.
00:16:40 That’s true, relatively speaking.
00:16:41 That said at most doses of classic psychedelics,
00:16:45 you still have a tether to reality.
00:16:48 Changes a little bit when you’re talking about smoking DMT
00:16:50 or smoking 5 methoxy DMT,
00:16:54 which are some interesting examples
00:16:56 we could talk more about.
00:16:57 But with MDMA, for example,
00:17:02 it’s very rare to have what’s called an ego loss experience
00:17:07 or a sense of transcendental unity,
00:17:10 where one really seemingly loses
00:17:15 the psychological construct of the self.
00:17:19 But MDMA, it’s very common for people to have this,
00:17:24 they still are perceiving themselves as a self,
00:17:26 but it’s common for them to have this warmth,
00:17:30 this empathy for humanity
00:17:32 and for their friends and loved ones.
00:17:34 So it’s more, and you see those effects
00:17:36 under the classic psychedelics,
00:17:38 but that’s a subset of what the classic psychedelics do.
00:17:41 So I see MDMA in terms of its subjective effects
00:17:44 is if you think about Venn diagrams,
00:17:47 it’s sort of MDMA is all within the classic psychedelics.
00:17:50 So everything that you see on a particular MDMA session,
00:17:54 sometimes a psilocybin session looks just like that,
00:17:58 but then sometimes it’s completely different with psilocybin.
00:18:00 It’s a little more narrowed
00:18:02 in terms of the variability with MDMA.
00:18:05 Is there something general to say about what the psychedelics
00:18:09 do to the human mind?
00:18:11 You mentioned kind of an ego loss experience
00:18:14 in the space of Venn diagrams.
00:18:16 If we’re to like draw a big circle,
00:18:20 what can we say about that big circle?
00:18:23 In terms of people’s report of subjective experience,
00:18:28 probably one of the most general things we can say
00:18:31 is that it expands that range.
00:18:35 So many people come out of these sessions
00:18:38 saying that they didn’t know it was possible
00:18:41 to have an experience like that.
00:18:44 So there’s an emphasis on the subjective experience
00:18:47 that is there words that people put to it
00:18:52 that capture that experience
00:18:55 or is it something that just has to be experienced?
00:19:00 Yeah, people like…
00:19:02 As a researcher, that’s an interesting question
00:19:03 because you have to kind of measure the effects of this
00:19:10 and how do you convert that into numbers?
00:19:13 Right.
00:19:14 That’s the ultimate challenge.
00:19:15 So is that possible to one, convert it into words
00:19:19 and the second, convert the words into numbers somehow?
00:19:22 So we do a lot of that with questionnaires,
00:19:25 some of which are very psychometrically validated.
00:19:28 So lots of numbers have been crunched on them.
00:19:30 And there’s always a limitation with questionnaires.
00:19:33 I mean, subjective effects are subjective effects.
00:19:35 Ultimately, it’s what the person is reporting
00:19:38 and that doesn’t necessarily point towards a ground truth.
00:19:45 So for example, if someone says
00:19:46 that they felt like they touched another dimension
00:19:48 or they felt like they sensed the reality of God
00:19:52 or if they, I mean, just you name it,
00:19:57 people’s ontological views can sometimes shift.
00:20:01 I think that’s more about where they’re coming from
00:20:03 and I don’t think it’s the quintessential way
00:20:05 in which they work.
00:20:05 There’s plenty of people that hold
00:20:06 onto a completely naturalistic viewpoint
00:20:09 and have profound and helpful experiences
00:20:15 with these compounds.
00:20:16 But the subjective effects can be so broad
00:20:20 that for some people, it shifts their philosophical
00:20:24 viewpoint more towards idealism,
00:20:27 more towards thinking that the nature of reality
00:20:32 might be more about consciousness than about material.
00:20:38 That’s a domain I’m very interested in.
00:20:40 Right now, we have essentially zero to say about that
00:20:43 in terms of validating those types of claims,
00:20:46 but it’s even interesting just to see
00:20:47 what people say along those lines.
00:20:49 So you’re interested in saying like,
00:20:50 can we more rigorously study this process of expansion?
00:20:54 Like, what do we mean by this expansion
00:20:57 of your sense of what is possible
00:21:00 in the experiences in this world?
00:21:02 Right, as much as what we can say about that
00:21:05 through naturalistic psychology,
00:21:07 especially as much as we can root it
00:21:09 to solid psychological constructs
00:21:13 and solid neuroscientific constructs.
00:21:16 And I wonder what the impact is of the language
00:21:18 that you bring to the table.
00:21:20 So you mentioned about God or speaking of God,
00:21:25 a lot of people are really into sort of
00:21:26 theoretical physics these days at a very surface level
00:21:29 and you can bring the language of physics, right?
00:21:31 You can talk about quantum mechanics,
00:21:33 you can talk about general relativity
00:21:36 and curvature of space time and using just that language
00:21:40 without a deep technical understanding of it
00:21:43 to somehow start thinking like,
00:21:45 sort of visualizing atoms in your head
00:21:48 and somehow through that process
00:21:50 because you have the language,
00:21:51 using that language to kind of dissolve the ego,
00:21:55 like realize like that we’re just all little bits
00:21:58 of physical objects that behave in mysterious ways.
00:22:02 And so that has to do with the language.
00:22:04 Like if you read a Sean Carroll book or something recently,
00:22:08 it seems like it has a huge influence
00:22:09 on the way you might experience,
00:22:13 might perceive the world and might experience
00:22:16 the alteration that psychedelics brings
00:22:19 to your perception system.
00:22:23 So I wonder like the language you bring to the table,
00:22:26 how that affects the journey you go on with the psychedelics.
00:22:30 I think very much so.
00:22:32 And I think there’s, I’m a little concerned
00:22:34 some of the science is going a little too far
00:22:36 in the direction of around the edges,
00:22:40 speaking about it changing beliefs in this sense
00:22:44 or that sense about particular, in particular domains.
00:22:48 And I think what really what a lot of what’s going on
00:22:51 is what you just discussed.
00:22:53 It’s the priors coming into it.
00:22:56 So if you’ve been reading a lot of physics,
00:23:00 then you might bring up like space time
00:23:05 and interpret the experience in that sense.
00:23:08 I mean, it’s not uncommon for people come out
00:23:10 talking about visions of the,
00:23:12 it’s not the most typical thing,
00:23:13 but it’s come up in sessions I’ve guided,
00:23:16 the Big Bang and this sort of nature of reality.
00:23:21 I think probably that the best way to think
00:23:23 about these experiences is that,
00:23:26 and the best evidence,
00:23:27 even though we’re in our infancy and understanding it,
00:23:30 they really tap into more general psychological mechanisms.
00:23:34 I think one of the best arguments
00:23:36 is they reduce the influence of our priors,
00:23:41 of what we bring into all of the assumptions
00:23:45 that we all that we’re essentially,
00:23:47 especially as adults, we’re riding on top of heuristic
00:23:49 after heuristic to get through life.
00:23:51 And you need to do that.
00:23:53 And that’s a good thing.
00:23:54 And that’s extremely efficient
00:23:55 and evolution has shaped that,
00:23:57 but that comes at an expense.
00:23:59 And it seems that these experiences
00:24:04 will allow someone greater mental flexibility and openness.
00:24:12 And so one can be both less influenced
00:24:16 by their prior assumptions,
00:24:18 but still nonetheless the nature of the experience
00:24:22 can be influenced by what they’ve been exposed to
00:24:24 in the world.
00:24:25 And sometimes they can get it in a deeper way.
00:24:28 Like maybe they’ve read,
00:24:29 I mean, I had a philosophy professor one time
00:24:31 as a participant in a high dose psilocybin study.
00:24:34 And I remember him saying, my God,
00:24:37 it’s like Hegel’s opposites defining each other.
00:24:40 Like, I get it.
00:24:41 I’ve taught this thing for years and years and years.
00:24:44 Like, I get it now.
00:24:46 And so like that, you know,
00:24:49 and even at the psychological, emotional level,
00:24:51 like the cancer patients we worked with,
00:24:54 you know, they told themselves a million times
00:24:56 over this people trying to quit smoking,
00:24:57 I need to quit smoking.
00:24:58 Oh, I’m ruining my life with this cancer.
00:25:00 I’m still healthy.
00:25:01 I should be getting out.
00:25:02 I’m letting this thing defeat me.
00:25:03 It’s like, yeah, you told yourself that in your head,
00:25:05 but sometimes they had these experiences
00:25:07 and they kind of feel it in their heart.
00:25:10 Like they really get it.
00:25:11 So in some sense that you bring some prize to the table,
00:25:17 but psychedelics allow you to acknowledge them
00:25:22 and then throw them away.
00:25:23 So like one popular terminology around this
00:25:26 in the engineering space is first principles thinking
00:25:29 that Elon Musk, for example, espouses a lot.
00:25:33 Let me ask a fun question
00:25:35 before we return to a more serious discussion.
00:25:38 With Elon Musk as an example,
00:25:42 but it could be just engineers in general,
00:25:45 do you think there’s a use for psychedelics
00:25:48 to take a journey of rigorous first principles thinking?
00:25:54 So like throwing away,
00:25:55 we’re not talking about throwing away assumptions
00:25:58 about the nature of reality in terms of like our philosophy
00:26:02 of the way we live day to day life,
00:26:04 but we’re talking about like how to build a better rocket
00:26:08 or how to build a better car
00:26:09 or how to build a better social network
00:26:12 or all those kinds of things, engineering questions.
00:26:15 I absolutely think there’s huge potential there.
00:26:17 And there was some research in the late 60s, early 70s
00:26:22 that were, it was very early and not very rigorous
00:26:26 in terms of methodology, but it was consistent with the,
00:26:31 I mean, there’s just countless anecdotes of folks.
00:26:34 I mean, people have argued that just,
00:26:36 Silicon Valley was largely influenced
00:26:39 by psychedelic experience.
00:26:41 I remember the, I think the person that came up
00:26:43 with the concept of freeware or shareware,
00:26:46 it’s like it kind of was generated out of
00:26:50 or influenced by psychedelic experience.
00:26:53 So to this, I think there’s incredible potential there
00:26:56 and we know really next,
00:26:59 there’s no rigorous research on that, but.
00:27:03 Is there anecdotal stuff like with Steve Jobs?
00:27:05 I think there’s stories, right?
00:27:07 In your exploration of that,
00:27:09 is there something a little bit more than just stories?
00:27:12 Is there like a little bit more of a solid data points,
00:27:16 even if they’re just experiential like anecdotes?
00:27:20 Is there something that you draw inspiration from
00:27:22 like in your intuition?
00:27:24 Because we’ll talk about,
00:27:25 you’re trying to construct studies
00:27:27 that are more rigorous around these questions.
00:27:29 But is there something you draw inspiration from,
00:27:31 from the past, from the 80s and the 90s
00:27:34 and Silicon Valley, that kind of space?
00:27:37 Or is it just like you have a sense
00:27:40 based on everything you’ve learned
00:27:42 and these kind of loose stories
00:27:44 that there’s something worth digging at?
00:27:47 I am influenced by the, gosh,
00:27:50 the just incredible number of anecdotes surrounding these.
00:27:55 I mean,
00:27:58 Carey Mullis, he invented PCR.
00:28:02 I mean, absolutely revolutionized biological sciences.
00:28:05 He says he wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize for him.
00:28:08 He said he wouldn’t have come up with that
00:28:09 had he not had psychedelic experiences.
00:28:14 Now, he’s an interesting character.
00:28:15 People should read his autobiography
00:28:17 because you could point to other things he was into.
00:28:19 But I think that speaks to the casting your nets wide
00:28:22 and this mental flex,
00:28:23 more of these general mechanisms
00:28:27 where sometimes if you cast your nets really wide
00:28:29 and it’s gonna depend on the person
00:28:31 and their influences,
00:28:32 but sometimes you come up with false positives.
00:28:38 You connect the dots
00:28:39 where maybe you shouldn’t have connected those dots,
00:28:41 but I think that can be constrained.
00:28:44 And so much of our,
00:28:47 not only our personal psychological suffering,
00:28:49 but our limitations academically
00:28:53 and in terms of technology
00:28:55 are because of the self imposed limitations
00:28:59 and heuristics, these entrenched ways of thinking.
00:29:03 Like those examples throughout the history of science
00:29:06 where someone has come up with the paradigm,
00:29:09 Kuhn’s paradigm shifts.
00:29:11 It’s like, here’s something completely different.
00:29:14 This doesn’t make sense by any of the previous models.
00:29:17 And like, we need more of those.
00:29:20 And then you need the right balance between that
00:29:22 because so many of the novel crazy ideas are just bunk
00:29:27 and that’s what science is about separating them
00:29:31 from the valid paradigm shifting ideas.
00:29:33 But we need more paradigm shifting ideas like in a big way.
00:29:38 And I think we could,
00:29:40 I think you could argue that we’ve,
00:29:42 because of the structure of academia and science
00:29:45 in modern times, it heavily biases against those.
00:29:49 Right, there’s all kinds of mechanisms in our human nature
00:29:52 that resist paradigm shift quite sort of obviously.
00:29:56 So, and psychedelics, there could be a lot of other tools
00:30:01 but it seems like psychedelics could be one set of tools
00:30:04 that encourage paradigm shifting thinking.
00:30:08 So like the first principles kind of thinking.
00:30:11 So it’s a kind of, you’re at the forefront of research here.
00:30:16 There’s just kind of anecdotal stories.
00:30:18 There’s early studies.
00:30:21 There’s a sense that we don’t understand very much
00:30:24 but there’s a lot of depth here.
00:30:26 How do we get from there to where Elon and I can regularly,
00:30:31 like I wake up every morning, I have deep work sessions
00:30:35 where it’s well understood like what dose to take.
00:30:41 Like if I want to explore something where it’s all legal,
00:30:45 where it’s all understood and safe, all that kind of stuff.
00:30:49 How do we get from where we are today to there?
00:30:53 Not speaking in terms of legality in the sense like
00:30:57 policy making all that like laws and stuff,
00:30:59 meaning like how do we scientifically understand this stuff
00:31:02 well enough to get to a place where I can just take it safely
00:31:07 in order to expand my thinking,
00:31:10 like this kind of first principles thinking,
00:31:12 which I’m in my personal life currently doing.
00:31:14 Like how do I revolutionize particular several things?
00:31:18 Like it seems like the only tools I have right now
00:31:22 is just, just, but my mind going, doing the first principles
00:31:28 like, wait, wait, wait, okay.
00:31:30 Why has this been done this way?
00:31:31 Can we do it completely differently?
00:31:33 It seems like I’m still tethered to the priors
00:31:37 that I bring to the table
00:31:39 and I keep trying to untether myself.
00:31:40 Maybe there’s tools that can systematically
00:31:43 help me untether.
00:31:44 Yeah, well, we need experiments and that’s tied to
00:31:49 kind of the policy level stuff.
00:31:51 And I should be clear,
00:31:52 I would never encourage anyone to do anything illicitly.
00:31:57 But yeah, in the future, we could see these compounds
00:32:03 used for technical and scientific innovation.
00:32:08 What we need are studies that are digging into that.
00:32:11 Right now, most of what the funding,
00:32:13 which is largely from philanthropy, not from the government,
00:32:18 largely what it’s for is treatment of mental disorders
00:32:23 like addiction and depression, et cetera.
00:32:27 But we need studies.
00:32:28 One of the early initial stabs on this question decades ago
00:32:34 was they took some architects and engineers
00:32:37 and said, what problems have you been working on?
00:32:40 Where have you been stuck for months
00:32:42 like working on this damn thing
00:32:43 and you’re not getting anywhere,
00:32:45 like your head’s butting up against the wall.
00:32:47 It’s like, come in here, take,
00:32:49 and I think it was 100 micrograms of LSD.
00:32:51 So not a big session.
00:32:52 And a little bit different model
00:32:54 where they were actually working.
00:32:55 It was a moderate enough dose
00:32:56 where they could work on the problem during the session.
00:33:00 I think probably, I’m an empiricist,
00:33:04 so I’d like to see all the studies done.
00:33:06 But the first thing I would do is like
00:33:08 a really high dose session where you’re not necessarily
00:33:10 in front of your computer,
00:33:13 which you can’t really do on a really high dose.
00:33:16 And then the work has been talked about,
00:33:19 like you take a really high dose, you take a journey,
00:33:21 and then the breakthroughs come
00:33:23 from when you return from the journey
00:33:25 and like integrate, quote unquote, that experience.
00:33:29 I think that’s where all the,
00:33:30 again, we’re babies at this point,
00:33:33 but my gut tells me that it’s the so called integration,
00:33:37 the aftermath.
00:33:38 We know that there’s some different forms of neuroplasticity
00:33:41 that are unfolding in the days following a psychedelics,
00:33:43 at least in animals, probably going on humans.
00:33:45 We don’t know if that’s related to the therapeutic effects.
00:33:48 My gut tells me it is,
00:33:50 although it’s only part of the story,
00:33:52 but we need big studies where we compare people,
00:33:55 like let’s get a hundred people like that,
00:33:57 scientists that are working on a problem,
00:34:00 and then randomize them too.
00:34:02 And then I think you need even more credible,
00:34:07 active controls or active placebo conditions
00:34:10 to kind of tease this out.
00:34:13 And then also in conjunction with that,
00:34:14 and you can do this in the same study,
00:34:16 you wanna combine that with more rigorous
00:34:19 sort of experimental models
00:34:22 where we actually give there a problem solving tasks
00:34:25 that we know, for example, that you tend to do better on
00:34:27 after you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep versus not.
00:34:30 And my sense is there’s a relationship there.
00:34:33 People go back to first principles,
00:34:36 questioning those first principles they’re operating under
00:34:39 and getting away from their priors
00:34:43 in terms of creative problem solving.
00:34:45 And so I think wrap those things
00:34:47 and you could speak a little more rigorously about those
00:34:50 because ultimately, if everyone’s bringing their own problem,
00:34:52 that’s more in the face valid side,
00:34:57 but you can’t dig in as much
00:34:58 and get as much experimental power
00:35:01 and speak to the mechanisms as you can
00:35:03 with having everyone do the same sort of canned
00:35:06 problem solving task.
00:35:08 So we’ve been speaking about psychedelics generally.
00:35:10 Is there one you find from the scientific perspective
00:35:14 or maybe even philosophical perspective
00:35:16 most fascinating to study?
00:35:18 Therapeutically, I’m most interested in psilocybin and LSD
00:35:22 and I think we need to do a lot more with LSD
00:35:24 because it’s mainly been psilocybin in the modern era.
00:35:27 I’ve recently gotten a grant
00:35:28 from the Heftar Research Institute to do an LSD study.
00:35:32 So I haven’t started it yet,
00:35:33 but I’m going through the paperwork and everything.
00:35:36 Therapeutic meaning there’s some issue
00:35:38 and you’re trying to treat that issue.
00:35:40 Right, right.
00:35:41 In terms of just like, what’s the most fascinating,
00:35:45 understanding the nature of these experiences,
00:35:47 if you really wanna like wrap your head around
00:35:49 what’s going on when someone has a completely altered sense
00:35:53 of reality and sense of self,
00:35:55 there I think you’re talking about the high dose,
00:36:00 either smoked vaporized or intravenous injection,
00:36:04 which all kind of, they’re very similar pharmacologically,
00:36:07 of DMT and 5 methoxy DMT.
00:36:11 This is like when people, this is what,
00:36:13 I don’t know if you’re familiar with Terrence McKenna,
00:36:15 he would talk a lot about smoking DMT,
00:36:16 Joe Rogan has talked a lot about that.
00:36:19 People will say that,
00:36:20 and there’s a close relative called 5 methoxy DMT.
00:36:23 Most people who know the terrain will say
00:36:25 that’s an order of magnitude or orders of magnitude beyond,
00:36:30 I mean, anything one could get from even a high dose
00:36:33 of psilocybin or LSD.
00:36:36 I think it’s a question about whether, you know,
00:36:39 how therapeutic,
00:36:40 I think there is a therapeutic potential there,
00:36:42 but it’s probably not as sure of a bet
00:36:45 because one goes so far out,
00:36:47 it’s almost like they’re not contemplating
00:36:49 their relationship and their direction in life.
00:36:51 They are like reality is ripping apart at the seams
00:36:55 and the very nature of the self and of the sense of reality.
00:37:01 And the amazing thing about these compounds
00:37:04 and same to a less degree with oral psilocybin and LSD
00:37:09 is that unlike some other drugs
00:37:12 that really throw you far out there,
00:37:16 you know, anesthetics and even alcohol,
00:37:18 like as reality starts to become different
00:37:21 at higher and higher doses, there’s this numbing,
00:37:24 there’s this sort of,
00:37:26 there’s this ability for the sense of being the center,
00:37:31 having a conscious experience that’s memorable,
00:37:35 that is maintained
00:37:37 throughout these classic psychedelic experiences.
00:37:40 Like one can go as far, so far out while still
00:37:47 being aware of the experience
00:37:50 and remembering the experience.
00:37:52 Interesting, so being able to carry something back.
00:37:55 Right.
00:37:56 Can you dig in a little deeper, like what is DMT,
00:38:01 how long is the trip usually,
00:38:03 like how much do we understand about it?
00:38:06 Is there something interesting to say
00:38:09 about just the nature of the experience
00:38:12 and what we understand about it?
00:38:15 One of the common methods for people to use it
00:38:17 is to smoke it or vaporize it.
00:38:19 And it usually takes,
00:38:21 this is a pretty good kind of description
00:38:23 of what it might feel like on the ground.
00:38:26 The caveat is it’s a completely insufficient description
00:38:30 that someone’s gonna be listening to.
00:38:33 It’s like nothing you could say is gonna come close.
00:38:36 But it’ll take about three big hits, inhalations,
00:38:40 in order to have what people call a breakthrough dose.
00:38:45 And there’s no great definition of that,
00:38:48 but basically meaning moving away from,
00:38:52 not just having the typical psilocybin or LSD experience
00:38:56 where like things are radically different,
00:38:58 but you’re still basically a person in this reality
00:39:02 to go in somewhere else.
00:39:04 And so that’ll typically take like three hits.
00:39:07 And this stuff comes on like a freight train.
00:39:10 So one takes a hit
00:39:11 and around the time of the first exhalation,
00:39:16 so we’re talking about a few seconds in,
00:39:18 or maybe just sometime between the first and the second hit,
00:39:22 like it’ll start to come on.
00:39:23 And they’re already up to, let’s say,
00:39:27 what they might get from a 30 milligram
00:39:30 or 300 microgram LSD trip, a big trip.
00:39:34 They’re already there at the second hit,
00:39:37 but their consciousness is geared,
00:39:39 this is like acceleration, not speed, to speak of physics.
00:39:43 It’s like those receptors are getting filled like that
00:39:47 and they’re going from zero to 60 in like Tesla time.
00:39:50 And at the second hit, again,
00:39:54 they’re at maybe the strongest psychedelic experience
00:39:57 they’ve ever had.
00:39:58 And then if they can take that third hit,
00:40:01 and some people can’t,
00:40:06 they’re propelled into this other reality.
00:40:10 And the nature of that other reality will differ
00:40:14 depending on who you ask,
00:40:15 but folks will often talk about it.
00:40:18 And we’ve done some survey research on this.
00:40:21 Entities of different types, elves tend to pop up.
00:40:27 The caveat is that I strongly presume
00:40:29 all of this is culturally influenced,
00:40:32 but thinking more about the psychology and the neuroscience,
00:40:36 there is probably something fundamental,
00:40:38 like for someone that might be colored as elves,
00:40:41 others that might be colored as,
00:40:44 Terrence McKenna called them self dribbling basketballs.
00:40:46 For someone else, it might be little animals
00:40:49 or someone else, it might be aliens.
00:40:52 I think that probably is dependent on who they are
00:40:55 and what they’ve been exposed to.
00:40:56 But just the fact that one has this sense
00:40:58 that they’re surrounded by autonomous entities.
00:41:02 Right, intelligent autonomous entities.
00:41:04 Right, and people come back with stories
00:41:06 that are just astonishing.
00:41:09 Like there’s communication between these,
00:41:12 communication between these entities
00:41:15 and often they’re telling them things
00:41:18 that the person says are self validating,
00:41:23 but it seems like it’s impossible.
00:41:25 Like it really seems like, and again,
00:41:28 this is what people say oftentimes,
00:41:31 that it really is like downloading some intelligence
00:41:35 from a higher dimension or some whatever metaphor
00:41:39 you wanna use.
00:41:39 Sometimes these things come up in dreams
00:41:41 like someone is exposed to something that,
00:41:43 I’ve had this in a dream,
00:41:45 where it seems like what they are being exposed to
00:41:48 is physically impossible,
00:41:51 but yet at the same time self validating, it seems true.
00:41:56 Like they really are figuring something out.
00:41:57 Of course, the challenge is to say something
00:41:59 in concrete terms after the experience
00:42:03 where you could verify that in any way.
00:42:07 And I’m not familiar of any examples of that.
00:42:10 Well, there’s a sense in which I suppose the experience
00:42:15 is like you’re a limited cognitive creature
00:42:22 that knows very little about the world
00:42:24 and here’s a chance to communicate
00:42:26 with much wiser entities that in a way
00:42:30 that you can’t possibly understand
00:42:32 are trying to give you hints of deeper truths.
00:42:38 And so there’s that kind of sense
00:42:40 that you can take something back,
00:42:42 but you can’t where our cognition is not capable
00:42:46 to fully grasp the truth.
00:42:48 We’ll just get a kind of sense of it
00:42:50 and somehow that process is mind expanding
00:42:53 that there’s a greater truth out there.
00:42:56 That seems like what from the people
00:42:59 I’ve heard talk about that seems to be what it is.
00:43:04 And that’s so fascinating that there’s fundamentally
00:43:08 to this whole thing is a communication
00:43:09 between an entity that is other than yourself, entities.
00:43:15 So it’s not just like a visual experience
00:43:17 like you’re like floating through the world
00:43:21 is there’s other beings there,
00:43:23 which is kind of, I don’t know.
00:43:26 I don’t know what to sort of,
00:43:27 from a person who likes Freud and Carl Jung,
00:43:30 I don’t know what to think about that.
00:43:32 That being of course from one perspective
00:43:34 is just you looking in the mirror.
00:43:36 But it could also be from another perspective
00:43:39 like actually talking to other beings.
00:43:41 Yeah, you mentioned Jung
00:43:43 and I think he’s particularly interesting
00:43:45 and it kind of points to something
00:43:47 I was thinking about saying is that,
00:43:50 I think what might be going on
00:43:52 from a naturalistic perspective.
00:43:55 So regardless, whether or not there are,
00:43:58 it doesn’t depend on autonomous entities out there.
00:44:01 What might be happening is that just the associative net,
00:44:06 the level of learning,
00:44:08 the comprehension might be so beyond what someone is used to
00:44:17 that the only way for the nervous system,
00:44:20 for the aware sense of self to orient towards it
00:44:25 is all by metaphor.
00:44:27 And so I do think,
00:44:29 when we get into these realms as a strong empiricist,
00:44:33 I think we always gotta be careful
00:44:34 and be as grounded as possible,
00:44:36 but I’m also willing to speculate
00:44:39 and sort of cast the nets wide with caveat.
00:44:42 But I think of things like archetypes
00:44:44 and it’s plausible that there are certain stories,
00:44:48 there are certain,
00:44:49 we’ve gone through millions of years of evolution.
00:44:52 It may be that we have certain characters and stories
00:44:58 that our central nervous system is sort of wired
00:45:03 to tend to.
00:45:05 Yeah, those stories, we carry those stories in us.
00:45:07 Right.
00:45:08 And this unlocks them in a certain kind of way.
00:45:10 And we think about stories.
00:45:11 Like our sense of self is basically,
00:45:13 narrative self is a story.
00:45:15 And we think about the world of stories.
00:45:18 This is why metaphors are always more powerful
00:45:20 than sort of laying out all the details all the time,
00:45:25 speaking in parables.
00:45:26 It’s like, if you really get some,
00:45:28 this is why, as much as I hate it,
00:45:31 if you’re presenting to Congress or something
00:45:33 and you have all the best data in the world,
00:45:36 it’s not as powerful as that one anecdote
00:45:39 as the mom dying of cancer that had the psilocybin session
00:45:44 and it transformed her life.
00:45:46 That’s a story, that’s meaningful.
00:45:48 And so when this kind of unimaginable kind of change
00:45:53 and experience happens with a DMT ingestion,
00:45:58 these stories of entities, they might be that,
00:46:04 stories that are constructed that is the closest,
00:46:08 which is not to say the stories aren’t real.
00:46:09 I mean, I think we’re getting to layers where
00:46:12 it doesn’t really, right.
00:46:14 Yeah, but it’s the closest we can come
00:46:17 to making sense out of it.
00:46:19 Because what we do know about these psychedelics,
00:46:22 one of the levels beyond the receptor
00:46:24 is that the brain is communicating it with itself
00:46:26 in a massively different way.
00:46:28 There’s massive communication with areas
00:46:30 that don’t normally communicate.
00:46:32 And so I think that comes with both,
00:46:36 it’s casting the nets wide.
00:46:38 I think that comes with the insights
00:46:41 and helpful novel ways of thinking.
00:46:42 I do think it comes with false positives,
00:46:45 that could be some of the delusion.
00:46:48 And so when you’re so far out there,
00:46:52 like with the DMT experience,
00:46:53 like maybe alien is the best way
00:46:58 that the mind can wrap some arms around that.
00:47:02 So I don’t know how much you’re familiar with Joe Rogan,
00:47:05 but he does bring up DMT quite a bit.
00:47:08 It’s almost a meme, it is a meme.
00:47:11 Have you ever, what is it, have you ever tried DMT?
00:47:16 I mean, I think he talks about this experience
00:47:18 of having met other entities
00:47:22 and they were mocking him, I think,
00:47:26 if I remember the experience correctly,
00:47:28 like laughing at him and saying F you, F you,
00:47:31 or something like that.
00:47:32 I may be misremembering this,
00:47:34 but there’s a general mockery.
00:47:37 And what he learned from that experience
00:47:40 is that he shouldn’t take himself too seriously.
00:47:42 So it’s the dissolution of the ego and so on.
00:47:45 Like what do you think about that experience?
00:47:48 And maybe if you have more general things
00:47:50 about Joe’s infatuation with DMT
00:47:54 and if DMT has that important role to play
00:47:58 in popular culture in general.
00:48:01 I’m definitely familiar with it.
00:48:03 I remember telling you offline
00:48:04 that when I first, the first time I learned
00:48:07 who Joe Rogan was, it was probably 15 years ago.
00:48:11 And I came upon a clip and I realized
00:48:14 there’s another person in the world
00:48:15 who’s into both DMT and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
00:48:19 And I think both those worlds have grown dramatically since
00:48:22 and it’s probably not such a special club these days.
00:48:24 So he definitely got onto my radar screen quickly.
00:48:29 You were into both before it was cool.
00:48:31 Right, I mean, this is all relative
00:48:33 because there’s people that were before the late 90s
00:48:36 and early 2000s who were into it
00:48:37 to say you’re a Johnny come lately.
00:48:39 But yeah, compared to where we’re at now.
00:48:42 But yet one of the things I always found fascinating
00:48:44 by Joe’s telling of his experiences I think
00:48:52 is that they resemble very much
00:48:54 Terrence McKenna’s experiences with DMT
00:48:57 and Joe has talked very much about Terrence McKenna
00:49:01 and his experiences.
00:49:03 If I had to guess, I would guess
00:49:04 that probably just having heard Terrence McKenna
00:49:08 talk about his experiences that that influenced
00:49:13 the coloring of Joe’s experience.
00:49:15 It’s funny how that works
00:49:17 because I mean, that’s why McKenna hasn’t,
00:49:19 I mean, poets and great orators give us the words
00:49:25 to then like start to describe our experiences
00:49:27 because our words are limited, our language is limited.
00:49:30 And it’s always nice to get some kind of nice poetry
00:49:33 into the mix to allow us to put words to it.
00:49:36 Right, but I also see some elements
00:49:40 that seem to relate to Joe’s psychology
00:49:43 just from what I’ve seen from hours
00:49:46 of watching him on his podcast
00:49:47 is that he’s a self critical guy.
00:49:52 And I think with always his positive been,
00:49:54 I’m always struck being a behavioral pharmacologist
00:49:56 and no one else really says it about cannabis.
00:49:59 I’ll get back to the DMT thing about
00:50:00 he likes the kind of the paranoid side of things.
00:50:03 He’s like, that’s you radically examining yourself.
00:50:05 It’s like, that’s not just a bad thing.
00:50:07 That’s you need to like look hard at yourself
00:50:09 and something’s making you uncomfortable,
00:50:11 like dig into that.
00:50:13 And like, that’s his,
00:50:14 it’s sort of along the lines of Goggins with exercise.
00:50:16 And it’s like, yeah, like things,
00:50:19 learning experiences aren’t supposed to be easy.
00:50:21 Like take advantage of these uncomfortable experience.
00:50:24 It’s why we call in our research
00:50:26 in a safe context with psychedelics,
00:50:28 they’re not bad trips, they’re challenging experiences.
00:50:32 Yes, yeah, that’s fascinating.
00:50:33 Just that’s the tiny tangent.
00:50:35 It’s always cool for me to hear him talk about marijuana,
00:50:40 like weed as the paranoia, the anxiety or whatever
00:50:44 that you experience as actually the fuel for the experience.
00:50:50 Like I think he talks about smoking weed when he’s writing.
00:50:54 That’s inspiring to me because
00:50:56 then you can’t possibly have a bad experience.
00:50:59 I’m a huge fan of that.
00:51:00 Like every experience is good.
00:51:03 Right, which is very Goggins.
00:51:04 Yeah, yeah, is it bad?
00:51:06 Okay, all right, great, you know.
00:51:08 Well, see Goggins is one side of that.
00:51:09 He wants it bad.
00:51:11 Like he wants the experience to be challenging always.
00:51:14 But I mean like both are good.
00:51:17 Like the few times of taking mushrooms,
00:51:21 the experience was like everything was beautiful.
00:51:26 There’s zero challenging aspect to it.
00:51:29 It was just like the world is beautiful
00:51:32 and it gave me this deep appreciation of the world.
00:51:35 I would say, so like that’s amazing,
00:51:37 but also ones that challenge you are also amazing.
00:51:41 Like all the times I drink vodka,
00:51:42 but that’s another, let’s not.
00:51:45 So back to DMT.
00:51:48 Yeah, Joe’s treating cannabis as a psychedelic,
00:51:52 which is something that I’d say like a lot of people
00:51:54 treat it more like Xanax or like beer or vodka.
00:51:59 But he’s really trying to delve into those minor,
00:52:03 it’s been called a minor psychedelic.
00:52:05 So with DMT, as you brought up,
00:52:07 it’s like the entity’s mocking him.
00:52:10 And it’s like, you’re not, I mean, this reminds me of him,
00:52:13 him describing his, like writing his,
00:52:16 or just his entire method of comedy.
00:52:20 It’s like, watch the tape of yourself.
00:52:23 Don’t just ignore it.
00:52:24 Like that’s where I screwed up.
00:52:26 That’s where I need to do better.
00:52:28 This like sort of radical self examination,
00:52:31 which I think our society is kind of getting away from
00:52:33 because like, all the children win trophies type of thing.
00:52:36 And it’s like, no, no, don’t go overboard,
00:52:39 but like recognize when you’ve messed up.
00:52:41 And so that’s a big part of the psychedelic experience.
00:52:45 Like people come out sometimes saying,
00:52:48 my God, I need to say sorry to my mom.
00:52:52 It’s so obvious, or whatever interpersonal issue
00:52:57 or like, my God, I’m not pulling enough weight
00:53:00 around the house and helping my wife.
00:53:02 And these things that are just obvious to them,
00:53:07 the self criticism that can be a very positive thing
00:53:09 if you act on it.
00:53:12 You’ve mentioned addiction.
00:53:13 Maybe we could take a little bit detour
00:53:15 into a darker aspect of things,
00:53:18 or not even darker, it’s just an important aspect of things.
00:53:22 What’s the nature of addiction?
00:53:24 You’ve mentioned some things within the big umbrella
00:53:28 of psychedelics may be usually not addictive,
00:53:32 but maybe MDMA, I think you said
00:53:35 might have some addictive properties,
00:53:37 but the point is stuff outside of the psychedelics umbrella
00:53:41 can often be highly addictive.
00:53:43 So you’ve studied addiction from several angles,
00:53:47 one of which is behavioral economics.
00:53:49 What have you understood about addiction?
00:53:53 What is addiction from the biological physiological level
00:53:57 to the psychological to whatever is the interesting way
00:54:00 to talk about addiction?
00:54:02 Yeah, and the lenses that I view addiction through
00:54:05 very much are behavioral economic,
00:54:08 but I also think they converge on,
00:54:11 I think it’s beautiful at the other end of the spectrum,
00:54:13 sort of just a completely humanistic psychology perspective.
00:54:20 It converges on what people come out of,
00:54:22 12 step meetings talking about.
00:54:24 Can you say what is behavioral economics
00:54:27 and what is humanistic psychology?
00:54:30 Like, what do you mean by that?
00:54:31 And more importantly, behavioral economics lens,
00:54:33 what is that?
00:54:34 Yeah, so behavioral economics,
00:54:36 my definition of it is the application
00:54:38 of economic principles, mostly microeconomic principles.
00:54:41 So understanding the behavior of individual agents
00:54:47 surrounding commodities in the marketplace,
00:54:51 applying microeconomic types of analyses
00:54:56 to non economic behavior.
00:54:59 So basically at one point,
00:55:01 like psychologists figured out
00:55:03 that there’s this whole other discipline
00:55:05 that’s been studying behavior,
00:55:06 it just happened to be all focused on monetary behavior,
00:55:09 spending and saving money, et cetera.
00:55:12 But it comes with all of these like principles
00:55:14 that can be wildly and fruitfully applied
00:55:17 to understanding behavior.
00:55:18 So for example, I’ve studied things like
00:55:22 demand curve analysis of drug consumption.
00:55:25 So I look at, for example, tobacco, cigarettes
00:55:30 and nicotine products through the lens of demand curves.
00:55:35 And in other words, at different prices,
00:55:38 if there’s different work requirements
00:55:40 for being able to smoke cigarettes, sort of modeling price.
00:55:45 Within that price data,
00:55:47 there is some indication of addiction,
00:55:49 how much the habits that you form
00:55:52 around these particular drugs.
00:55:54 It’s one important dimension.
00:55:56 So I think a particularly important one there
00:55:58 is elasticity or inelasticity, two ends of the spectrum.
00:56:02 So that’s the price sensitivity.
00:56:05 So for example, you could have something
00:56:07 that’s pretty price inelastic, like gasoline.
00:56:14 So the price of gas at times can keep going up
00:56:16 and Americans are just gonna pretty much
00:56:20 buy the same amount of gas.
00:56:21 Or maybe the price of gas doubles,
00:56:24 but their consumption only decreases by 10%.
00:56:26 So it’s a sub proportional reduction.
00:56:28 So that’s an inelastic.
00:56:30 And that changes, like you push the price up high enough.
00:56:33 I mean, if it was $100 a gallon, it would eventually turn,
00:56:35 the curve would turn and go downward more drastically
00:56:39 and it would be elastic.
00:56:41 But you can apply that to someone who,
00:56:45 a regular cigarette smoker who was working
00:56:49 for cigarette puffs, who’s gone six hours without smoking.
00:56:52 And you’re asking questions like,
00:56:54 how many times are they willing to pull this knob
00:56:57 in the lab during this three hour session?
00:56:59 I do a lot of work like this in order to earn a cigarette.
00:57:02 How does the content of nicotine in that affect?
00:57:05 It has the availability of nicotine replacement products
00:57:08 like nicotine gum or eCigarettes affect those decisions.
00:57:12 So it’s a certain lens of, it’s sort of a way to take
00:57:15 the kind of the classic behavioral psychology definition
00:57:19 of reinforcement, which is just basically reward.
00:57:24 How much is this a good thing?
00:57:25 And it kind of breaks that apart
00:57:26 into a multi dimensional space.
00:57:31 So it’s not just the ideas reward or reinforcement
00:57:34 is not unit dimensional.
00:57:36 So for example, you can unpack that with demand curves.
00:57:39 At a cheap price, you might prefer one good to another.
00:57:44 So the classic example is luxury versus necessity.
00:57:47 So diamonds versus toilet paper.
00:57:49 So at those cheap prices,
00:57:51 you can look at something called intensity of demand.
00:57:54 If it was basically as cheap as possible,
00:57:56 or essentially zero, how much would you buy of this good?
00:57:59 But then you keep jacking up the price and you’ll see,
00:58:02 so diamonds will look like the better reward
00:58:06 at that low price sort of intensity of demand side of things.
00:58:09 But as you keep jacking up the price,
00:58:11 you gotta have some toilet paper.
00:58:13 And again, we can get into the whole bidet thing,
00:58:15 but forget that, I know Joe’s been pushing that too.
00:58:21 You’re gonna hang on and keep buying the toilet paper
00:58:23 to a greater degree than you will the diamonds.
00:58:26 So you’ll see a crossing of demand curves.
00:58:28 So what’s the better reinforcer?
00:58:30 What’s the better reward?
00:58:31 Depends on your price.
00:58:33 And so that’s an example of one way to look at addiction.
00:58:39 So specifically drug consumption,
00:58:41 which isn’t all of addiction,
00:58:43 but it’s like in order for something to be addictive,
00:58:46 it has to be a reward.
00:58:48 And it has to compete with other rewards in your life.
00:58:54 And one of the two main aspects of addiction in my view,
00:58:59 and this doesn’t map onto how the DSM,
00:59:01 the psychiatry Bible defines addiction,
00:59:04 which I think is largely bunk,
00:59:06 but there’s some value to have some common description,
00:59:08 but it’s how rewarding is it
00:59:12 from this multi dimensional lens?
00:59:15 And specifically, how does that rewarding value compete
00:59:19 with other rewards, other consequences in your life?
00:59:25 So it’s not a problem if the use of that substance
00:59:30 is rewarding.
00:59:32 Okay, yeah, you like to have a couple of beers
00:59:33 every once in a while, and it’s like not a problem.
00:59:38 But then you have the alcoholic who is drinking so much
00:59:42 that it tanks their career, it ruins their marriage.
00:59:47 It’s in competition with these pro social aspects
00:59:51 to their life.
00:59:52 It’s all about comparing to the other choices you’re making,
00:59:55 the other activities in your life.
00:59:57 And if you evaluate it as a much higher reward
01:00:02 than anything else, that becomes an addiction.
01:00:05 Right, right.
01:00:06 And so it’s not just the rewarding value,
01:00:08 but it’s the relative rewarding value.
01:00:10 And the other major aspect, again, from behavioral economics,
01:00:13 that the thing that makes addiction
01:00:16 is something called delayed discounting.
01:00:20 So in economics, sometimes it’s called time preference.
01:00:23 It’s what compound interest rates are based upon.
01:00:26 It’s the idea that delaying a good access to a good
01:00:30 or a reward comes with a certain decrement to its value.
01:00:35 So we’d all rather have things now than later.
01:00:39 And we can study this at the individual level of,
01:00:42 would you rather have $9 today or $10 tomorrow?
01:00:48 And when you do that, you get huge differences
01:00:52 between addicted populations and non addicted,
01:00:56 not just heroin and cocaine, but like just cigarette smokers,
01:00:59 like normal everyday cigarette smokers.
01:01:02 And even when you look at something like monetary rewards.
01:01:06 And so you can go into the rabbit hole
01:01:08 with this delayed discounting model.
01:01:10 So it’s not only those huge differences
01:01:12 that seem to have a face valid aspect to it.
01:01:15 Like the cigarette smoker is choosing this thing
01:01:17 that’s rewarding today,
01:01:19 but I know it comes with increased risk
01:01:21 of having these horrible consequences down the line.
01:01:24 So it’s this competition between what’s good for me now
01:01:26 and what’s good for me later.
01:01:28 And the other aspect about delayed discounting
01:01:30 is that if you quantitatively map out
01:01:33 that discounting curve over time,
01:01:37 so you don’t just do that $10 tomorrow,
01:01:43 how much is it worth to you today?
01:01:45 So you can say, what about nine?
01:01:46 What about eight?
01:01:47 What about $7?
01:01:48 And you can titrate it to find that indifference point.
01:01:51 And so we can say, aha, $10 tomorrow is worth $6 today.
01:01:57 So it’s by the one day it’s decreased by 40%.
01:02:00 We can do that also at one week and one month
01:02:04 and one year and 10 years and map out that curve,
01:02:08 get a shape of that curve.
01:02:09 And one of the fascinating things about this
01:02:11 is that whether you’re talking about pigeons,
01:02:13 making these types of choices
01:02:14 between a little bit of food now
01:02:16 or a little bit of food a minute from now or rats,
01:02:18 or like dozens of species of animals tested,
01:02:21 including humans,
01:02:22 the tendency is pretty consistently
01:02:24 that we discount hyperbolically rather than exponentially.
01:02:31 And what exponentially means is that every unit of time
01:02:34 is associated with the same proportional reduction.
01:02:37 Every unit of delay is associated with the same,
01:02:40 causes the same proportional reduction in value.
01:02:42 And that’s the way the compound interest rate works.
01:02:47 Every day you get this sort of out of whatever values
01:02:53 in there at the beginning of that day,
01:02:54 you get this, we’ll give you this amount of extra money
01:02:58 to compensate you for that delay.
01:03:01 But then the way that all animals tend to function
01:03:05 is of this very different way where the reductions,
01:03:09 the initial, that initial delay,
01:03:11 so like one day’s worth of delay,
01:03:13 you see a much stronger discounting rate
01:03:16 or reduction in value than you do over those.
01:03:20 So you see the super proportional,
01:03:22 then it changes to these lesser rates.
01:03:26 And so the implication of that,
01:03:27 I know I’ve gone like really into the weeds quantitatively,
01:03:29 but what that means is that
01:03:32 there’s these preference reversals.
01:03:34 When you have curves of that nature,
01:03:37 the decay that’s hyperbolic,
01:03:40 it maps onto this phenomenon we see
01:03:46 both in terms of how people deal with future rewards,
01:03:49 but also how perception works.
01:03:52 When two things are far away,
01:03:54 whether it’s physical distance
01:03:56 or whether in terms of perception
01:03:57 or whether it’s in terms of time,
01:03:59 when you’re really far away,
01:04:01 the value, the subjective value for that further,
01:04:05 that delayed reward is larger.
01:04:08 So for example, like,
01:04:11 let’s say we’re talking about 360,
01:04:15 364 days from now, you can get $9 or 365 days a year.
01:04:21 Now you get $10 and you’re like,
01:04:23 dude, it’s like, it’s a year, like no difference.
01:04:25 Like I’ll take, why not get one more dollar?
01:04:29 You bring that same exact set of choices closer.
01:04:31 Nothing’s changed other than the time to both rewards.
01:04:34 And it’s like, would you rather have $9 today
01:04:37 or $10 tomorrow and plenty of people would say,
01:04:39 eh, just about the same, let’s go ahead and take it today.
01:04:43 So you see this preference reversal.
01:04:45 And so that’s a model of addiction
01:04:50 in the sense that consistently with true addiction,
01:04:55 I would argue, you see this competition
01:04:58 between molar and molecular utility.
01:05:01 It’s like interpersonal,
01:05:05 like within the person competing agents.
01:05:07 Someone sometimes has control of the bus
01:05:10 that wants to do what’s good for you in the short term.
01:05:14 And someone at other times is in control of driving the bus
01:05:18 and they want to do what’s good for you in the long term.
01:05:22 So you tell the, you’re trying to quit
01:05:25 and you see a doctor, you see your 12 step therapist
01:05:28 and say, God, I know this stuff is killing me.
01:05:30 Like, I’m really, I’m on the path, like I’m done.
01:05:35 And that’s when you’re kind of in their office
01:05:37 or wherever you’re not, it’s not around you.
01:05:39 And then later on that day, your buddy says that,
01:05:41 hey man, I just scored.
01:05:42 I got it right here.
01:05:43 Do you want it?
01:05:44 And that reward is right in front of you.
01:05:45 That’s like bringing those two choices right in front of you.
01:05:48 And it’s like, hell yeah, I want to use.
01:05:50 And then you can go through that cycle for like years
01:05:52 of the person telling themselves, I want to quit.
01:05:56 But then other times that same person is saying,
01:05:58 I don’t want to, you know, functionally,
01:06:01 they’re saying, I don’t want to,
01:06:01 because they’re saying, yeah, like, yeah, give me some.
01:06:04 So in the moment, it’s very difficult to quit.
01:06:07 And this isn’t just something,
01:06:08 this is something that has huge clinical ramifications
01:06:11 with addiction, but it’s like all humans do it.
01:06:13 Anyone who’s hit the snooze alarm in the morning,
01:06:15 like the night before they realize,
01:06:17 oh, I got to get up extra early tomorrow.
01:06:19 That’s what’s ultimately better for me.
01:06:21 So I’m going to set the alarm for, you know, 5 a.m.
01:06:24 And it goes off at 5 a.m., you know,
01:06:30 and then, so now those two consequences have come sooner
01:06:34 and it’s like, what the hell?
01:06:35 And they hit the snooze alarm.
01:06:37 And sometimes not just once,
01:06:38 but then five minutes later and five minutes later,
01:06:41 you know, and so, and it’s why it’s easier
01:06:43 to exercise self control at the grocery store
01:06:46 compared to in your fridge.
01:06:48 Like if that snack is like 30 seconds away in your fridge,
01:06:54 you’re going to more likely yield to temptation
01:06:58 than if it is further away.
01:07:01 So then just take a step back to something
01:07:03 you brought up earlier, the inelasticity of pricing.
01:07:08 Is it from a perspective of the dealers,
01:07:12 whether we’re talking about cigarettes
01:07:14 or maybe venturing slightly into the illegal realm,
01:07:20 you know, of people who sell drugs illegally,
01:07:23 they also have an economics to them
01:07:25 that they set prices and all those kinds of things.
01:07:29 Does addiction allow you to mess with the nature of pricing?
01:07:35 Like, so I kind of assume that you meant
01:07:39 that there’s a correlation between things you’re addicted to
01:07:42 and the inelasticity of the price.
01:07:44 So you can jack up the price.
01:07:46 Is there something interesting to be said
01:07:49 both for legal drugs and illegal drugs
01:07:52 about the kind of price games you can play
01:07:59 because the consumers of the product are addicted?
01:08:03 Right, I mean, I think you just described it.
01:08:06 Yeah, you can jack up the price
01:08:07 and you know, some people are going to drop off,
01:08:10 but the people, you know, and it’s not dichotomous
01:08:13 because you could just consume less,
01:08:15 but some people are going to consume less
01:08:16 and the people that are most addicted are going to keep,
01:08:19 you know, I mean, you see this,
01:08:21 they’re going to keep purchasing.
01:08:23 So you see this with cigarettes.
01:08:24 And so it’s interesting when you interface this with policy,
01:08:28 like in one respect, heavily taxing cigarettes
01:08:31 is a good thing.
01:08:32 We know it keeps adolescents particularly price sensitive.
01:08:36 So you definitely, people smoke less
01:08:38 and especially kids smoke less when you keep
01:08:41 cigarette prices high and you tax the hell out of them.
01:08:44 But one of the downsides you’ve got to balance
01:08:46 and keep in mind is that you disproportionately
01:08:49 have working class, poor people.
01:08:52 And then you get into a point where someone’s spending,
01:08:54 you know, a quarter of their paycheck on cigarettes.
01:08:56 So they’re going to smoke no matter what.
01:08:58 And basically because they’re addicted,
01:09:01 they’re going to smoke no matter what.
01:09:02 And you’re just, yeah, you’re taxing their existence.
01:09:06 Right, so you’re making it worse for them.
01:09:08 If they don’t, if they are completely inelastic,
01:09:10 you’re actually making that person’s life worse.
01:09:12 Because we know that by interfering with the amount
01:09:16 of money they have, you’re interfering with the other
01:09:19 pro social, the potential competitors to smoking, you know.
01:09:23 And we know that when someone’s in more impoverished
01:09:26 environments and they have less sort of non drug alternatives,
01:09:31 you know, the more likely they’re going to stay addicted.
01:09:34 So, you know.
01:09:35 Is there data, this is interesting,
01:09:38 from a scientific perspective of those same kind of games
01:09:42 in illegal drugs?
01:09:45 Sort of, because that’s where most drug,
01:09:50 I was, I mean, I don’t know, maybe you can correct me,
01:09:52 but it seems like most drugs are currently illegal.
01:09:56 And so, but there’s still an economics to them, obviously.
01:10:00 That’s the drug war and so on.
01:10:01 Is there data on the setting of prices
01:10:05 or like how good are the business people running
01:10:08 the selling of drugs that are illegal?
01:10:11 Are they all the same kind of rules apply
01:10:13 from a behavioral economics perspective?
01:10:15 I think so.
01:10:16 I mean, they’re basically, whether they’re crunching
01:10:18 the numbers or not, they’re basically sensitive
01:10:21 to that demand curve and they’re doing the same thing
01:10:24 that businesses do in a legal market.
01:10:27 And, you know, you want to sell as much of a product
01:10:30 to get as much money.
01:10:32 You’re looking more at the total income.
01:10:33 So if you jack the price a little bit,
01:10:36 you’re going to get some reduction in consumption,
01:10:38 but it may be that the total amount of money
01:10:40 that you rake in is going to be more than,
01:10:44 it’s going to overcompensate for that.
01:10:46 So you’re willing to take,
01:10:47 okay, I’m going to lose 10% of my customers,
01:10:49 but I’m getting more than enough to compensate
01:10:52 from that, from the extra money
01:10:53 from the people who still are buying.
01:10:55 So I think they’re more, you know,
01:10:57 and especially when we get to the lower,
01:10:58 I wouldn’t be surprised if people are crunching those numbers
01:11:01 and looking at demand curves, maybe at the, you know,
01:11:03 at the really high levels of the, you know,
01:11:06 up the chain with the cartels and whatnot.
01:11:07 I don’t know, that wouldn’t surprise me at all,
01:11:10 but I think it’s probably more implicit
01:11:12 at the lower levels where something,
01:11:16 you brought up drug policy.
01:11:17 I will say that for years now,
01:11:19 it’s been this kind of unquestioned goal by, for example,
01:11:25 the drug czar’s office in the US
01:11:28 to make the price of illegal drugs as high as possible
01:11:32 without this kind of nuanced approach that,
01:11:36 yeah, if you make, you know,
01:11:38 for some people, if you make the price so high,
01:11:41 you’re actually making things worse.
01:11:43 I mean, I’m all about reducing the problems associated
01:11:47 with drugs and drug addictions.
01:11:48 And part of that is the,
01:11:50 are more direct consequences of those drugs themselves,
01:11:53 but a whole lot is what you get from indirectly
01:11:57 and, you know, sort of the,
01:11:59 both for the individual and for society.
01:12:02 So like making a poor person
01:12:04 who doesn’t have enough money for their kids,
01:12:05 making them even poorer.
01:12:06 So now you’ve made their children’s future worse
01:12:10 because they’re growing up in deeper poverty
01:12:12 because you’ve essentially levied a tax
01:12:14 onto this person who’s heavily addicted.
01:12:18 But then at the societal level, you know,
01:12:21 so everything we know about the drug war
01:12:23 in terms of the heavy criminalization
01:12:26 and filling up prisons and reducing employment
01:12:29 and educational opportunities,
01:12:31 which in the big picture,
01:12:32 we know are the things that in a free market
01:12:35 compete against some of the worst problems of addiction
01:12:38 is actually having educational
01:12:40 and employment opportunities.
01:12:42 But when you give someone a felony, for example,
01:12:46 you’re pretty much guaranteeing
01:12:47 they’re never gonna go very high on the economic ladder.
01:12:50 And so you’re making drugs a better reward
01:12:53 for that person’s future.
01:12:56 So this is a quick step into the policy realm.
01:13:00 And I think for both you and I,
01:13:02 I’m not sure you can correct me,
01:13:04 but I’m more comfortable into studying the effects of drugs
01:13:08 on the human behavior and human psychology
01:13:12 versus like policy.
01:13:13 It seems like a whole giant mess,
01:13:14 but yeah, there’s some libertarian candidates for president
01:13:20 and just libertarian thinkers
01:13:23 that had a nice thought experiment
01:13:26 of possibly legalizing,
01:13:28 I’ve spoken about possibly legalizing basically all drugs.
01:13:32 In your intuition,
01:13:34 do you think a world where all drugs are legal
01:13:39 is a safer world or a less safe world
01:13:43 for the users of those drugs?
01:13:45 It really depends on what we mean by legalization.
01:13:47 So this is one of my beefs with this,
01:13:50 how these things are talked about.
01:13:52 I mean, we have very few completely laissez faire,
01:13:57 you know, legal drugs.
01:13:59 So even caffeine is one of the few examples.
01:14:02 So for example, caffeine and tea and coffee is in that realm.
01:14:05 Like there’s no limits, no one’s testing,
01:14:07 there’s no laws, regulation at any level
01:14:09 of how much caffeine you’re allowed to buy
01:14:11 or how much is in the product.
01:14:12 But even like with this Starbucks, like nitro,
01:14:14 there are rules with soda and with canned products,
01:14:18 you can only put so much.
01:14:19 In there, yeah.
01:14:20 So this is FDA regulated.
01:14:22 And it’s kind of weird because there’s a limit to sodas
01:14:24 that’s not there for energy drinks and other things.
01:14:27 But, you know, so even caffeine,
01:14:29 it depends on what product we’re talking about.
01:14:31 Like if you’re like no dose
01:14:33 and other caffeine products over the counter,
01:14:34 like you can’t just put 800 milligrams in there.
01:14:36 The pills are like one or 200 milligrams.
01:14:39 And so it’s FDA regulated as an over counter drug.
01:14:41 Some of the most dangerous drugs in society,
01:14:45 I would say arguably one of the most dangerous classes
01:14:47 of drugs is the volatile anesthetics, huffing.
01:14:49 People huffing gasoline and, you know, airplane glue,
01:14:52 toluene, whatnot, severely damaging to the nervous system.
01:14:58 Pretty much legal, but there’s some regulation
01:15:01 in the sense that there’s a warning label,
01:15:03 like it’s illegal to do it for,
01:15:04 not that they’re busting people for this,
01:15:07 but, you know, it’s against federal law
01:15:10 to use this in a way other than intended type of,
01:15:13 basically saying like, yeah, don’t huff this, you know,
01:15:17 your paint thinner or whatnot.
01:15:19 It at least keeps people from selling it for that.
01:15:22 Like, no, because they’re gonna go after that person.
01:15:24 They’re not gonna be able to find
01:15:25 the 12 year old who’s huffing.
01:15:27 So anyway, just as some extreme examples at the end.
01:15:30 And then, you know, even the so called illegal,
01:15:34 like schedule one drugs, psilocybin,
01:15:36 we do plenty in terms of schedule two,
01:15:39 which is ironically less restrictive than psilocybin,
01:15:42 but methamphetamine and cocaine,
01:15:43 I’ve done human research with.
01:15:45 My research has been legal.
01:15:47 So they’re scheduled compounds,
01:15:48 but they’re not completely illegal.
01:15:49 Like you can do research with them
01:15:51 with the appropriate licenses and approval.
01:15:55 So there really is no such thing.
01:15:57 And like alcohol, well, it’s illegal
01:16:00 if you’re 12 years old or 18 years old or 20 years old.
01:16:03 And for anyone, it’s illegal to be drinking it
01:16:05 while you’re driving.
01:16:06 So there’s always a nuance.
01:16:09 It’s not dichotomy.
01:16:11 And I actually should admit,
01:16:12 it’s been on my to do list for a while
01:16:13 to buy in Massachusetts, some like edible,
01:16:17 or buy weed legally.
01:16:21 Yeah, haven’t done that in Massachusetts,
01:16:23 let’s put it this way.
01:16:24 And I wonder what that experience is like,
01:16:28 because I think it’s fully legal in Massachusetts.
01:16:31 And so I wonder what legal drugs look like to me.
01:16:35 You know, I grew up with even weed being like,
01:16:38 you know, it’s like this forbidden thing,
01:16:41 you know, not forbidden, but it’s illegal.
01:16:43 You know, most people, of course, I never partook,
01:16:46 but most people I knew would attain it illegally.
01:16:50 And so that big switch that’s been happening
01:16:53 across the country, there’s like federal stuff going on
01:16:57 to make marijuana legal federally.
01:17:00 I’m half paying attention.
01:17:01 There’s some movement there.
01:17:02 I mean, the House passed a bill
01:17:03 that’s not gonna be passed by the Senate,
01:17:06 but yeah, it’s progress.
01:17:08 There’s clearly a change.
01:17:09 Right, it’s moving in a trend.
01:17:11 So that’s the example of a drug that used to be illegal
01:17:14 is now becoming more and more and more legal.
01:17:17 So like, I wonder what like cocaine being legal looks like,
01:17:23 what a society with cocaine being legal looks like,
01:17:26 the rules around it, you know, the processes
01:17:30 in which you can consume it in a safer way
01:17:34 and be more educated about its consequences,
01:17:37 be able to control dose and like purity much better,
01:17:41 be able to get help for overdose.
01:17:44 I don’t know, all those kinds of things.
01:17:46 It does in a utopian sense feel like legalizing drugs
01:17:53 at least should be talked about and considered
01:17:56 versus keeping them in the dark.
01:17:59 I agree.
01:18:00 But yeah, so that in your sense,
01:18:05 it’s possible that in 50 years we legalize all drugs
01:18:10 and it makes for a better world.
01:18:13 The way I like to talk about it is that I would say
01:18:15 that it’s possible and it would probably be a good thing
01:18:18 if we regulate all drugs.
01:18:20 How would you regulate like cocaine, for example?
01:18:23 Is there ideas there?
01:18:25 So yeah, and you were already, you know, going, you know,
01:18:28 where I was going with that kind of first I described
01:18:31 how there’s always a new ones.
01:18:32 And even like the cannabis in Massachusetts,
01:18:34 federally illegal.
01:18:35 So for example, if I was like, and I, you know,
01:18:38 colleagues that do cannabis research
01:18:39 where they get people high in the lab,
01:18:41 like you’re a federal funded researcher with NIH funds,
01:18:43 you can’t get that stuff from the dispensary
01:18:46 because you’re breaking a federal law.
01:18:48 Even though the feds don’t have the resources to go after,
01:18:50 they don’t want the controversy at this point
01:18:52 to go after the individual users
01:18:53 or even the sellers in those legal states.
01:18:56 So there’s always this nuance,
01:18:57 but it’s about the right regulation.
01:18:59 So I think we already know enough that, for example,
01:19:03 like I think safe injection sites for hard drugs
01:19:06 makes a lot of sense.
01:19:07 Like I wouldn’t want heroin and cocaine
01:19:11 at the convenience stores.
01:19:13 And I don’t think, maybe there’s some extreme libertarians
01:19:15 that want that.
01:19:16 I think even the folks that identify as libertarians,
01:19:19 probably most of them don’t, well, I don’t know.
01:19:21 Like not all of them want that, you know?
01:19:25 I think, you know, that as a form of regulation,
01:19:27 like, look, if you’re using these hard drugs
01:19:29 on a regular basis, you’re putting yourself at risk
01:19:33 for lethal overdose.
01:19:34 You’re putting yourself at risk for catching HIV
01:19:37 and hepatitis.
01:19:41 If you’re gonna do it, if you’re doing it anyway,
01:19:43 come to this place where at least you’re not like,
01:19:46 you know, like pulling the water out of like,
01:19:50 you know, the puddle on the side of the street.
01:19:52 Yeah, so it’s done by professionals
01:19:54 and those professionals are able to educate you also.
01:19:57 So like a 711 clerk may not be both capable
01:20:01 of helping you to inject the drug properly,
01:20:05 but also won’t be equipped to educate you
01:20:07 at the negative consequences, all those kinds of things.
01:20:10 That’s a huge part of it, the education.
01:20:11 But then I think with the opioids,
01:20:13 like the big part of it is just like with naloxone,
01:20:18 which is an antagonist, it goes into the receptor,
01:20:21 it’s called Narcan, that’s the trade name,
01:20:23 but it’s what they revive people on an opioid overdose.
01:20:26 That’s almost completely effective.
01:20:29 Like if there’s a medical professional there
01:20:31 and someone’s ODing on an opioid,
01:20:33 they’re virtually guaranteed to live.
01:20:35 Like that’s remarkable that if 100% at the opioid crisis,
01:20:40 you know, if all of those people right now that are dying
01:20:43 were doing that in the presence of a medical professional,
01:20:45 like even like a nurse with Narcan,
01:20:48 there’d be basically almost no deaths.
01:20:50 There’s always some exceptions, but you know,
01:20:52 almost no deaths, like that’s staggering to me.
01:20:54 So the idea that people are doing this,
01:20:56 that we could have that level of positive effect
01:21:01 without encouraging the drug.
01:21:02 And this is where like you get into this like terrain
01:21:05 of like sending the wrong message.
01:21:06 And it’s like, no, you can do that.
01:21:09 You can say like, we’re not encouraging this.
01:21:12 In fact, probably one of the greatest advertisements
01:21:15 for not getting hooked on heroin
01:21:16 is like visiting a methadone clinic,
01:21:18 visiting a safe injection site.
01:21:19 Like this is not like an advertisement
01:21:23 for getting hooked on this drug,
01:21:25 but knowing that we can save people.
01:21:26 Now you have a landscape here
01:21:27 because a lot of times it’s just like supervised injection,
01:21:31 but you bring your own stuff, you know,
01:21:32 you bring your own heroin, which could still be, you know,
01:21:34 dirty and filled with fentanyl and fentanyl derivatives,
01:21:38 which because of the incredible potency
01:21:41 and the more difficulty measuring it,
01:21:43 and some differences at the receptor,
01:21:46 like you may be more likely,
01:21:47 you are more likely on average to lethally overdose on it.
01:21:51 You know, so you could,
01:21:53 the level that’s been more explored in Switzerland
01:21:55 is in some places is you actually provide the drug itself
01:22:01 and you supervise the injection.
01:22:03 So I don’t see.
01:22:04 Do you like that idea?
01:22:05 Yeah, the public health data are completely on the side of,
01:22:08 there’s really no credible evidence to this.
01:22:11 If we allow that, we’re sending the wrong message
01:22:12 and everyone’s gonna, I mean, I’m not showing up.
01:22:15 Like, you know, and it’s different by drug.
01:22:17 Like, yeah, you legalize, you set up cannabis shops
01:22:19 and some people are gonna say,
01:22:20 so you go, I’m gonna go there.
01:22:21 I don’t think a whole lot of people
01:22:22 are gonna go to one of these places
01:22:24 and say, I’m gonna shoot up heroin for the first time.
01:22:28 And even if like, you know,
01:22:29 it’s a country of 300 million people,
01:22:30 like even if someone does that,
01:22:33 you have to compare this to the every day
01:22:35 people are dying from opioid overdoses.
01:22:39 Like people’s kids, people’s uncles,
01:22:41 people’s like, these are real lives
01:22:42 that are being shattered.
01:22:43 So you just look at that.
01:22:45 And then the other thing,
01:22:46 and I know this from having done residential,
01:22:49 even like non treatment research,
01:22:50 where we just have a cocaine user or something,
01:22:52 stay on our inpatient ward for a month
01:22:54 and you really get to know them.
01:22:55 And sometimes you see like, oftentimes
01:22:58 that’s the first time this person has had a discussion
01:23:00 with a medical professional, any type of professional
01:23:03 in their entire life around their drug use.
01:23:05 Even if they’re not looking to quit.
01:23:07 And it’s like, you know, you could imagine that
01:23:09 in the safe injection settings where it’s like,
01:23:12 it might be a year into treatment and they’re like,
01:23:15 you know, doc, I know you’re not the cops.
01:23:17 Like you really care for me.
01:23:18 Like, I think I’m ready to try that methadone thing.
01:23:21 I think I’m really, I think I wanna be done.
01:23:23 I’m really patient about it, yeah.
01:23:24 Yeah, they get to trust the people
01:23:26 and realize that they’re there
01:23:29 cause they truly like, they have a compassion,
01:23:31 a love for this community, like as human beings,
01:23:34 and they don’t want people to die.
01:23:36 And you get real human connections and that,
01:23:39 and again, like those are the conditions
01:23:40 where people are gonna ultimately seek treatment
01:23:42 and not everyone always will, but you’re gonna get that.
01:23:46 And then, you know, you’re gonna get people
01:23:48 like looking into treatment options sometimes,
01:23:50 you know, maybe it’s years into the treatment.
01:23:53 So it’s like, they’re just all of these indirect benefits
01:23:56 that I think at that level,
01:23:57 I don’t know if you’d call that legalizing,
01:23:59 you know, I think again, at least well regulated.
01:24:02 Right, whatever that word is.
01:24:04 Yeah, well regulated, but out in the open.
01:24:08 Right, minimizing as many harms as we can
01:24:11 while not encouraging.
01:24:13 I mean, we don’t encourage people to drink all the,
01:24:15 I mean, people die every year from caffeine overdose.
01:24:17 Like, you know, there’s different ways to like, you know,
01:24:20 just by allowing something doesn’t mean
01:24:22 we’re sending the message that, you know,
01:24:24 by saying we’re not gonna give you a felony,
01:24:26 which is actually often the penalty for psychedelics.
01:24:32 I just actually testified for the Judiciary Committee
01:24:34 of the Senate, the Assembly in New Jersey.
01:24:38 And just to move psilocybin from a felony to misdemeanor,
01:24:43 they use different language in New Jersey, it’s weird,
01:24:45 but like the equivalent of felony and misdemeanor.
01:24:47 And that was like, two people didn’t vote for that
01:24:49 on this committee because it was might,
01:24:53 one of them said it might be sending the wrong message.
01:24:55 And it’s like, a felony, I mean, there’s real harms.
01:24:59 Like, that’s the scarlet letter the rest of your life.
01:25:01 You’re stuck at the lower ends of the employment ladder.
01:25:04 You’re not gonna get, you know, loans for education,
01:25:07 all of this, maybe because of a stupid mistake
01:25:08 you made once as a 19 year old.
01:25:11 Doing something that like, you know,
01:25:12 a presidential candidate could have done and admitted to
01:25:15 and had no problem, you know?
01:25:16 Yeah, what drug is the most addictive,
01:25:22 the most dangerous in your view?
01:25:25 Not maybe, like not technically,
01:25:29 like specifically which drug,
01:25:31 but more like in our society today,
01:25:34 what is a highly problematic drug?
01:25:35 We talked about psychedelics not being that addictive
01:25:40 on the other flip side of that.
01:25:41 You mentioned cocaine, is that the top one?
01:25:45 Is there something else?
01:25:46 That’s a concern to you?
01:25:48 It depends, and you’ve already alluded to this nuance.
01:25:50 It depends on how you define it.
01:25:51 If we’re talking about on the ground today,
01:25:53 in, you know, a modern society,
01:25:56 I’d say nicotine, tobacco.
01:25:59 Oh shit.
01:26:00 I mean, in terms of mortality,
01:26:03 it kills far more than any other drug known to humankind.
01:26:09 Four times more than alcohol,
01:26:10 like a half million deaths in the US every year
01:26:13 and about five to six million worldwide due to tobacco.
01:26:18 That’s four times more in the US than alcohol.
01:26:21 And if you graph all of the drugs, legal and illegal,
01:26:25 like, you know, put all of the illegal drugs
01:26:28 in like one category on that figure,
01:26:30 and you put alcohol and tobacco on that figure,
01:26:33 all the illegal drugs combined,
01:26:35 they’re a barely visible blip to this incredible,
01:26:39 like there’s no, even all of the opioid epidemic rolled up
01:26:43 along with cocaine and everything else,
01:26:44 the meth barely shows up compared to tobacco.
01:26:47 That’s one of those uncomfortable truths
01:26:51 that I don’t know what to do with.
01:26:52 It’s like where everybody’s freaking out
01:26:55 about coronavirus, right?
01:26:59 And nobody’s… The relative.
01:27:00 It’s all relative.
01:27:01 If you look at the relative thing,
01:27:03 it’s like, well, why aren’t we freaking out
01:27:06 about cigarettes, which we are increasingly so
01:27:10 over the, historically speaking, right?
01:27:12 Right. It’s like terrorism versus swimming pools.
01:27:14 I remember that being back in the,
01:27:17 after the war on terror started.
01:27:18 It’s like, yeah, there’s not even comparison.
01:27:21 Okay. So, you know, that’s a little sobering truth there.
01:27:25 Cause I was thinking like cocaine,
01:27:26 I was thinking about all of these hard drugs,
01:27:29 but the reality is relatively nicotine is the big one.
01:27:33 And you didn’t ask about mortality or deaths.
01:27:35 You asked about addiction,
01:27:37 but that really is hard to evaluate.
01:27:40 It gets into those nuances I spoke of before
01:27:42 about there’s not a unidimensional way
01:27:45 to measure reinforcement.
01:27:46 It kind of depends on the situation
01:27:48 and what measure we’re looking at.
01:27:50 But you know, more people have access to tobacco
01:27:55 and I’m not advocating that we make it an illegal drug.
01:27:58 I think that would be a horrible mistake.
01:28:00 Although there is a very credible push
01:28:03 to mandate the reduction of nicotine in cigarettes,
01:28:07 which I have most scientists that study it are for it.
01:28:10 I think there’s some real dangers there
01:28:14 cause I see that in the broader history of drug use.
01:28:16 It’s like when has drug prohibition worked broadly speaking?
01:28:20 And it’s to me that path would only make sense
01:28:25 in very good conjunction with eCigarettes,
01:28:28 which once they’re fully regulated can be a safer,
01:28:31 not safe, but much safer alternative.
01:28:34 And if we tax the hell out of eCigarettes
01:28:37 and ban every attractive feature
01:28:39 like flavors and everything,
01:28:41 then that’s gonna push people to a black market
01:28:45 if they can’t get the real thing from real cigarette.
01:28:47 Like some people will just quit straight out.
01:28:49 But I think with the regulators
01:28:51 and what a lot of scientists that study tobacco,
01:28:53 like myself, it’s a big part still of what I study.
01:28:58 They’re not used to thinking about the like tobacco really
01:29:01 as a drug largely speaking in terms of,
01:29:05 for example, the history of prohibition.
01:29:07 And I think of like,
01:29:08 we already know there’s an illicit market,
01:29:09 a black market for tobacco to get around taxes.
01:29:14 I mean, and for selling even loose cigarettes,
01:29:16 that’s what initially caused in Staten Island
01:29:18 the police to approach Eric Garland
01:29:20 who was selling loose cigarettes and he got choked out.
01:29:23 I mean, the thing that caused that police contact
01:29:25 was he was selling, well, I think reported
01:29:27 to sell individual cigarettes for like,
01:29:30 he gets home for court, it happens in Baltimore.
01:29:32 And it’s like, that’s technically illegal.
01:29:34 But are you not gonna have massive boats
01:29:39 of supplies coming over from China and elsewhere
01:29:42 of real deal cigarettes if you ban the sale of nicotine?
01:29:47 Like it’s obviously gonna happen.
01:29:49 And you have to weigh that against,
01:29:52 you’re gonna create a black market to one size or another.
01:29:55 And your intuition that really hasn’t worked
01:29:57 throughout the history when we’ve tried it.
01:29:59 Right, but I see a potential path forward,
01:30:01 but only if it’s well,
01:30:04 if it’s not in conjunction with eCigarettes.
01:30:06 If there’s a clear alternative,
01:30:07 that’s a positive alternative
01:30:08 that it kind of stares the population towards an alternative.
01:30:14 The difference here, the unique thing
01:30:16 that could be taken advantage of here
01:30:18 is nicotine is by and large, not what causes the harm.
01:30:20 It’s the aromatic hydrocarbons,
01:30:23 it’s the carcinogens and tobacco,
01:30:26 it’s burning tobacco smoke, it’s not the nicotine.
01:30:29 So it’s not like alcohol prohibition
01:30:34 where like you couldn’t create the O’Douls,
01:30:37 the near beer is not gonna have the alcohol.
01:30:39 And so people like, here you do have the possibility
01:30:42 of giving another medium the ability to deliver the drug,
01:30:48 which still aren’t to a lot of people
01:30:49 isn’t preferred to the tobacco, but nonetheless,
01:30:52 again, if you overregulate those
01:30:54 and make them less attractive,
01:30:55 like if you aren’t thoughtful about the nicotine limits
01:30:58 and thoughtful about whether you’re allowing flavors
01:31:00 and everything, and if you overtax them,
01:31:03 you’re actually decreasing the ability to compete
01:31:06 with the more dangerous products.
01:31:08 So I feel like there is a potential path forward,
01:31:11 but I don’t have a lot of confidence
01:31:12 that that’s gonna be done in a thoughtful analytical way.
01:31:17 And I’m afraid that it could decrease the increase
01:31:20 of black market calls all of the harms.
01:31:23 Like every other drug we’re moving away from the prohibition
01:31:26 model slowly, but the big barge ship
01:31:30 is like making a very slow turn.
01:31:32 And like, okay, we really had to step back
01:31:34 and question if we went with nicotine, tobacco,
01:31:38 are we moving into that direction?
01:31:41 Like big picture.
01:31:43 It doesn’t quite make sense.
01:31:45 You’ve done a study on cocaine and sexual decision making.
01:31:52 Can you explain?
01:31:53 Can you explain the findings?
01:31:56 I mean, in a broad sense, how do you do a study
01:32:03 that involves cocaine and the other,
01:32:08 how do you do a study involving sexual decision making?
01:32:13 And then how do you do a study that combines both?
01:32:16 Yeah, sex and drugs too.
01:32:18 I’m just missing the rock and roll.
01:32:19 It’s like the two controversial,
01:32:21 rock and roll isn’t very controversial anymore.
01:32:23 Yeah, so the cocaine, lots of hoops to jump through.
01:32:26 You gotta have a lot of medical support.
01:32:28 You gotta be at a basically an institution,
01:32:30 a research unit like I’m at that has a long history
01:32:34 and the ability to do that and get ethics approval,
01:32:39 get FDA approval, but it’s possible.
01:32:41 And whenever you’re dealing with something like cocaine,
01:32:43 you would never wanna give that to someone
01:32:46 who hasn’t already used cocaine.
01:32:49 And you wanna make sure you’re not giving it to someone
01:32:51 who is an active user who wants to quit.
01:32:53 So the idea is like, okay,
01:32:54 if you’re using this type of drug anyway,
01:32:57 and we’re really sure you’re not looking to quit,
01:33:00 hey, use a couple of times in the lab with us
01:33:04 so we can at least learn something.
01:33:06 And part of what we learn is maybe to help people not use
01:33:09 and it’ll reduce the harms of cocaine.
01:33:12 So there’s hoops to jump through.
01:33:14 With the sexual decision making,
01:33:16 I looked at the main thing I looked at was this model
01:33:18 of I applied delayed discounting
01:33:21 to what we talked about earlier, the now versus later,
01:33:24 that kind of decision making that goes along with addiction.
01:33:27 I applied that to condom use decisions.
01:33:30 And I’ve done probably published about 20 or so papers
01:33:33 with this and different drugs.
01:33:36 So the primary metric is whether you do
01:33:39 or don’t use a condom?
01:33:40 Right, and so this is using hypothetical decision making,
01:33:43 but I’ve published some studies looking at,
01:33:47 showing a tight correspondence to self report it
01:33:51 in correlational studies to self reported behavior.
01:33:54 So this is like, so like how do you,
01:33:57 did you do a questionnaire kind of thing?
01:33:59 Right, so it’s not quite a questionnaire,
01:34:02 but it’s a behavioral task requiring them to respond to.
01:34:08 So you show pictures of a bunch of individuals
01:34:11 and it’s kind of like one of these fun behavioral,
01:34:13 like a lot of them you get like numbers are boring,
01:34:15 but it’s like, okay, hot or not,
01:34:17 like which of these 60 people
01:34:18 would you have a one night stand with?
01:34:20 Men, women, so pick whatever you like,
01:34:22 a little bit of this, a little bit of that,
01:34:23 whatever you’re into, it’s all variety there.
01:34:26 Out of that group, you pick some subsets of people.
01:34:29 Who do you think is the one you most want to have sex
01:34:31 with the least, he thinks most likely to have an STI
01:34:34 or least likely a sexually transmitted disease by STI.
01:34:37 And then you could do certain decision making questions.
01:34:41 So what I’ve done is asked,
01:34:43 say this person you read a vignette,
01:34:45 this person wants to have sex with you now you’ve met them,
01:34:46 you get along casual sex scenario,
01:34:50 like a one night stand with a condoms available,
01:34:53 just rate your likelihood from one to 100
01:34:54 on this kind of scale, would you use it?
01:34:57 But then you can change your scenario to say,
01:34:59 okay, now imagine you have to wait five minutes
01:35:01 to use a condom.
01:35:02 So the choice is now instead of using condom
01:35:04 versus not in terms of your likelihood scale,
01:35:07 it now what ranges from have sex now without a condom
01:35:11 versus on the other end of the scale
01:35:13 is wait five minutes to have sex with a condom.
01:35:16 So you rate your likelihood of where your behavior
01:35:18 would be along that continuum.
01:35:20 And then you could say, okay, well, what about an hour?
01:35:22 What about three hours?
01:35:23 What about 24 hours?
01:35:25 Misunderstanding, now without a condom
01:35:31 or five minutes later with a condom?
01:35:32 Right.
01:35:33 So what’s supposed to be the preference for the person?
01:35:41 There’s a lot of factors coming into play, right?
01:35:44 There’s like pleasure, a personal preference
01:35:49 and then there’s also the safety.
01:35:51 Those are two like, are those competing objectives?
01:35:55 Right, and so we do get at that
01:35:57 through some individual measures
01:35:58 and this task is more of a face valid task
01:36:01 where there’s a lot underneath the hood.
01:36:02 So for most people, sex with the condom is the better reward
01:36:07 but underneath the hood of that
01:36:09 is just at the purely physical level,
01:36:11 they’d rather have sex without the condom.
01:36:13 It’s gonna feel better.
01:36:14 What do you mean by reward?
01:36:15 Like when they calculate their trajectory through life
01:36:19 and try to optimize it,
01:36:21 then sex with the condom is a good idea?
01:36:24 Well, it’s really based on, I mean, yeah, yeah.
01:36:27 Presumably that’s the case that there’s,
01:36:31 but it’s measured by like what would you,
01:36:33 really that first question where there is no delay.
01:36:35 Most people say they would be at the higher end scale
01:36:38 a lot of times 100% they would say
01:36:39 they would definitely use a condom.
01:36:41 Not everybody and that we know that’s the case.
01:36:43 See, it’s like that some people don’t like condoms,
01:36:46 some people say, yeah, I wanna use a condom
01:36:49 but quarter of the time ended up not
01:36:50 because I just getting lost in the passion of the moment.
01:36:53 So for the people, I mean, the only reason that people,
01:36:56 so behaviorally speaking,
01:36:58 at least for a large number of people
01:37:00 in many circumstances condom use as a reinforcer
01:37:02 just because people do it.
01:37:03 Like, why are they doing it?
01:37:07 They’re not because it makes the sex feel better
01:37:10 but because it makes that it allows
01:37:12 for at least the same general reward.
01:37:15 Even if actually, even if it feels a little bit
01:37:16 not as good with the condom, nonetheless,
01:37:20 they get most of the benefit without the concurrent,
01:37:24 oh my gosh, there’s this risk of either unwanted pregnancy
01:37:27 or getting HIV or way more likely than HIV,
01:37:31 herpes in general awards, et cetera, all the lovely ones.
01:37:37 And we’ve actually done research saying like
01:37:38 where we gauge the probability
01:37:40 of these individual different SDIs.
01:37:42 And it’s like, what’s the heavy hitter
01:37:43 in terms of what people are using to judge
01:37:46 and to evaluate whether they’re gonna use a condom.
01:37:49 So that’s why the condom use is the delayed thing,
01:37:52 five minutes or more.
01:37:54 And then, yeah, because that’s the prefer.
01:37:56 Which would normally be the larger later reward
01:37:58 like the $10 versus the nine, it’s like the $10,
01:38:00 which is counterintuitive
01:38:02 if you just think about the physical pleasure.
01:38:04 So that’s a good thing to measure.
01:38:07 So condom use is a really good concrete,
01:38:09 quantifiable thing that you can use in a study.
01:38:13 And then you can add a lot of different elements
01:38:15 like the presence of cocaine and so on.
01:38:18 Yeah, you can get people loaded on like any number of drugs
01:38:20 like cocaine, alcohol and methamphetamine
01:38:22 are the three that I’ve done and published on.
01:38:24 And it’s interesting that.
01:38:26 These are fun studies, man.
01:38:28 Right, I love to get people loaded in a safe context
01:38:32 and like, but to really, it started,
01:38:34 like there was some early research with alcohol.
01:38:36 I mean, the psychedelics are the most interesting,
01:38:38 but it’s like all of these drugs are fascinating.
01:38:40 The fact that all of these are keys
01:38:41 that unlock a certain like psychological experience
01:38:45 in the head.
01:38:46 And so there was this work with alcohol
01:38:48 that showed that it didn’t affect those monetary
01:38:51 delay discounting decisions,
01:38:53 $9 now versus $10 later.
01:38:54 And I’m like getting people drunk.
01:38:57 And I thought to myself, are you telling me
01:38:59 that getting someone,
01:39:02 that people being drunk does not cause people
01:39:05 at least sometimes to make,
01:39:07 to choose what’s good for them in the short term
01:39:10 at the expense of what’s good for them in the long term.
01:39:13 It’s like, bullshit, like we see like,
01:39:16 but in what context does that happen?
01:39:19 So that’s something that inspired me to go
01:39:21 in this direction of like, aha, risky sexual decisions
01:39:25 is something they do when they’re drunk.
01:39:27 They don’t necessarily go home.
01:39:28 And even though some people have gambling problems
01:39:30 and alcohol interacts with that,
01:39:31 the most typical thing is not for people to go home,
01:39:34 log on and change their allocation
01:39:36 in their retirement account or something like that.
01:39:40 But they’re more likely, risky sexual decisions,
01:39:42 they’re more likely to not wait the five minutes
01:39:44 for the condom and instead go no condom now.
01:39:48 Right, that’s a big effect.
01:39:49 And we see that.
01:39:50 And interestingly, we do not see,
01:39:53 with those different drugs, we don’t see an effect
01:39:55 if we just look at that zero delay condition.
01:39:57 In other words, the condoms right there waiting to be used,
01:39:59 how likely are to use it?
01:40:00 You don’t see it.
01:40:01 I mean, people are by and large gonna use the condom.
01:40:05 So, and that’s the way most of this research
01:40:08 outside of behavioral economics
01:40:09 that just looked at condom use decisions,
01:40:12 very little of which has ever actually administered
01:40:15 the drugs, which is another unique aspect.
01:40:17 But they usually just look at like assuming
01:40:19 the condom is there.
01:40:20 But this is more using behavioral economics
01:40:22 to delve in and model something that,
01:40:24 and I’ve done survey research on this,
01:40:26 modeling what actually happens.
01:40:28 Like you meet someone at a laundromat,
01:40:30 like you weren’t planning on like,
01:40:32 and it’s like one thing leads to another,
01:40:34 they live around the corner, these things.
01:40:37 And like we did one survey with men who have sex with men
01:40:43 and found that 25% of them, 24%, about a quarter,
01:40:48 reported in the last six months
01:40:49 that they had unprotected anal intercourse,
01:40:52 which is the most risky
01:40:54 in terms of sexually transmitted infection.
01:40:58 In the last six months, in a situation
01:41:00 where they would have used a condom,
01:41:01 but they simply didn’t use one
01:41:02 just because they didn’t have one on them.
01:41:04 So this to me, it’s like,
01:41:07 if unless we delve into this and understand this,
01:41:10 these suboptimal conditions,
01:41:12 we’re not gonna fully address the problem.
01:41:14 There’s plenty of people that say,
01:41:15 yep, condom use is good.
01:41:17 I use it a lot of the time.
01:41:19 It’s like, where is that failing?
01:41:21 And it’s under these suboptimal conditions,
01:41:22 which in Frank, if you think about it,
01:41:24 it’s like most of the case.
01:41:26 Action is unfolding, things are getting hot and heavy.
01:41:28 Someone’s like, do you got a condom?
01:41:31 Eh, no.
01:41:32 It’s like, do they break the action
01:41:34 and take 10 minutes to go to the convenience store
01:41:37 or whatever?
01:41:38 Maybe everything’s closed.
01:41:39 Maybe they gotta wait till tomorrow.
01:41:42 And there’s something to be studied there on the,
01:41:47 that just seems like an unfortunate set of circumstances.
01:41:49 Like, what’s the solution to that is,
01:41:53 I mean, what’s the psychology
01:41:56 that needs to be taken apart there?
01:42:00 Because it just seems like that’s the way of life.
01:42:02 We don’t expect the things to happen.
01:42:05 Are we supposed to expect them better
01:42:07 to be self aware enough about our calculations?
01:42:11 Or you see the 10 minute detour to a convenience store
01:42:15 as a kind of thing that we need to understand
01:42:20 how we humans evaluate the cost of that.
01:42:26 I think in terms of like how we use this to help people,
01:42:30 it’s mostly on the environment side,
01:42:32 rather than on the individual side.
01:42:34 Yeah, although those interact.
01:42:36 So it’s like, in one sense, if you’re,
01:42:38 especially if you’re gonna be drinking
01:42:39 or using another substance that is associated
01:42:42 with a stimulant, alcohol and stimulants
01:42:45 go along with risky sex.
01:42:47 Good to be aware that you might make decisions
01:42:49 just to tell yourself you might make a decision
01:42:50 that you wouldn’t have made in your sober state.
01:42:54 And so, hey, throwing a condom in the purse,
01:42:57 in the pocket, might be a good idea.
01:43:00 I think at the environmental level,
01:43:02 just more condom, I mean, it highlights what we know
01:43:04 about just making condoms widely available.
01:43:07 Something that I’d like to do
01:43:09 is like reinforcing condom use.
01:43:12 So just getting people used to carrying a condom
01:43:17 everywhere they go.
01:43:18 Because once it’s in someone’s habit,
01:43:20 if they are, say, like a young, single person,
01:43:22 and they occasionally have unprotected sex,
01:43:26 like training those people,
01:43:27 like what if you got a text message
01:43:30 once every few days saying,
01:43:31 ah, if you send back a photo of a condom,
01:43:34 within a minute you get a reward of $5.
01:43:37 You could shape that up like that.
01:43:39 It’s a process called contingency management.
01:43:40 It’s basically just straight up operant reinforcement.
01:43:43 You could shape that up with no problem.
01:43:45 And I mean, those procedures of contingency management,
01:43:50 giving people systematic rewards is like,
01:43:52 for example, the most powerful way
01:43:53 to reduce cocaine use in addicted people.
01:43:57 And by saying, if you show me a negative urine for cocaine,
01:44:04 I’m gonna give you a monetary reward.
01:44:05 And like that has huge effects
01:44:07 in terms of decreasing cocaine use.
01:44:09 If that can be that powerful
01:44:10 for something like stopping cocaine use,
01:44:12 how powerful could that be for shaping up
01:44:15 just carrying a condom?
01:44:16 Because the primary, unlike cocaine use,
01:44:19 here, we’re not saying you can’t have the main reward,
01:44:22 like you could still have sex,
01:44:24 and you can even have sex in the way
01:44:26 that you tell yourself you’d rather do it
01:44:28 if the condom is available.
01:44:35 Relatively speaking, it’s way easier
01:44:36 than like not using cocaine if you like using cocaine.
01:44:39 It’s just basically getting in the habit
01:44:41 of carrying a condom.
01:44:43 So that’s just one idea of like why.
01:44:45 There could be also the capitalistic solutions
01:44:47 of like, there could be a business opportunity
01:44:49 for like a door dash for condoms.
01:44:51 Oh yeah.
01:44:52 Like delivery.
01:44:53 I thought about this.
01:44:55 Within five minute delivery of a condom at any location,
01:44:57 like Uber for condoms.
01:44:59 I’ve thought about it, not with condoms,
01:45:01 but a very similar line of thinking,
01:45:03 a line that you’re going into in terms of Uber
01:45:05 and people getting drunk when they enter the bar
01:45:09 playing to have one or two,
01:45:10 they ended up having five or six,
01:45:11 and it’s like, okay, yeah, you can take the cab home,
01:45:14 the Uber home, but you’ve left your car there.
01:45:17 It might get towed.
01:45:18 You might like, there’s also the hassle of just,
01:45:20 you wanna wake up tomorrow with your hangover
01:45:22 and forget about it and move on.
01:45:24 And I think a lot of people in their situation,
01:45:26 they’re like, screw it.
01:45:27 I’m gonna take the risk, just get it.
01:45:29 What if you had an Uber service where two,
01:45:33 you have a car come out with two drivers
01:45:38 and one of them, two sober drivers, obviously,
01:45:45 and the person, the one driver drops off the other
01:45:49 that then drives you home in their car, in your car,
01:45:55 so that you can, I mean,
01:45:57 I think a lot of people would pay 50 bucks.
01:45:59 It’s gonna be more than a regular Uber,
01:46:01 but it’s like, it’s gonna be done.
01:46:02 I got the money.
01:46:03 I already spent 60 bucks at the bar tonight.
01:46:06 Like, just get the damn thing done tomorrow.
01:46:09 I’m done with it.
01:46:10 I wake up, my car’s in front of my house.
01:46:12 I think that would be, I think someone could,
01:46:14 I’m not gonna open that business,
01:46:15 so if anyone hears this and wants to take off with that,
01:46:19 I think it could help a lot of people.
01:46:20 Yeah, definitely.
01:46:21 And Uber itself, I would say,
01:46:23 helped a huge amount of people,
01:46:25 just making it easy to make the decision
01:46:28 of going home, not driving yourself.
01:46:31 I read about in Austin where they,
01:46:33 I don’t know where it’s at now,
01:46:34 where they outlawed Uber for a while.
01:46:36 You know, because of the whole taxicab union type thing
01:46:39 and how just, yeah, there were like hordes of drunk people
01:46:42 that were used to Uber
01:46:44 that now didn’t have a cheap alternative.
01:46:47 So just, we didn’t exactly mention,
01:46:51 you’ve done a lot of studies in sexual decision making
01:46:54 with different drugs.
01:46:55 Is there some interesting insights or findings
01:46:59 on the difference between the different drugs?
01:47:03 So I think you said meth as well.
01:47:06 So cocaine, is there some interesting characteristics
01:47:09 about decision making that these drugs alter
01:47:12 versus like alcohol, all those kinds of things?
01:47:14 I think, and there’s much more to study with this,
01:47:16 but I think the biggie there is that the stimulants,
01:47:20 they create risky sex by really increasing
01:47:24 the rewarding value of sex.
01:47:26 Like if you talk to people that are really,
01:47:27 especially that are hooked on stimulants,
01:47:30 one of the biggies is like sex on coke or meth
01:47:33 is like so much better than sex without.
01:47:35 And that’s a big part of why they have trouble quitting
01:47:38 because it’s so tied to their sex life.
01:47:41 So it’s not that your decision making is broken,
01:47:44 it’s just that you, well, you allocate.
01:47:46 It’s a different aspect of their decision.
01:47:48 Yeah, on the reward side.
01:47:49 I think on the alcohol, it works more through disinhibition.
01:47:52 It’s like, alcohol is really good at reducing the ability
01:47:56 of a delayed punisher to have an effect on current behavior.
01:48:00 In other words, there’s this bad thing
01:48:02 that’s gonna happen tomorrow or a week from now
01:48:04 or 20 years from now.
01:48:07 Being drunk is a really good way,
01:48:09 and you see this in like rats making decisions.
01:48:12 A high dose of alcohol makes someone less sensitive
01:48:15 to those consequences.
01:48:16 So I think that’s the lever that’s being hit with alcohol
01:48:20 and it’s the more, just the increasing the rewarding value
01:48:23 of sex by the psycho stimulants on that side.
01:48:26 We actually found that it, and it was amazing
01:48:28 because like hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent
01:48:31 by NIH to study the connection between cocaine and HIV.
01:48:35 Like we ran the first study on my grant
01:48:38 that like actually just gave people cocaine
01:48:41 under double blind conditions and showed that like,
01:48:44 yeah, when people are on coke,
01:48:46 like their ratings of sexual desire,
01:48:48 even though they’re not in a sexual situation,
01:48:50 yeah, you’ve shown them some pictures,
01:48:51 but they’re just saying they’re horny.
01:48:53 Like you get subjective ratings
01:48:54 of like how much sexual desire are you feeling right now.
01:48:57 People get horny when they’re on stimulants.
01:49:00 And a lot of people say, duh,
01:49:03 if they really know these drugs.
01:49:04 But that’s a rigorous study that’s in the lab
01:49:06 that shows like there’s a plot.
01:49:09 Right, the dose effects of that, the time course of that.
01:49:12 Yeah, it’s not just.
01:49:13 Can you please tell me there’s a paper with a plot
01:49:16 that shows dose versus evaluation of like horniness.
01:49:21 Yeah, we didn’t say horniness.
01:49:22 We said sexual arousal, yeah, basically, yeah.
01:49:24 There’s a plot, I’m gonna find this plot.
01:49:26 Right, I’ll send it to you.
01:49:27 There was one headline from some publicity on the work
01:49:32 that said, horny cocaine users don’t use condoms
01:49:36 or something like that.
01:49:38 You gotta love journalism.
01:49:39 I wouldn’t have put it that way, but like, yeah, that’s right.
01:49:41 I guess that’s what it finds.
01:49:43 So you’ve published a bunch of studies on psychedelics.
01:49:47 Is there some especially favorite insightful findings
01:49:52 from some of these that you could talk about?
01:49:55 So maybe favorite studies or just something
01:49:58 that pops to mind in terms of both the goals
01:50:02 and like the major insights gained
01:50:04 and maybe the side little curiosities
01:50:07 that you discovered along the way.
01:50:09 Yeah, I think of the work with like using psilocybin
01:50:12 to help people quit smoking.
01:50:14 And we’ve talked about smoking being such a serious addiction
01:50:19 and so that what inspired me to get into that
01:50:23 was just kind of having like behavioral psychology
01:50:26 as my primary lens, sort of this sort of like,
01:50:32 you know, kind of radical empirical basis of,
01:50:36 I’m really interested in the mystical experience
01:50:40 and all of these reports, very interested.
01:50:44 And, but at the same time, I’m like, okay,
01:50:47 let’s get down to some behavior change
01:50:50 and something that we can record,
01:50:52 like quantitatively verify biologically.
01:50:55 So find all kinds of negative behaviors
01:50:58 that people practice and see if we can turn those
01:51:01 into positive or change their behavior.
01:51:02 Right, like really change it, not just people saying,
01:51:05 which again is interesting, I’m not dismissing it,
01:51:07 but folks that say my life has turned around,
01:51:09 I feel this has completely changed me.
01:51:11 It’s like, yep, that’s good.
01:51:13 All right, let’s see if we can harness that and test that.
01:51:16 And just something that’s real behavior change.
01:51:20 You know what I mean?
01:51:21 It’s quantifiable.
01:51:22 It’s like, okay, you’ve been smoking for 30 years,
01:51:25 you know, like that’s a real thing.
01:51:26 And you’ve tried a dozen times, like seriously to quit
01:51:29 and you haven’t been able to long term, like, okay.
01:51:32 And if you quit, like we’ll ask you and I’ll believe you,
01:51:35 but I don’t trust everyone reading the paper to believe you.
01:51:38 So we’re gonna have you pee in a cup and we’ll test that.
01:51:40 And we’ll have you blow into this little machine
01:51:42 that measures carbon monoxide and we’ll test that.
01:51:44 So multiple levels of biological verification.
01:51:48 Like now we’re getting like,
01:51:50 to me that’s where the rubber meets the road
01:51:51 in terms of like therapeutics.
01:51:53 It’s like, can we really shift behavior?
01:51:55 And since, and so much as we’ve talked about
01:51:58 my other scientific work outside of psychedelics
01:52:00 is about understanding addiction and drug use.
01:52:02 So it’s like, you know, looking at addiction,
01:52:04 it’s a no brainer and smoking is just a great example.
01:52:07 And so back to your question,
01:52:08 like we’ve had really high success rates.
01:52:11 I mean, it really, it rivals anything that’s been published
01:52:14 in the scientific literature.
01:52:16 The caveat is that, you know,
01:52:18 that’s based on our initial trial of only 15 people,
01:52:20 but extremely high longterm success rates,
01:52:24 80% at six months per smoke free.
01:52:27 So can we discuss the details of this?
01:52:29 So first of all, which psychedelic are we talking about?
01:52:31 And maybe can you talk about the 15 people
01:52:34 and how the study ran and what you found?
01:52:37 Yeah, yeah.
01:52:38 So the drug we’re using is psilocybin
01:52:40 and we’re using moderately high and high doses of psilocybin.
01:52:45 And I should say this about most of our work,
01:52:47 these are not kind of museum level doses.
01:52:50 In other words, nothing,
01:52:51 even big fans of psychedelics wanna take
01:52:53 and go to a concert or go to the museum.
01:52:57 If someone’s at Burning Man on this type of dose,
01:52:59 like they’re probably gonna wanna find their way back
01:53:02 to their tent and zip up and hunker down
01:53:04 for, you know, not be around strangers.
01:53:07 By the way, the delivery method,
01:53:10 so psilocybin is mushrooms, I guess.
01:53:16 What’s the usual, is it edible?
01:53:19 Is there some other way?
01:53:20 Like, how is people supposed to think
01:53:21 about the correct dosing of these things?
01:53:25 Cause I’ve heard that it’s hard to dose correctly.
01:53:29 That’s right.
01:53:30 So in our studies, we use the pure compound psilocybin.
01:53:33 So it’s a single molecule, you know, a bunch of molecules.
01:53:36 And we give them a capsule with that in it.
01:53:41 And so it’s just, you know, a little capsule, they swallow.
01:53:44 What people, when psilocybin is used outside of research,
01:53:49 it’s always in the context of mushrooms
01:53:53 cause they’re so easy to grow.
01:53:54 There’s no market for synthetic psilocybin.
01:53:56 There’s no reason for that to pop up.
01:53:58 The high dose that we use in research is 30 milligrams,
01:54:08 body weight adjusted.
01:54:10 So if you’re a heavier person,
01:54:11 it might be like 40 or even 50 milligrams.
01:54:16 We have some data that, based on that data,
01:54:18 we’re actually moving into like getting away
01:54:20 from the body weight adjusting of the dose
01:54:22 and just giving an absolute dose.
01:54:23 It seems like there’s no justification
01:54:25 for the body weight based dosing, but I digress.
01:54:29 Generally 30, 40 milligrams, it’s a high dose.
01:54:32 And based on average, even though, as you alluded to,
01:54:34 there’s variability, which gets people into some trouble
01:54:37 in terms of mushrooms, like psilocybe cubensis,
01:54:40 which is the most common species
01:54:42 in the illicit market in the US.
01:54:44 This is about equivalent to five dried grams,
01:54:47 which is right at about where McKenna and others,
01:54:51 they call it a heroic dose.
01:54:55 This is not hanging out with your friends,
01:54:57 going to the concert again.
01:54:59 So this is a real deal dose, even to people that really,
01:55:03 just even to psychonauts.
01:55:05 And we’ve even had a number of studies.
01:55:06 Psychonauts?
01:55:07 Yeah, people that, yeah, astronaut or cosmonaut,
01:55:11 like for psychedelics.
01:55:14 Yeah, going as far out as possible.
01:55:16 But even for them, even for those
01:55:19 who’ve flown to space before.
01:55:21 Right, right, they’re like, holy shit,
01:55:22 I didn’t know the orbit would be that far out.
01:55:25 Or I escaped the orbit, I was in interplanetary space there.
01:55:31 So these folks, the 15 folks in the study,
01:55:34 there’s not a question of dose being too low
01:55:38 to truly have an impact.
01:55:40 Right, right, out of hundreds of volunteers over the years,
01:55:43 we’ve only seen a couple of people
01:55:44 where there was a mild effect of the 30 milligrams.
01:55:48 And who knows, that person’s, their serotonins,
01:55:51 they might have lesser density
01:55:53 of serotonin 2A receptors or something, we don’t know.
01:55:56 But it’s extremely rare.
01:55:57 For most people, this is like something interesting
01:56:00 is gonna happen, put it that way.
01:56:01 Speaking of Joe Rogan, I think that Jamie,
01:56:04 his producer, is immune to psychedelics.
01:56:09 So maybe he’s a good recruit for the study to test.
01:56:13 So that’s interesting.
01:56:13 Now I’m not, the caveat is I’m not encouraging
01:56:16 anything illicit, but just theoretically,
01:56:19 my first question as a behavioral pharmacologist
01:56:21 is like, you know, increase the dose.
01:56:23 You know, like really, let’s see the full dose.
01:56:26 I’m not telling him, Jamie, to do that,
01:56:27 but like, okay, like, you know,
01:56:30 you’re taking the same amount
01:56:31 that friends might be taking, but yeah.
01:56:33 But he was also referring to the psychedelic effects
01:56:35 of edible marijuana, which is,
01:56:38 is there rules on dosage for like marijuana?
01:56:46 Is there limits?
01:56:47 Like what place where it’s, this is, this all goes,
01:56:50 it probably is state by state, right?
01:56:52 It is, but most, they’ve gone that direction
01:56:54 in states that didn’t initially have these rules
01:56:56 have now have them.
01:56:57 So it was like, you’ll get, I think, you know,
01:56:59 five, 10 mil, I think 10, five or 10 milligrams of THC
01:57:04 being a common, and like, and this is an important thing,
01:57:07 like where they’ve moved from not being allowed to say,
01:57:10 like have a whole candy bar
01:57:11 and have each of the eight or 10 squares
01:57:13 on the candy bar being 10 milligrams,
01:57:16 but it’s like, no, the whole thing,
01:57:17 because like, you know, someone gets a candy bar,
01:57:19 they’re eating the freaking candy bar.
01:57:20 And it’s like, unless you’re a daily cannabis user,
01:57:24 if you take, you know, a hundred milligrams,
01:57:26 it’s like, that’s what could lead to a bad trip for someone.
01:57:30 And it’s like, you know, a lot of these people,
01:57:32 it’s like, oh, you used to smoke a little weed in college,
01:57:35 they might say they’re visiting Denver
01:57:37 for a business trip and they’re like, why not?
01:57:39 Let’s give it a shot, you know?
01:57:40 And they’re like, oh, I don’t want to smoke something
01:57:41 because it’s going to, so I’m going to be safer
01:57:43 with this edible, they might consume this massive,
01:57:47 you know, but there’s huge tolerance.
01:57:48 So a regular, like for someone who’s smoking weed every day,
01:57:52 they might take five milligrams
01:57:53 and kind of hardly feel anything.
01:57:55 And they may really need something like 30, 40, 50 milligrams
01:58:00 to have a strong effect.
01:58:02 But yeah, so they’ve evolved in terms of the rules
01:58:06 about like, okay, what constitutes a dose, you know?
01:58:11 Which is why you see less big candy bars and more,
01:58:13 or if it is a whole candy bar,
01:58:15 you’re only getting a smaller dose like 10 milligrams or,
01:58:17 yeah, because that’s where people get in trouble
01:58:20 more often with edibles.
01:58:22 Yeah, except Joey Diaz, which I’ve heard.
01:58:25 That’s definitely somebody I want to talk to
01:58:27 out of the crazy comedians I want to talk to as well.
01:58:30 Anyway, so yeah, the study of the 15
01:58:33 and the dose not being a question.
01:58:36 So like, what was the recruitment based on?
01:58:39 What was the, like, how did the study get conducted?
01:58:44 Yeah, so the recruitment, and I really liked this fact,
01:58:46 it wasn’t people that, you know, largely were, you know,
01:58:49 we were honest about what we were studying,
01:58:51 but for most people, it was,
01:58:53 they were in the category of like, you know,
01:58:56 not particularly interested in psychedelics,
01:58:58 but more of like, they want to quit smoking.
01:59:00 They’ve tried everything but the kitchen sink.
01:59:03 And this sounds like the kitchen sink.
01:59:05 You know, and it’s like, well, it’s Hopkins.
01:59:08 So, you know, thinking that sounds like it’s safe enough.
01:59:11 So like, what the hell, let’s give it a shot.
01:59:13 Like most of them were in that category,
01:59:15 which I really, you know, I appreciate
01:59:19 because it’s more of a test, you know, of, yeah,
01:59:24 just like a better model of what,
01:59:26 if these are approved as medicines,
01:59:29 like what you’re going to have the average participant,
01:59:31 you know, be like.
01:59:34 And so the therapy involves a good amount
01:59:37 of non psilocybin sessions, of preparatory sessions,
01:59:41 like eight hours of getting to know the person,
01:59:44 like the two people who are going to be their guides
01:59:45 or the person in the room with them during the experience,
01:59:50 having these discussions with them
01:59:52 where you’re both kind of rapport building,
01:59:53 just kind of discussing their life, getting to know them,
01:59:56 but then also telling them, preparing them
01:59:58 about the psilocybin experience.
02:00:01 Oh, it could be scary in this sense,
02:00:03 but here’s how to handle it, trust, let go, be open.
02:00:05 And also during that preparation time,
02:00:08 preparing them to quit smoking,
02:00:09 using really standard bread and butter techniques
02:00:12 that can all fall under the label typically
02:00:15 of the cognitive behavioral therapy,
02:00:16 just stuff like before you quit,
02:00:19 we assign a target quit date ahead of time,
02:00:22 you’re not just quitting on the fly.
02:00:24 And that happens to be the target quit date
02:00:26 in our study was the day
02:00:27 where they got the first psilocybin dose,
02:00:29 but doing things like keeping a smoking diary,
02:00:31 like, okay, during the three weeks until you quit,
02:00:34 every time you smoke a cigarette,
02:00:35 just like jot down what you’re doing,
02:00:37 what you’re feeling, what situation, that type of thing.
02:00:39 And then having some discussion around that
02:00:41 and then going over the pluses and minuses in their life
02:00:44 that smoking kind of comes with
02:00:45 and being honest about the, this is what it does for me,
02:00:47 this is why I like it, this is why I don’t like it.
02:00:50 Preparing for like, what if you do slip, how to handle it,
02:00:53 like don’t dwell on guilt
02:00:54 because that leads to more full on relapse,
02:00:57 just kind of treat it as a learning experience,
02:00:59 that type of thing.
02:01:00 Then you have the session day where they come in,
02:01:06 five minutes of questionnaires,
02:01:07 but pretty much they jump into the,
02:01:09 we touch base with them and we give them the capsule.
02:01:13 It’s a serious setting, but a comfortable one.
02:01:17 They’re in a room that looks more like a living room
02:01:19 than like a research lab.
02:01:21 We measure their blood pressure, their experience,
02:01:22 but kind of minimal kind of medical vibe to it.
02:01:25 And they lay down on a couch
02:01:28 and it’s a purposefully an introspective experience.
02:01:32 So they’re laying on a couch
02:01:33 during most of the five to six hour experience
02:01:36 and they’re wearing eye shades,
02:01:38 which is a better connotation as a name than blindfold.
02:01:40 But like, yeah, so they’re wearing eye shades,
02:01:42 but that’s, and they’re wearing headphones
02:01:45 through which music is played, mostly classical,
02:01:49 although we’ve done some variation of that.
02:01:50 I have a paper that was recently accepted
02:01:52 kind of comparing it to more like gongs
02:01:54 and harmonic bowls and that type of thing,
02:01:57 kind of like sound, you know, kind of.
02:02:00 You’ve also added this to the science
02:02:04 and have a paper on the musical accompaniment
02:02:07 to the psychedelic experience, that’s fascinating.
02:02:09 Right, and we found basically that about the same effect,
02:02:12 even by a trend, not significant,
02:02:13 but a little bit better of an effect,
02:02:15 both in terms of subjective experience and longterm,
02:02:19 whether it helped people quit smoking,
02:02:20 just a little tiny non significant trend
02:02:22 even favoring the novel playlist
02:02:25 with the Tibetan singing bowls and the gongs
02:02:28 and didgeridoo and all of that.
02:02:30 And so anyway, just saying, okay,
02:02:33 we can deviate a little bit from this,
02:02:35 like what goes back to the 1950s of this method
02:02:37 of using classical music as part of this psychedelic therapy,
02:02:41 but they’re listening to the music
02:02:42 and they’re not playing DJ in real time.
02:02:44 You know, it’s like, you know, they’re just,
02:02:46 be the baby, you’re not the decision maker for today,
02:02:49 go inward, trust, let go, be open.
02:02:51 And pretty much the only interaction,
02:02:53 like that we’re there for is to deal
02:02:56 with any anxiety that comes up.
02:02:57 So guide is kind of a misnomer in a sense.
02:03:00 It’s, we’re more of a safety net.
02:03:02 And so like, tell us if you feel some butterflies
02:03:05 that we can provide reassurance,
02:03:06 a hold of their hand can be very powerful.
02:03:09 I’ve had people tell me that that was like the thing
02:03:10 that really just grounded them.
02:03:12 Can you break apart trust, let go, be open?
02:03:17 What, so in a sense,
02:03:21 how would you describe the experience,
02:03:25 the intellectual and the emotional approach
02:03:29 that people are supposed to take
02:03:30 to really let go into the experience?
02:03:35 Yeah, so trust is, trust the context,
02:03:40 you know, trust the guides,
02:03:41 trust the overall institutional context.
02:03:45 I see it as layers of like safety,
02:03:47 even though it’s everything I told you
02:03:48 about the relative bodily safety of psilocybin.
02:03:51 Nonetheless, we’re still getting blood pressure
02:03:52 throughout the session, just in case.
02:03:54 We have a physician on hand who can respond just in case.
02:03:57 We’re literally across the street
02:03:59 from the emergency department, just in case.
02:04:01 You know, all of that, you know.
02:04:02 Privacy is another thing you’ve talked about
02:04:04 is just trusting that you’re,
02:04:07 and whatever happens is just between you
02:04:09 and the people in the study.
02:04:10 Right, and hopefully they’ve really gotten that
02:04:13 by that point deep into the study
02:04:14 that like they realize where do we take that seriously
02:04:17 and everything else, you know.
02:04:18 And so it’s really kind of like a very special role
02:04:20 that you’re playing as a researcher or a guide
02:04:22 and hopefully they have your trust.
02:04:25 And so, you know, and trust that they could be as emotional,
02:04:28 everything from laughter to tears,
02:04:29 like that’s gonna be welcomed.
02:04:30 We’re not judging them.
02:04:31 It’s like, it’s a therapeutic relationship
02:04:33 where, you know, this is a safe container.
02:04:36 It’s a safe space.
02:04:37 It’s a lot of baggage to that term,
02:04:39 but it truly is, it’s a safe space for that,
02:04:42 for this type of experience and to let go.
02:04:45 So trust, let’s see, let go.
02:04:48 So that relates to the emotional, like,
02:04:50 you feel like crying, cry.
02:04:52 You feel like laughing your ass off, laugh your ass off.
02:04:55 You know, it’s like all the things actually
02:04:58 that sometimes it’s more challenging
02:04:59 with someone has a large recreational use,
02:05:02 sometimes it’s harder for them
02:05:03 because people in that context, and understandably so,
02:05:07 it’s more about holding your shit.
02:05:09 Someone’s had a bunch of mushrooms at a party.
02:05:12 Maybe they don’t wanna go into the back room
02:05:15 and start crying about these thoughts
02:05:17 about the relationship with their mother.
02:05:19 And they don’t wanna be the drama queen or king
02:05:22 that bring their friends down
02:05:23 because their friends are having an experience too.
02:05:26 And so they wanna like compose, you know.
02:05:29 And also just the appearance in social settings
02:05:31 versus the, so like prioritizing how you appear to others
02:05:34 versus the prioritizing the depth of the experience.
02:05:39 And here in the study, you can prioritize the experience.
02:05:42 Right, and it’s all about, like you’re the astronaut
02:05:44 and there’s only one astronaut.
02:05:46 We’re ground control.
02:05:48 And I use this often with,
02:05:50 I have a photo of the space shuttle on a plaque
02:05:53 in my office and I kind of often use that as an example.
02:05:56 And it’s like, we’re here for you.
02:05:58 Like we’re a team, but we have different roles.
02:06:00 It’s just like, you don’t have to like compose yourself.
02:06:04 Like you don’t have to like be concerned about our safety.
02:06:07 Like we’re playing these roles today.
02:06:09 And like, yeah, your job is to go as deep as possible
02:06:12 or as far out, whatever your analogy is, like as possible.
02:06:16 And we’re keeping you safe.
02:06:18 And so, yeah, and the emotional side is a hard one
02:06:23 because you really want people to,
02:06:25 like if they go into realms of subjectively
02:06:28 of despair and sorrow, like, yeah, like cry, it’s okay.
02:06:34 And especially if someone’s more macho
02:06:37 and you want this to be the place where they can let go.
02:06:41 And again, something that they wouldn’t or shouldn’t do
02:06:44 if someone were to theoretically use it
02:06:46 in a social setting.
02:06:49 And like, and also these other things,
02:06:51 like even that you get in those social settings of like,
02:06:54 yeah, you don’t have to like worry about your wallet
02:06:56 for being taken advantage or especially for a woman
02:06:59 sexually assaulted by some creep at a concert or something.
02:07:02 Cause they’re, you know, they’re laying down,
02:07:05 being far out.
02:07:06 There’s like a million sources of anxiety
02:07:08 that are external versus internal.
02:07:11 So you can just focus on your own,
02:07:12 like the beautiful thing that’s going on in your mind.
02:07:16 And even the cops at that layer,
02:07:18 even though it’s extremely unlikely for most people
02:07:21 that cops would come in and bust them right when,
02:07:23 like even at that theoretical,
02:07:25 like that one in a billion chance,
02:07:26 like that might be a real thing psychologically.
02:07:29 In this context, we even got that covered.
02:07:31 This is, we’ve got DEA approval.
02:07:33 Like you are, this is okay by every level of society
02:07:37 that counts, you know, that has the authority.
02:07:39 So it’s, so go deep, trust the, you know, trust the setting,
02:07:43 trust yourself, you know, let go and be open.
02:07:48 So in the experience, and this is all subjective
02:07:50 and by analogy, but like, if there’s a door, open it,
02:07:54 go into it.
02:07:54 If there’s a stairwell, go down it or a stairway, go up it.
02:07:59 If there’s a monster in the mind’s eye, you know,
02:08:03 don’t run, approach it, look in the eye and say, you know,
02:08:07 let’s talk.
02:08:08 Yeah, what’s up, what are you doing here?
02:08:10 Let’s talk Turkey, you know?
02:08:12 And I thought.
02:08:13 Dave Goggins entered the chat, okay.
02:08:14 Right, right, it really is that,
02:08:16 that really is a heart of it, this radical courage.
02:08:19 Like it. Courage.
02:08:20 People are often struck by that coming out.
02:08:22 Like this is heavy lifting, this is a hard work.
02:08:25 People come out of this exhausted and it can be extremely,
02:08:30 some people say it’s the most difficult thing
02:08:31 they’ve done in their life.
02:08:33 Like choosing to let go on a moment,
02:08:36 a microsecond by microsecond basis.
02:08:39 Everything in their inclination is to say stop,
02:08:42 sometimes stop this, I don’t like this,
02:08:45 I didn’t know it was gonna be like this, this is too much.
02:08:48 And Terrence McKenna put it this way,
02:08:49 it’s like comparing to meditation and other techniques,
02:08:52 it’s like spending years trying to press the accelerator
02:08:55 to make something happen.
02:08:57 High dose psychedelics is like you’re speeding down
02:08:59 the mountain in a fully loaded semi truck
02:09:03 and you’re charged with not slamming the brake.
02:09:06 It’s like, let it happen.
02:09:09 So it’s very difficult and to engage,
02:09:12 always go further into it and take that radical,
02:09:16 radical courage throughout.
02:09:19 What do they say in self report?
02:09:22 If you can put general words to it,
02:09:24 what is their experience like?
02:09:26 What do they say it’s like?
02:09:27 Because these are many people, like you said,
02:09:29 that haven’t probably read much about psychedelics
02:09:32 or they don’t have like with Joe Rogan,
02:09:36 like language or stories to put on it.
02:09:39 So this is very raw self report of experiences.
02:09:43 What do they say the experience is like?
02:09:45 Yeah, and some more so than others,
02:09:47 cause everyone has been exposed at some level or another,
02:09:50 but some it is pretty superficial as you’re saying.
02:09:55 One of the hallmarks of psychedelics
02:09:57 is just their variability.
02:09:58 So I’m more stressed, it’s like not the mean,
02:10:00 but the standard deviation is so wide that it’s like,
02:10:03 it could be like hellish experiences
02:10:07 and just absolutely beautiful and loving experiences,
02:10:14 everything in between and both of those,
02:10:17 like those could be two minutes apart from each other.
02:10:20 And sometimes kind of at the same time concurrently.
02:10:24 So let’s see, there’s different ways to,
02:10:28 there were some Jungian psychologists back in the 60s,
02:10:31 masters in Houston that wrote a really good book,
02:10:34 The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience,
02:10:36 which is a play on varieties of religious experience
02:10:39 by William James, that they described this,
02:10:43 a perceptual level.
02:10:44 So most people have that when,
02:10:47 whether they’re looking at the room without the eyeshades on
02:10:49 or inside their mind’s eye with the eyeshades on,
02:10:52 colors, sounds like this,
02:10:56 it’s a much richer sensorium,
02:11:01 which can be very interesting.
02:11:02 And then at another level, a master’s in Houston
02:11:04 called it the psychodynamic level.
02:11:08 And I think you could think about it more broadly than,
02:11:10 that’s kind of Jungian,
02:11:11 but just the personal psychological levels,
02:11:14 how I think of it, like this is about your life.
02:11:17 There’s a whole life review.
02:11:17 Oftentimes people have thoughts about their childhood,
02:11:20 about their relationships, their spouse or partner,
02:11:24 their children, their parents, their family of origin,
02:11:27 their current family, that stuff comes up a lot,
02:11:31 including people just pouring with tears
02:11:35 about how much, it hits them so hard
02:11:39 how much they love people.
02:11:41 Like in a way, for people that they’d love their family,
02:11:44 but it just hits them so hard that how important this is
02:11:50 and the magnitude of that love
02:11:52 and what that means in their life.
02:11:54 So those are some of the most moving experiences
02:11:57 to be present for is where people like it hits home,
02:12:00 like what really matters in their life.
02:12:02 And then you have this sort of what masters in Houston
02:12:06 called the archetypal realm,
02:12:08 which again is sort of Jungian with the focus on archetypes,
02:12:12 which is interesting,
02:12:13 but I think of that more generally as like symbolic level.
02:12:15 So just really deep experiences where you have,
02:12:19 you do have experiences that seem symbolic of,
02:12:22 very much in like what we know about dreaming
02:12:25 and what most people think about dreaming,
02:12:27 like there’s this randomness of things,
02:12:29 but sometimes it’s pretty clear in retrospect,
02:12:31 oh, like this came up
02:12:33 because this thing has been on my mind recently.
02:12:36 So it seems to be, there seems to be this symbolic level.
02:12:40 And then they have this,
02:12:41 the last level that they describe
02:12:42 is the mystical integral level,
02:12:45 which this is where there’s lots of terms for it,
02:12:48 but transcendental experiences, experiences of unity,
02:12:52 mystical type effects we often measure.
02:12:56 Europeans use a scale
02:12:57 that will refer to oceanic boundlessness.
02:13:00 This is all pretty much the same thing.
02:13:02 This is like at some sense,
02:13:04 the deepest level of the very sense of self
02:13:08 seems to be dissolved, minimize, or expanded,
02:13:13 such that the boundaries of the self go into in here.
02:13:16 I think some of this is just semantics,
02:13:17 but whether the self is expanding
02:13:19 such that there’s no boundary between the self
02:13:21 and the rest of the universe,
02:13:24 or whether there’s no sense of self,
02:13:25 again, might be just semantics,
02:13:27 but this radical shift or sense of loss
02:13:30 of sense of self or self boundaries.
02:13:33 And that’s like the most,
02:13:34 typically when people have that experience,
02:13:37 they’ll often report that as being the most remarkable thing.
02:13:40 And this is what you don’t typically get with MDMA,
02:13:43 these deepest levels of the nature of reality itself,
02:13:46 the subjectivity and objectivity,
02:13:48 just like the seer and the seen become one,
02:13:54 and it’s a process, and yeah.
02:13:58 And they’re able to bring that experience back
02:14:04 and be able to describe it?
02:14:06 Yeah, but one of the, to a degree,
02:14:09 but one of the hallmarks going back to William James
02:14:11 of describing a mystical experience is the ineffability.
02:14:15 And so even though it’s ineffable,
02:14:17 people try as far as they can to describe it,
02:14:20 but when you get the real deal, they’ll say,
02:14:22 and even though they say a lot of helpful things
02:14:24 to help you describe the landscape,
02:14:26 they’ll say, no matter what I say,
02:14:28 I’m still not even coming anywhere close to what this was.
02:14:31 Like the language is completely failing.
02:14:34 And I like to joke that even though it’s ineffable,
02:14:36 and we’re researchers,
02:14:37 so we try to eff it up
02:14:38 by asking them to describe the experience.
02:14:41 I love it, it’s a good one.
02:14:44 But to bring it back a little bit,
02:14:46 so for that particular study on tobacco,
02:14:50 what was the results, what was the conclusions
02:14:54 in terms of the impact of psilocybin on their addiction?
02:14:59 So in that pilot study, it was very small
02:15:01 and it wasn’t a randomized study, so it was limited.
02:15:04 The only question we could really answer was,
02:15:06 is this worthy enough of followup?
02:15:08 And the answer to that was absolutely,
02:15:11 because the success rates were so high,
02:15:12 80% biologically confirmed successful at six months,
02:15:15 that held up to 60% biologically confirmed abstinent
02:15:19 at an average of two and a half years, a very long fall.
02:15:22 Yeah, and so, I mean, the best that’s been reported
02:15:26 in the literature for smoking cessation
02:15:28 is in the upper 50%, and that’s with not one,
02:15:30 but two medications for a couple of months,
02:15:32 followed by regular cognitive behavioral therapy,
02:15:36 where you’re coming in once a week or once every few weeks
02:15:38 for an entire year.
02:15:41 And so it was very heavy.
02:15:44 This is just like a few uses of psilocybin?
02:15:48 So this was three doses of psilocybin
02:15:50 over a total course, including preparation, everything,
02:15:52 a 15 week period, where there’s mainly like,
02:15:56 for most part, one meeting a week,
02:15:58 and then the three sessions are within that.
02:16:00 And so it’s, and we scaled that back
02:16:02 in the more, the study we’re doing right now,
02:16:05 which I can tell you about,
02:16:06 which is a randomized controlled trial.
02:16:09 But it’s, yeah, the original pilot study
02:16:17 was these 15 people.
02:16:20 So given the positive signal from the first study
02:16:23 telling us that it was a worthy pursuit,
02:16:25 we hustled up some money
02:16:25 to actually be able to afford a larger trial.
02:16:28 So it’s randomizing 80 people
02:16:30 to get either one psilocybin session,
02:16:33 we’ve scaled that down from three to one,
02:16:36 mainly because we’re doing fMRI neuroimaging
02:16:40 before and after,
02:16:40 and it made it more experimentally complex
02:16:42 to have multiple sessions.
02:16:45 But one psilocybin session versus the nicotine patch
02:16:49 using the FDA approved label,
02:16:52 like standard use of the nicotine patch.
02:16:53 So it’s randomized, 40 people get randomized to psilocybin,
02:16:57 one session, 40 people get nicotine patch.
02:17:00 And they all get the same cognitive behavioral therapy
02:17:02 sort of the standard talk therapy.
02:17:03 And we’ve scaled it down somewhat,
02:17:05 so there’s less weekly meetings,
02:17:07 but it’s within the same ballpark.
02:17:09 And right now we’re still,
02:17:13 the study’s still ongoing.
02:17:16 And in fact, we just recently started recruiting again,
02:17:18 we paused for COVID.
02:17:19 Now we’re starting back up with some protections
02:17:21 like masks and whatnot.
02:17:23 But right now for the 44 people
02:17:28 who have gotten through the one year followup,
02:17:31 and so that includes 22 from each of the two groups,
02:17:33 the success rates are extremely high.
02:17:36 For the psilocybin group,
02:17:37 it’s 59% have been biologically confirmed as smoke free
02:17:41 at one year after their quit date.
02:17:43 And that compares to 27% for the nicotine patch,
02:17:48 which by the way is extremely good for the nicotine patch
02:17:51 compared to previous research.
02:17:53 So the results could change because it’s ongoing,
02:17:56 but we’re mostly done
02:17:58 and it’s still looking extremely positive.
02:18:01 So if anyone’s interested,
02:18:02 they have to be sort of be in commuting distance
02:18:04 to the Baltimore area, but you know.
02:18:06 To participate.
02:18:07 Right, right, to participate.
02:18:09 This is a good moment to bring up something.
02:18:13 I think a lot of what you talked about is super interesting.
02:18:17 And I think a lot of people listening to this,
02:18:19 so now it’s anywhere from 300 to 600,000 people
02:18:25 for just a regular podcast.
02:18:27 I know a lot of them will be very interested
02:18:29 in what you’re saying and they’re going to look you up.
02:18:32 They’re going to find your email
02:18:34 and they’re going to write you a long email
02:18:36 about some of the interesting things they’ve found
02:18:40 in any of your papers.
02:18:43 How should people contact you?
02:18:45 What is the best way for that?
02:18:47 Would you recommend?
02:18:49 You’re a super busy guy.
02:18:50 You have a million things going on.
02:18:54 How should people communicate with you?
02:18:56 Thanks for bringing this up.
02:18:57 This is a, I’m glad to get the opportunity to address this.
02:19:01 If someone’s interested in participating in a study,
02:19:04 the best thing to do is go to the website.
02:19:08 Of the study or of like, yeah, which website?
02:19:13 So we have all of our psilocybin studies.
02:19:15 So everything we have is up on one website
02:19:18 and then we link to the different study websites,
02:19:21 but hopkinspsychedelic.org.
02:19:24 So everything we do, or if you don’t remember that,
02:19:27 just go to your favorite search engine
02:19:29 and look up Johns Hopkins Psychedelic
02:19:32 and you’re going to find one of the first hits
02:19:33 is going to be our, is this website.
02:19:35 And there’s going to be links to the smoking study
02:19:38 and all of our other studies.
02:19:39 If there’s no link to it there,
02:19:40 we don’t have a study on it now.
02:19:42 And if you’re interested in psychedelic research more broadly,
02:19:46 you can look up, like at another university
02:19:48 that might be closer to you.
02:19:49 And there’s a handful of them now across the country.
02:19:52 And there’s some in Europe that have studies going on,
02:19:55 but you can, at least in the US,
02:19:56 you can look at clinicaltrials.gov
02:20:00 and look up the term psilocybin.
02:20:02 And in fact, optionally people even in Europe
02:20:04 can register their trial on there.
02:20:06 So that’s a good way to find studies.
02:20:07 But for our research, rather than emailing me,
02:20:11 like a more efficient way is to go straight
02:20:13 and you can do that first, the first phase of screening.
02:20:17 There’s some questions online
02:20:18 and then someone will get back in touch with you.
02:20:21 But I do already, you know,
02:20:24 and I expect it’s like going to increase,
02:20:29 but I’m already at the level where my simple limited mind
02:20:32 and limited capacity is already,
02:20:34 I sometimes fail to get back to emails.
02:20:37 I mean, I’m trying to respond to my colleagues,
02:20:39 my mentees, all these things, my responsibilities.
02:20:43 And as many of the people just inquiring
02:20:45 about I wanna go to graduate school,
02:20:47 I’m interested in this, I had this,
02:20:49 I have a daughter that took a psychedelic
02:20:51 and she’s having trouble.
02:20:51 And it’s like, I try to respond to those,
02:20:54 but sometimes I just simply can’t get to all of it already.
02:20:58 To be honest, like from my perspective,
02:21:00 it’s been quite heartbreaking
02:21:03 because I basically don’t respond to any emails anymore.
02:21:07 And especially as you mentioned mentees and so on,
02:21:11 like outside of that circle,
02:21:14 it’s heartbreaking to me how many brilliant people
02:21:16 there are, thoughtful people, like loving people.
02:21:19 And they write long emails that are really,
02:21:22 by the way, I do read them very often.
02:21:26 It’s just that I don’t,
02:21:28 the response is then you’re starting a conversation.
02:21:31 And the heartbreaking aspect is you only have
02:21:35 so many hours in the day to have deep,
02:21:37 meaningful conversations with human beings on this earth.
02:21:40 And so you have to select who they are.
02:21:42 And usually it’s your family,
02:21:43 it’s people like you’re directly working with.
02:21:46 And even I guarantee you with this conversation,
02:21:48 people will write you long, really thoughtful emails.
02:21:54 Like there’ll be brilliant people,
02:21:55 faculty from all over, PhD students from all over.
02:21:59 And it’s heartbreaking
02:22:00 because you can’t really get back to them.
02:22:01 But you’re saying like many of them,
02:22:04 if you do respond, it’s more like here,
02:22:06 go to this website when you’re interested into the study,
02:22:10 just it makes sense to directly go to the site
02:22:13 if there’s applications open, just apply for the study.
02:22:16 Right, right, right, as either a volunteer
02:22:19 or if we’re looking for somebody,
02:22:22 we’re gonna be posting,
02:22:25 including on the Hopkins University website,
02:22:28 we’re gonna be posting if we’re looking for a position.
02:22:30 I am right now actually looking through
02:22:32 and it’s mainly been through email and contacts,
02:22:35 but should I say it?
02:22:37 I think I’d rather cast my nets wide,
02:22:39 but I’m looking for a postdoc right now.
02:22:40 Oh, great.
02:22:41 So I’ve mentored postdocs for, I don’t know,
02:22:44 like a dozen years or so.
02:22:46 And more and more of their time
02:22:47 is being spent on psychedelics.
02:22:50 So someone’s free to contact me.
02:22:52 That’s more of a, that’s sort of so close to home.
02:22:54 That’s a personal, you know,
02:22:56 that like emailing me about that.
02:22:58 But I come to appreciate more the advice
02:23:01 that folks like Tim Ferriss have of like,
02:23:03 I think it’s him, like five cents emails,
02:23:06 you know, like a subject that gets to the point
02:23:10 that tells you what it’s about
02:23:11 so that like you break through the signal to the noise.
02:23:14 But I really appreciate what you’re saying
02:23:15 because part of the equation for me is like,
02:23:17 I have a three year old,
02:23:18 and like my time on the ground, on the floor,
02:23:21 playing blocks or cars with him is part of that equation.
02:23:25 And even if the day is ending
02:23:27 and I know some of those emails are slipping by
02:23:29 and I’ll never get back to them.
02:23:30 And I have, I’m struggling with it already.
02:23:32 And I get what you’re saying is like,
02:23:34 I haven’t seen anything yet
02:23:35 if with the type of exposure that like your podcast gets.
02:23:39 This will bring in exposure.
02:23:40 And then I think in terms of postdocs,
02:23:42 this is a really good podcast
02:23:43 in the sense that there’s a lot of brilliant PhD students
02:23:47 out there that are looking for a poster
02:23:48 from all over, from MIT, probably from Hopkins,
02:23:52 it’s just all over the place.
02:23:53 So this is, and I, we have different preferences,
02:23:57 but my preference would also be to have like a form
02:24:00 that they could fill out for posts.
02:24:01 Because, you know, it’s very difficult through email
02:24:05 to tell who’s really going to be a strong collaborator
02:24:09 for you, like a strong postdoc, strong student,
02:24:12 because you want a bunch of details,
02:24:15 but at the same time,
02:24:16 you don’t want a million pages worth of email.
02:24:19 So you want a little bit of application process.
02:24:21 So usually you set up a form that helps me indicate
02:24:24 how passionate the person is,
02:24:27 how willing they are to do hard work.
02:24:33 Like I often ask a question,
02:24:35 people of what do you think is more important
02:24:39 to work hard or to work smart?
02:24:41 And I use that, those types of questions
02:24:45 to indicate who I would like to work with.
02:24:49 Because it’s counterintuitive.
02:24:51 But anyway, I’ll leave that question unanswered
02:24:56 for people to figure out themselves.
02:24:57 But maybe if you know my love for David Goggins,
02:25:00 you will understand.
02:25:01 So anyway.
02:25:02 Those are good thoughts about the forms and everything.
02:25:04 It’s difficult.
02:25:05 And that’s something that evolves.
02:25:07 Email is such a messy thing.
02:25:09 There’s, speaking of Baltimore, Cal Newport,
02:25:15 if you know who that is,
02:25:17 he wrote a book called Deep Work.
02:25:19 He’s a computer science professor
02:25:21 and he’s currently working on a book about email,
02:25:23 about all the ways that email is broken.
02:25:25 So this is gonna be a fascinating read.
02:25:28 This is a little bit of a general question,
02:25:30 but almost a bigger picture question
02:25:36 that we touched on a little bit,
02:25:38 but let’s just touch it in a full way,
02:25:40 which is what have all the psychedelic studies
02:25:43 you’ve conducted taught you about the human mind,
02:25:49 about the human brain and the human mind?
02:25:52 Is there something,
02:25:53 if you look at the human scientists you were before
02:25:56 this work and the scientists you are now,
02:26:00 how has your understanding of the human mind changed?
02:26:03 I’m thinking of that in two categories.
02:26:08 One kind of more scientific,
02:26:13 and they’re both scientific,
02:26:14 but one more about the brain and behavior
02:26:20 and the mind, so to speak.
02:26:22 And as a behaviorist,
02:26:24 all we see sort of the mind as a metaphor for behaviors,
02:26:28 but anyway, that gets philosophical.
02:26:30 But it’s really increasing the,
02:26:35 so the one category is increasing the appreciation
02:26:39 for the magnitude of depth.
02:26:43 I mean, so these are all metaphors of human experience.
02:26:47 That might be a good way to,
02:26:48 because you use certain words like consciousness
02:26:51 and it’s like we’re using constructs
02:26:53 that aren’t well defined unless we kind of dig in,
02:26:56 but human experience like that,
02:27:01 the experiences on these compounds
02:27:03 can be so far out there or so deep.
02:27:08 And they’re doing that by tinkering
02:27:10 with the same machinery that’s going on up there.
02:27:13 I mean, my assumption,
02:27:16 and I think it’s a good assumption is that all experiences,
02:27:20 there’s a biological side to all phenomenal experience.
02:27:25 So there is not,
02:27:27 the divide between biology and experience or psychology
02:27:35 is, it’s not one or the other.
02:27:38 These are just two sides of the same coin.
02:27:43 I mean, you’re avoiding the use
02:27:45 of the word consciousness, for example,
02:27:47 but the experience is referring
02:27:49 to the subjective experience.
02:27:50 So it’s the actual technical use
02:27:53 of the word consciousness of subjective experience.
02:27:57 And even that word, there are certain ways that like,
02:28:00 sort of like if we’re talking about access consciousness
02:28:02 or narrative self awareness, which is an aspect of,
02:28:05 like you can wrap a definition around that
02:28:08 and we can talk meaningfully about it,
02:28:09 but so often around psychedelics,
02:28:11 it’s used in this much more,
02:28:13 in terms of ultimately explaining
02:28:15 phenomenal consciousness itself,
02:28:17 the so called hard problem,
02:28:18 and relating to that question
02:28:22 and psychedelics really haven’t spoken to that.
02:28:25 And that’s why it’s hard
02:28:27 because like it’s hard to imagine anything.
02:28:29 But I think what I was getting is that psychedelics
02:28:32 have done this by,
02:28:34 the reason I was getting into the biology versus mind,
02:28:37 psychology divide is that just to kind of set up the fact
02:28:41 that I think all of our experience is related
02:28:45 to these biological events.
02:28:49 So whether they be naturally occurring neurotransmitters,
02:28:52 like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine, et cetera,
02:28:56 and a whole other sort of biological activity
02:28:59 and kind of another layer up
02:29:01 that we could talk about as network activity,
02:29:03 communication amongst brain areas,
02:29:05 like this is always going on,
02:29:06 even if I just prompt you to think about a loved one,
02:29:10 like there’s something happening biologically.
02:29:13 Okay, so that’s always another side of the coin.
02:29:15 So another way to put that
02:29:18 is all of our subjective experience outside of drugs,
02:29:21 it’s all a controlled hallucination in a sense.
02:29:27 Like this is completely constructed.
02:29:28 Our experience of reality is completely a simulation.
02:29:33 So I think we’re on solid ground to say
02:29:36 that that’s our best guess
02:29:37 and that’s a pretty reasonable thing to say scientifically.
02:29:41 Like all the rich complexity of the world emerges
02:29:43 from just some biology and some chemicals.
02:29:46 So in that definition implied a causation, it comes from.
02:29:49 And so we know at least there’s a solid correlation there.
02:29:53 And so then we delve deep into the philosophy
02:29:57 of like idealism or materialism and things like this,
02:30:00 which I’m not an expert in,
02:30:01 but I know we’re getting into that territory.
02:30:03 You don’t even necessarily have to go there.
02:30:06 Like you at least go to the level of like,
02:30:09 okay, we know there seems to be this one on one
02:30:11 correspondence and that seems pretty solid.
02:30:14 Like you can’t prove a negative and you can’t prove,
02:30:16 you know, it’s in that category of like,
02:30:18 you could come up with an experience
02:30:20 that maybe doesn’t have a biological correlate,
02:30:22 but then you’re talking about,
02:30:24 there’s also the limits of the science.
02:30:25 Is it a false negative?
02:30:26 But I think our best guess and a very decent assumption
02:30:29 is that every psychological event has a biological correlate.
02:30:33 So with that said, you know, the idea that you can throw,
02:30:37 alter that biology in a pretty trivial manner.
02:30:42 I mean, you could take like a relatively small number
02:30:45 of these molecules, throw them into the nervous system
02:30:48 and then have a 60 year old person who has,
02:30:54 you name it, I mean, that has hiked to the top of Everest
02:30:59 and that speaks five languages and that has been married
02:31:02 and has kids and grandkids and has,
02:31:06 you name it, you know, like been at the top and say,
02:31:09 this fundamentally changed who I am as a person
02:31:12 and what I think life is about.
02:31:17 Like that’s the thing about psychedelics
02:31:20 that just floors me and it never fails.
02:31:24 I mean, sometimes you get bogged down by the paperwork
02:31:27 and running studies and all the, I don’t know,
02:31:30 all of the BS that can come with being in academia
02:31:33 and everything and then you,
02:31:34 and sometimes you get some dud sessions
02:31:37 where it’s not the full, all the magic isn’t happening
02:31:39 and it’s, you know, more or less it’s either a dud
02:31:42 or somewhere and I don’t mean to dismiss them,
02:31:44 but you know, it’s not like these magnificent
02:31:46 sort of reports, but sometimes you get the full Monty report
02:31:50 from one of these people and you’re like,
02:31:52 oh yeah, that’s why we’re doing this.
02:31:54 Whether it’s like therapeutically
02:31:56 or just to understand the mind and you’re like,
02:32:01 and you’re still floored, like how is that possible?
02:32:05 How did we slightly alter serotonergic neurotransmission
02:32:11 and say, and this person is now saying
02:32:13 that they’re making fundamental differences
02:32:16 in the priorities of their life after 60 years.
02:32:19 It also just fills you with awe of the possibility
02:32:25 of experiences we’re yet to have uncovered.
02:32:28 If just a few chemicals can change so much,
02:32:32 it’s like, man, what if this could be up?
02:32:36 I mean, like how, cause we’re just like took a little,
02:32:40 it’s like lighting a match or something in the darkness
02:32:43 and you could see there’s a lot more there,
02:32:44 but you don’t know how much more.
02:32:47 And that’s.
02:32:49 And then like, where’s that gonna go with like,
02:32:51 I mean, I’m always like aware of the fact
02:32:53 that like we always as humans and as scientists
02:32:55 think that we figured out 99%
02:32:58 and we’re working on that first 1%.
02:32:59 And we gotta keep reminding ourselves, it’s hard to do.
02:33:01 Like we figured out like not even 1%, like we know nothing.
02:33:05 And so like, I can speculate and I might sound like a fool,
02:33:09 but like what are drugs, even the concept of drugs,
02:33:12 like 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years,
02:33:15 if we’re surviving, like molecules that go
02:33:21 to a specific area of the brain
02:33:23 in combination with technology,
02:33:25 in combination with the magnetic stimulation,
02:33:27 in combination with the, like targeted pharmacology
02:33:31 of like, oh, like this subset of serotonin 2A receptors
02:33:35 in the claustrum, at this time, in this particular sequence
02:33:39 in combination with this other thing,
02:33:41 like this baseball cap you wear that like has,
02:33:45 has one of the, is doing some of these things
02:33:47 that we can only do with these like giant
02:33:49 like pieces of equipment now,
02:33:50 like where it’s gonna go is gonna be endless.
02:33:53 And it becomes easy to combine within virtual reality
02:33:56 where the virtual reality is gonna move
02:33:58 from being something out here to being more in there.
02:34:01 And then we’re getting, like we talked about before,
02:34:04 we’re already in a virtual reality
02:34:06 in terms of human perception and cognition models
02:34:11 of the universe being all representations
02:34:14 and sort of color not existing and just our representations
02:34:18 of EM wavelengths, et cetera, sound,
02:34:22 being vibrations and all of this.
02:34:23 And so as the external VR and the internal VR
02:34:28 come closer to each other,
02:34:30 like this is what I think about
02:34:31 in terms of the future of drugs.
02:34:33 Like all of this stuff sort of combines
02:34:35 and like where that goes is just, it’s unthinkable.
02:34:42 Like we were probably gonna, you know,
02:34:44 again, I might sound like a fool and this may not happen,
02:34:46 but I think it’s possible, you know,
02:34:49 to go completely offline,
02:34:50 like where most of people’s experiences maybe
02:34:55 going into these internal worlds.
02:34:58 And I mean, maybe you through some,
02:35:02 through a combination of these techniques,
02:35:03 you create experiences
02:35:04 where someone could live a thousand years
02:35:07 in terms of maybe they’re living a regular lifespan,
02:35:09 but in over the next two seconds,
02:35:11 you’re living a thousand years worth of experience.
02:35:13 Inside your mind.
02:35:15 Yeah, through this manipulation of them.
02:35:16 Like, is that possible?
02:35:19 Like just based on like first principles and like.
02:35:23 Yeah, first principles, yes.
02:35:24 I think so.
02:35:26 Like give us another 50, 100, 500, like who knows,
02:35:30 but like how could it not go there?
02:35:33 In a small tangent, what are your thoughts
02:35:37 in this broader definition of drugs,
02:35:39 of psychedelics, of mind altering things?
02:35:42 What are your thoughts about Neuralink
02:35:44 and brain computer interfaces,
02:35:47 sort of being able to electrically stimulate
02:35:52 and read neuronal activity in the brain
02:35:57 and then connect that to the computer,
02:35:59 which is another way from a computational perspective
02:36:05 for me is kind of appealing,
02:36:06 but it’s another way of altering subtly
02:36:11 the behavior of the brain.
02:36:13 That’s kind of, if you zoom out, reminiscent
02:36:17 of the way psychedelics do as well.
02:36:20 So what do you have?
02:36:22 Like what are your thoughts about Neuralink?
02:36:25 What are your hopes as a researcher
02:36:27 of mind altering devices, systems, chemicals?
02:36:33 I guess broadly speaking, I’m all for it.
02:36:36 I mean, for the same reason I am with psychedelics,
02:36:38 but it comes with all the caveats.
02:36:40 You know, you’re going into a brave new world
02:36:42 where it’s like all of a sudden
02:36:44 there’s going to be a dark side.
02:36:46 There’s going to be serious ethical considerations,
02:36:51 but that should not stop us from moving there.
02:36:54 I mean, particularly the stuff from, and I’m no expert,
02:36:57 but on the short list in the short term, it’s like, yeah,
02:37:00 can we help these serious neurological disorders?
02:37:02 Like, hell yeah.
02:37:04 And I’m also sensitive to something being someone
02:37:07 that has lots of neuroscience colleagues with some
02:37:13 of this stuff, and I can’t talk about particulars,
02:37:16 I’m not recalling, but in terms of stuff getting out there
02:37:20 and then kind of a mocking of, oh gosh,
02:37:25 they’re saying this is unique, we know this,
02:37:27 or sort of like this belittling of like, oh,
02:37:31 this sounds like it’s just a, I don’t know,
02:37:33 a commercialization or like an oversimplification.
02:37:35 I forget what the example was, but something like,
02:37:38 something that came off to some of my neuroscientific
02:37:41 colleagues as an oversimplification,
02:37:42 or at least the way they said it.
02:37:44 Oh, from a Neuralink perspective.
02:37:46 Right, oh, we’ve known that for years and like,
02:37:49 but I’m very sympathetic to like,
02:37:52 maybe it’s because of my very limited,
02:37:54 but relatively speaking, the amount of exposure
02:37:57 the psychedelic work has had to my limited experience
02:38:00 of being out there, and then you think about someone
02:38:02 like Mike Musk, who’s like really, really out there,
02:38:06 and you just get all these arrows that like,
02:38:10 and it’s hard to be like when you’re plowing new ground,
02:38:13 like you’re gonna get, you’re gonna get criticized
02:38:16 like every little word that you,
02:38:18 this balance between speaking to like people
02:38:20 to make it meaningful, something scientists
02:38:21 aren’t very good at, having people understand
02:38:23 what you’re saying, and then being belittled
02:38:25 by oversimplifying something in terms of the public message.
02:38:30 So I’m extremely sympathetic, and I’m a big fan
02:38:33 of like what that, you know, what Elon Musk does,
02:38:35 like tunnels through the ground, and SpaceX,
02:38:39 and all this, just like, hell yeah,
02:38:40 like this guy has some, he has some great ideas.
02:38:43 And there’s something to be said,
02:38:45 it’s not just the communication to the public.
02:38:47 I think his first principles thinking,
02:38:50 it’s like, because I get this
02:38:51 in the artificial intelligence world,
02:38:52 it’s probably similar to neuroscience world,
02:38:55 where Elon will say something like,
02:38:57 or I worked at MIT, I worked on autonomous vehicles.
02:39:00 And he’s sort of, I could sense how much he pisses off
02:39:05 like every roboticist at MIT, and everybody who works
02:39:08 on like the human factor side of safety
02:39:11 of autonomous vehicles, and saying like,
02:39:14 nah, we don’t need to consider human beings in the car,
02:39:18 like the car will drive itself, it’s obvious
02:39:21 that neural networks is all you need.
02:39:22 Like it’s obvious that like we should be able
02:39:25 to systems that should be able to learn constantly.
02:39:30 And they don’t really need LIDAR,
02:39:32 they just need cameras, because we humans just use our eyes,
02:39:36 and that’s the same as cameras.
02:39:38 So like it doesn’t, why would we need anything else?
02:39:41 You just have to make a system that learns faster,
02:39:42 and faster, and faster, and neural networks can do that.
02:39:46 And so that’s pissing off every single community.
02:39:48 It’s pissing off human factors community,
02:39:50 saying you don’t need to consider the human driver
02:39:53 in the picture, you can just focus on the robotics problem.
02:39:56 It’s pissing off every robotics person
02:39:59 for saying LIDAR can be just ignored, it can be camera.
02:40:02 Every robotics person knows that camera is really noisy,
02:40:06 that it’s really difficult to deal with.
02:40:08 But he’s, and then every AI person who says,
02:40:13 who hears neural networks, and says like,
02:40:16 neural networks can learn everything,
02:40:18 like almost presuming that it’s kind of going
02:40:20 to achieve general intelligence.
02:40:22 The problem with all those haters in the three communities
02:40:26 is that they’re looking one year ahead, five years ahead.
02:40:31 The hilarious thing about the, quote unquote,
02:40:34 ridiculous things that Elon Musk is saying,
02:40:36 is they have a pretty good shot at being true in 20 years.
02:40:40 And so like, when you just look at the, you know,
02:40:43 when you look at the progression
02:40:45 of these kinds of predictions,
02:40:47 and sometimes first principles thinking can allow you
02:40:51 to do that, is you see that it’s kind of obvious
02:40:55 that things are going to progress this way.
02:40:58 And if you just remove the prejudice you hold
02:41:01 about the particular battles
02:41:04 of the current academic environment,
02:41:07 and just look at the big picture,
02:41:08 the progression of the technology,
02:41:10 you can usually see the world in the same kind of way.
02:41:15 And so in that same way, looking at psychedelics,
02:41:18 you can see like, there is so many exciting possibilities
02:41:22 here if we fully engage in the research.
02:41:24 Same thing with Neuralink.
02:41:26 If we fully engage, so we go from a thousand channels
02:41:30 of communication to the brain,
02:41:32 to billions of channels of communication to the brain,
02:41:35 and we figure out many of the details
02:41:38 of how to do that safely with neurosurgery and so on,
02:41:42 that the world would just change completely
02:41:45 in the same kind of way that Elon is.
02:41:47 It’s so ridiculous to hear him talk
02:41:49 about a symbiotic relationship between AI
02:41:52 and the human brain.
02:41:55 But it’s like, is it though?
02:42:00 Is it?
02:42:01 Because I can see in 50 years,
02:42:03 that’s going to be an obvious,
02:42:05 like everyone will have, like obviously you have,
02:42:08 like why are we typing stuff in the computer?
02:42:11 It doesn’t make any sense.
02:42:12 That’s stupid.
02:42:13 People used to type on a keyboard with a mouse?
02:42:16 What is that?
02:42:17 And it seems pretty clear, like we’re going to be there.
02:42:19 Like, and the only question is like, what’s the timeframe?
02:42:21 Is that going to be 20 or is it 50 or a hundred?
02:42:23 Like, how could we not?
02:42:25 And the thing that I guess upsets with Elon and others
02:42:29 is the timeline he tends to do.
02:42:31 I think a lot of people tend to do that kind of thing.
02:42:33 I definitely do it, which is like, it’ll be done this year
02:42:37 versus like, it’ll be done in 10 years.
02:42:39 The timeline is a little bit too rushed,
02:42:41 but from our leadership perspective,
02:42:43 it inspires the engineers to do the best work
02:42:46 of their life to really kind of believe,
02:42:49 because to do the impossible, you have to first believe it,
02:42:52 which is a really important aspect of innovation.
02:42:55 And there’s the delay discounting aspect
02:42:57 I talked about before.
02:42:58 It’s like saying, oh, this is going to be a thing
02:43:00 20, 50 years from now.
02:43:01 It’s like, what motivates anybody?
02:43:04 And even if you’re fudging it
02:43:05 or like wishful thinking a little bit,
02:43:07 or let’s just say airing on one side
02:43:09 of the probability distribution,
02:43:12 like there’s value in saying like, yeah,
02:43:14 like there’s a chance we could get this done in a year.
02:43:17 And you know what?
02:43:18 And if you set a goal for a year and you’re not successful,
02:43:21 hey, you might get it done in three years.
02:43:23 Whereas if you had aimed at 20 years,
02:43:25 well, you either would have never done it at all,
02:43:27 or you would have aimed at 20 years
02:43:28 and then it would have taken you 10.
02:43:29 So the other thing I think about this,
02:43:32 like in terms of his work
02:43:34 and I guess we’ve seen with psychedelics,
02:43:36 it’s like there’s a lack of appreciation
02:43:39 for like sort of the variability
02:43:40 you need a natural selection,
02:43:42 sort of extrapolating from biological,
02:43:45 from evolution like,
02:43:47 hey, maybe he’s wrong about focusing only on the cameras
02:43:50 and not these other things.
02:43:52 Be empirically driven.
02:43:53 It’s like, yeah, you need to like when he’s,
02:43:56 when you need to get the regulation,
02:43:57 is it safe enough to get this thing on the road?
02:43:59 Those are real questions and be empirically driven.
02:44:01 And if he can meet the whatever standard is relevant,
02:44:04 that’s the standard and be driven by that.
02:44:06 So don’t let it affect your ethics.
02:44:07 But if he’s on the wrong path,
02:44:10 how wonderful someone’s exploring that wrong path.
02:44:12 He’s gonna figure out it’s a wrong path.
02:44:13 And like other people, he’s,
02:44:15 damn it, he’s doing something.
02:44:17 Like he’s, and appreciating that variability,
02:44:24 that like it’s valuable even if he’s not on,
02:44:27 I mean, this is all over the place in science.
02:44:29 It’s like a good theory.
02:44:30 One standard definition
02:44:32 is that it generates testable hypotheses.
02:44:35 And like the ultimate model
02:44:37 is never gonna be the same as reality.
02:44:39 Some models are gonna work better than others.
02:44:42 Newtonian physics got us a long ways,
02:44:46 even if there was a better model like waiting.
02:44:49 And some models weren’t as good as,
02:44:52 were never that successful,
02:44:53 but just even like putting them out there and test it.
02:44:56 We wouldn’t know something is a bad model
02:44:58 until someone puts it out anyway, so.
02:45:00 Yeah, diversity of ideas is essential for progress, yeah.
02:45:05 So we brought up consciousness a few times.
02:45:07 There’s several things I wanna kind of disentangle there.
02:45:11 So one, you’ve recently wrote a paper titled
02:45:13 Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus,
02:45:16 Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine.
02:45:19 So that’s one side of it.
02:45:20 You’ve kind of already mentioned
02:45:21 that these terms can be a little bit misused
02:45:24 or used in a variety of ways
02:45:28 that they can be confusing.
02:45:32 But in a specific way,
02:45:34 as much as we can be specific about these things,
02:45:39 about the actual heart problem of consciousness
02:45:41 or understanding what is consciousness,
02:45:44 this weird thing that it feels like,
02:45:46 it feels like something to experience things.
02:45:50 Have psychedelics given you some kind of insight
02:45:55 on what is consciousness?
02:45:58 You’ve mentioned that it feels like psychedelics
02:46:01 allows you to kind of dismantle your sense of self,
02:46:06 like step outside of yourself.
02:46:10 So that feels like somehow playing
02:46:13 with this mechanism of consciousness.
02:46:15 And if it is in fact playing
02:46:17 with the mechanism of consciousness
02:46:19 using just a few chemicals,
02:46:21 it feels like we’re very much in the neighborhood
02:46:24 of being able to maybe understand
02:46:27 the actual biological mechanisms
02:46:29 of how consciousness can emerge from the brain.
02:46:32 So yeah, there’s a bunch there.
02:46:34 I think my preface is that I certainly have opinions
02:46:39 that I can say, here are my best speculations
02:46:42 as just a person and an armchair philosopher.
02:46:47 And that philosophy is certainly not my training
02:46:50 and my expertise.
02:46:52 So I have thoughts there,
02:46:53 but that I recognize are completely
02:46:55 in the realm of speculation
02:46:57 that are like things that I would love to wrap
02:47:00 empirical science around,
02:47:01 but that there’s no data
02:47:06 and getting to the hard problem,
02:47:08 like no conceivable way,
02:47:09 even though I’m very open,
02:47:11 like I’m hoping that that problem can be cracked.
02:47:14 And as an armchair philosopher,
02:47:16 I do think that is a problem.
02:47:18 I don’t think it can be dismissed as some people argue
02:47:20 it’s not even really a problem.
02:47:22 It strikes me that explaining just the existence
02:47:25 of phenomenal consciousness is a problem.
02:47:27 So anyway, I very much keep that divide in mind
02:47:30 when I talk about these things,
02:47:31 what we can really say about what we’ve learned
02:47:34 through science, including by psychedelics
02:47:35 versus like what I can speculate on
02:47:38 in terms of the nature of reality and consciousness.
02:47:42 But in terms of, by and large,
02:47:48 skeptically, I have to say psychedelics
02:47:50 have not really taught us anything
02:47:53 about the nature of consciousness.
02:47:55 I’m hopeful that they will.
02:47:57 They have been used around certain,
02:48:01 I don’t even know if features is the right term,
02:48:03 but things that are called consciousness.
02:48:04 So consciousness can refer to not only
02:48:06 just phenomenal consciousness,
02:48:08 which is like the source of the hard problem
02:48:11 and what it is to be like Nagel’s description,
02:48:16 but the sense of self,
02:48:19 which can be sort of like the experiential self
02:48:22 moment to moment, or it can be like the narrative self,
02:48:24 the stringing together of stories.
02:48:25 So those are things that I think can be,
02:48:29 and a little bit’s been done with psychedelics
02:48:33 regarding that, but I think there’s far more potential.
02:48:41 So like one story that unfolded
02:48:43 is that psychedelics acutely having effects
02:48:45 on the default mode network,
02:48:48 a certain pattern of activation
02:48:50 amongst a subset of brain areas
02:48:52 that is associated with self referential processing,
02:48:55 seems to be more active,
02:48:57 more communication between these areas,
02:49:01 like the posterior cingulate cortex
02:49:04 and the medial prefrontal cortex, for example,
02:49:05 being parts of this and others that are tied
02:49:09 with sort of thinking about yourself,
02:49:12 remembering yourself in the past,
02:49:13 projecting yourself into the future.
02:49:15 And so an interesting story emerged
02:49:18 when it was found that when psilocybin is on board
02:49:24 in the person’s system,
02:49:25 that there’s less communication amongst these areas.
02:49:29 So with resting state fMRI imaging,
02:49:32 that there’s less synchronization
02:49:35 or presumably communication between these areas.
02:49:38 And so I think it has been overstated
02:49:41 in terms of, ah, we see this is like,
02:49:43 this is the dissolving of the ego.
02:49:46 The story made a whole lot of sense,
02:49:48 but there’s several,
02:49:50 I think that story is really being challenged.
02:49:53 Like one, we see increasing number of drugs
02:49:55 that decouple that network,
02:49:59 including ones like that aren’t psychedelic.
02:50:02 So this may just be a property, frankly,
02:50:04 of being like, you know, screwed up, you know,
02:50:07 like, you know, being out of your head,
02:50:09 being like, like, you know.
02:50:10 Anytime you mess with the perception system,
02:50:12 maybe it screws up some,
02:50:14 just our ability to just function in the holistically
02:50:19 like we do in order,
02:50:20 yeah, for the brain to perceive stuff,
02:50:22 to be able to map it to memory,
02:50:24 to connect things together,
02:50:26 the whole recur mechanism
02:50:28 that that could just be messed with.
02:50:30 Right.
02:50:31 And it could, and I’m speculating,
02:50:32 it could be tied to more
02:50:33 if you had to download into the language,
02:50:34 everyday language, like not feeling like yourself.
02:50:37 Like, so whether that be like really drunk
02:50:39 or really hopped up on amphetamine or, you know,
02:50:42 like we found it like decoupling of the default mode network
02:50:45 on salvinorin A, which is a smokable psychedelic,
02:50:48 which is a non classic psychedelic,
02:50:50 but another one where like DMT,
02:50:52 where people are often talking to entities
02:50:54 and that type of thing.
02:50:55 That was a really fun study to run.
02:50:57 But nonetheless, most people say
02:50:58 it’s not a classic psychedelic
02:51:00 and doesn’t have some of those phenomenal features
02:51:04 that people report from classic psychedelics
02:51:06 and not sort of the clear sort of ego loss type,
02:51:11 at least not in the way that people report it
02:51:12 with classic psychedelics.
02:51:13 So you get it with all these different drugs.
02:51:15 And so, and then you also see just broad,
02:51:18 broad changes in network activity with other networks.
02:51:21 And so I think that story took off a little too soon,
02:51:25 although, so I think, and the story that the DMN,
02:51:29 the default mode network relating to the self,
02:51:32 and I know some neuroscientists, it drives them crazy
02:51:34 if you say that it’s the ego and that just like,
02:51:37 but self referential processing, if you go that far,
02:51:42 like that was already known before psychedelics.
02:51:45 Psychedelics didn’t really contribute to that.
02:51:48 The idea that this type of brain network activity
02:51:52 was related to a sense of self.
02:51:56 But it is absolutely striking that psychedelics
02:52:00 that people report with pretty high reliability,
02:52:02 these unity experiences that where people subjectively,
02:52:06 like they report losing or again, like the boundaries,
02:52:10 however you wanna say it, like these unity experiences,
02:52:14 I think we can do a lot with that
02:52:16 in terms of figuring out the nature of the sense of self.
02:52:19 Now, I don’t think that’s the same as the hard problem
02:52:23 or the existence of phenomenal consciousness,
02:52:25 because you can build an AI system,
02:52:27 and you correct me if I’m wrong,
02:52:28 that will pass a Turing test
02:52:31 in terms of demonstrating the qualities
02:52:34 of like a sense of self.
02:52:37 It will talk as if there’s a self
02:52:38 and there’s probably a certain like algorithm
02:52:40 or whatever, like computational,
02:52:44 like scaling up of computations that results in somehow,
02:52:49 and I think this is the argument with humans,
02:52:52 but some have speculated this,
02:52:53 why do we have this illusion of the self that’s evolved?
02:52:57 And we might find this with AI that like it works,
02:53:01 having a sense of self, and that’s stated incorrectly,
02:53:06 like acting as if there is an agent at play
02:53:12 and behaviorally acting like there is a self,
02:53:17 that might kind of work.
02:53:18 And so you can program a computer or a robot
02:53:24 to basically demonstrate, have an algorithm like that
02:53:27 and demonstrate that type of behavior.
02:53:28 And I think that’s completely silent
02:53:30 on whether there’s an actual experience inside there.
02:53:33 I’ve been struggling to find the right words
02:53:36 in how I feel about that whole thing,
02:53:38 but because I’ve said it poorly before,
02:53:42 I’ve before said that there’s no difference
02:53:44 between the appearance and the actual existence
02:53:48 of consciousness or intelligence or any of that.
02:53:51 What I really mean is the more the appearance
02:53:57 starts to look like the thing,
02:54:00 the more there’s this area where it’s like,
02:54:03 I don’t think, our whole idea of what is real
02:54:10 and what is just an illusion
02:54:13 is not the right way to think about it.
02:54:16 So the whole idea is like, if you create a system
02:54:20 that looks like it’s having fun,
02:54:22 the more it’s realistically able to portray itself
02:54:27 as having fun, like there’s a certain gray area
02:54:31 which the system is having fun.
02:54:34 And same with intelligence, same with consciousness.
02:54:36 And we humans wanna simplify,
02:54:40 like it feels like the way we simplify the existence
02:54:42 and the illusion of something is missing the whole truth
02:54:49 of the nature of reality,
02:54:50 which we’re not yet able to understand.
02:54:52 Like it’s the 1%, we only understand 1% currently.
02:54:55 So we don’t have the right physics to talk about things,
02:54:59 we don’t have the right science to talk about things.
02:55:00 But to me, like the faking it and actually it being true
02:55:07 is the difference is much smaller
02:55:12 than what humans would like to imagine.
02:55:15 That’s my intuition, but the philosophers hate that
02:55:18 because, and guess what?
02:55:21 It’s philosophers, what have you actually built?
02:55:23 So like to me is that’s the difference
02:55:27 in philosophy and engineering.
02:55:28 It feels like if we push the creation, the engineering,
02:55:32 like fake it until you make it all the way,
02:55:35 which is like fake consciousness
02:55:37 until you realize, holy crap, this thing is conscious.
02:55:41 Fake intelligence until you realize,
02:55:42 holy crap, this is intelligence.
02:55:44 And from my curiosity with psychedelics
02:55:48 and just neurobiology and neuroscience
02:55:52 is like it feels, I love the armchair.
02:55:55 I love sitting in that armchair
02:55:57 because it feels like at a certain point
02:55:59 you’re going to think about this problem
02:56:01 and there’s going to be an aha moment.
02:56:05 Like that’s what the armchair does.
02:56:06 Sometimes science prevents you from really thinking,
02:56:09 wait, like it’s really simple.
02:56:14 There’s something really simple.
02:56:15 Like there’s some, there could be some dance of chemicals
02:56:20 that we’re totally unaware of,
02:56:22 not from aspects of like which chemicals to combine
02:56:26 with which biological architectures,
02:56:29 but more like we were thinking of it completely wrong
02:56:33 that just out of the blue,
02:56:38 like maybe the human mind is just like a radio
02:56:41 that tunes into some other medium
02:56:44 where consciousness actually exists.
02:56:46 Like those weird sort of hypothetically,
02:56:49 like maybe we’re just thinking about the human mind
02:56:52 totally wrong.
02:56:53 Maybe there’s no such thing as individual intelligence.
02:56:56 Maybe it is all collective intelligence between humans.
02:57:00 Like maybe the intelligence is possessed
02:57:02 in the communication of language between minds.
02:57:05 And then in fact, consciousness is a property
02:57:08 of that language versus a property of the individual minds.
02:57:13 And somehow the neurotransmitters
02:57:15 will be able to connect to that.
02:57:16 So then AI systems can join
02:57:19 that common collective intelligence, that common language,
02:57:23 like just thinking completely outside of the box.
02:57:25 I just said a bunch of crazy things.
02:57:26 I don’t know, but thinking outside the box
02:57:29 and there’s something about subtle manipulation
02:57:33 of the chemicals of the brain,
02:57:35 which feels like the best or one of the great chances
02:57:40 of the scientific process leading us
02:57:43 to an actual understanding of the hard problem.
02:57:46 So I am very hopeful that,
02:57:48 and so I mean, I’m a radical empiricist,
02:57:52 which I’m very strong with that.
02:57:54 Like that’s what, you know,
02:57:56 so, you know, science isn’t about
02:57:57 ultimately being a materialist.
02:57:59 It’s like, it’s about being an empiricist in my view.
02:58:02 And so, for example, I’m very fascinated
02:58:04 by the so called Psi phenomenon,
02:58:06 you know, like stuff that people just kind of reject
02:58:08 out of hand.
02:58:10 You know, I kind of orient towards that stuff
02:58:12 with an idea of, you know, hey, look,
02:58:16 you know, what we consider,
02:58:17 like anything exists as natural.
02:58:19 And so, but the boundary of what we observe in nature,
02:58:23 like what we recognize as in nature moves,
02:58:26 like what we do today and what we know today
02:58:28 would only be described as magic 500 years ago,
02:58:31 or even a hundred years ago, some of it.
02:58:32 So there will surely be things that,
02:58:36 like you explained these phenomenon
02:58:37 that just sound like completely,
02:58:39 they’re supernatural now,
02:58:41 where there may be, for some of it,
02:58:42 like some of it might turn out to be a complete bunk
02:58:44 and some of it might turn out to be,
02:58:47 it’s just another layer of nature,
02:58:49 whether we’re talking about multiple dimensions
02:58:50 that are invoked or something,
02:58:52 we don’t even have the language towards.
02:58:53 And what you’re saying about the moving together
02:58:55 of the model and the real thing of conscious,
02:58:58 like, I’m very sympathetic to that.
02:59:00 So that’s that part of like, on the armchair side,
02:59:03 where I want to be clear, I can’t say this as a scientist,
02:59:06 but just in terms of speculating,
02:59:07 I find myself attracted to these,
02:59:12 more of the sort of the panpsychism ideas.
02:59:15 And that kind of makes sense to me.
02:59:17 I don’t know if that’s what you meant there,
02:59:19 but it seemed like related,
02:59:20 the sense that ultimately if you were completely modeling,
02:59:26 like it’s like, if you completely modeling,
02:59:28 unless you dismiss like the idea
02:59:31 that there is a phenomenal consciousness,
02:59:33 which I think is hard,
02:59:33 given that we all, I seem like I have one,
02:59:35 that’s really all I know.
02:59:37 But if that’s so compelling, I can’t just dismiss that.
02:59:41 Like if you take that as a given,
02:59:44 then the only way for the model and the real thing to merge
02:59:49 is if there is something baked into the nature of reality,
02:59:56 sort of like in the history of like,
02:59:57 there are certain just like fundamental forces
03:00:00 or fundamental, like, and that’s been useful for us.
03:00:03 And sometimes we find out
03:00:04 that that’s pointing towards something else,
03:00:05 or sometimes it’s still, seems like it’s a fundamental,
03:00:09 and sometimes it’s a placeholder for someone to figure out,
03:00:11 but there’s something like, this is just a given.
03:00:13 This is just, and sometimes something like gravity
03:00:16 seems like a very good placeholder,
03:00:17 and then there’s something better that comes to replace it.
03:00:20 So, I kind of think about like consciousness
03:00:23 and I didn’t, I kind of had this inclination
03:00:25 before I knew there was a term for it,
03:00:27 Rosalian monism, the idea that, which is a form of,
03:00:31 again, I’m an armchair philosopher, not a very good one.
03:00:35 Broadly panpsychism, by the way,
03:00:37 is the idea that sort of consciousness permeates all matter
03:00:40 and, or it’s a fundamental part of physics
03:00:44 of the universe kind of thing.
03:00:45 So, and there’s a lot of different flavors of it
03:00:49 as you’re alluding to.
03:00:51 And something that struck me as like consistent
03:00:53 with some just, you know, inclinations of mine,
03:00:56 just total speculation is this idea of everything we know
03:01:01 in science and with most of the stuff we think of physics,
03:01:06 you know, really describes, it’s all interactions.
03:01:11 It’s not the thing itself.
03:01:13 Like there is something to, and this sounds very new agey,
03:01:20 which is why it’s very difficult
03:01:21 and I have a high bullshit like meter and everything,
03:01:24 but like an isness, I mean, think about like Huxley,
03:01:27 all this Huxley with his mescaline experience
03:01:30 and doors of procession, like there’s an isness there
03:01:32 in Alan Watson, like there is a nature of being,
03:01:37 again, very new agey sounding,
03:01:39 but maybe there is something to,
03:01:41 and when we say consciousness,
03:01:43 we think of like this human experience,
03:01:45 but maybe that’s just, that’s so processed
03:01:47 and so, that’s so far, so derivative of this kind
03:01:52 of basic thing that we wouldn’t even recognize
03:01:54 the basic thing, but the basic thing might just be,
03:01:57 this is not about the interaction between particles.
03:02:00 This is what it is like to exist as a particle.
03:02:06 And maybe it’s not even particles.
03:02:07 Maybe it’s like space time itself.
03:02:09 I mean, again, totally in the speculation area.
03:02:11 And something else based on, so it’s funny
03:02:14 because we don’t have this, neither the science
03:02:16 nor the proper language to talk about it.
03:02:18 All we have is kind of a little intuitions
03:02:21 about there might be something in that direction
03:02:24 of the darkness to pursue.
03:02:26 And in that sense, I find panpsychism interesting
03:02:31 in that like, it does feel like there’s something
03:02:35 fundamental here, that consciousness is,
03:02:38 it’s not just like, okay, so the flip side,
03:02:40 consciousness could be just a very basic
03:02:43 and trivial symptom, like a little hack of nature
03:02:48 that’s useful for like survival of an organism.
03:02:53 It’s not something fundamental.
03:02:55 It’s just this very basic, boring chemical thing
03:03:01 that somehow has convinced us humans,
03:03:03 because we’re very human centric, we’re very self centric,
03:03:06 that this is somehow really important,
03:03:08 but it’s actually pretty obvious.
03:03:10 But, or it could be something really fundamental
03:03:13 to the nature of the universe.
03:03:15 So both of those are to me pretty compelling.
03:03:18 And I think eventually scientifically testable.
03:03:21 It is so frustrating that it’s hard to design
03:03:24 a scientific experiment currently,
03:03:25 but I think that’s how Nobel Prizes are won,
03:03:29 is nobody did it until they do it.
03:03:33 The reason I lean towards, and again, armchair spec,
03:03:36 if I had to bet like $1,000 on which one of these
03:03:40 ultimately be proved, I would lean towards,
03:03:44 I’d put my bets on something like panpsychism
03:03:47 rather than the emergence of phenomenal consciousness
03:03:51 through complexity or computational complexity,
03:03:55 because, although certainly if there is
03:03:58 some underlying fundamental consciousness,
03:04:01 it’s clearly being processed in this way through computation
03:04:07 in terms of resulting in our experience
03:04:09 and the experience presumably of other animals.
03:04:11 But the reason I would bet on panpsychism is to me,
03:04:14 Occam’s razor, in terms of truly the hard problem,
03:04:19 at some point you have an inside looking out.
03:04:22 And even looking refers to vision and it doesn’t,
03:04:24 that’s just an example, but just,
03:04:26 there’s an inside experiencing something.
03:04:31 At some point of complexity, all of a sudden,
03:04:34 you start from this objective universe
03:04:36 and all we know about is interactions between things
03:04:38 and things happen.
03:04:39 And at this certain level of complexity,
03:04:42 magically there’s an inside.
03:04:45 That to me doesn’t pass Occam’s razor as easily
03:04:48 as maybe there is a fundamental property of the universe.
03:04:53 There’s both subjective and objective.
03:04:56 There is both interactions amongst things
03:04:58 and there is the thing itself.
03:05:02 Yes.
03:05:03 But, yeah.
03:05:04 So I’m of two minds.
03:05:05 I agree with you totally on half my mind.
03:05:08 And the other half is I’ve seen,
03:05:09 looking at cellular automata a lot,
03:05:12 which is, it sure does seem that we don’t understand
03:05:16 anything about complexity.
03:05:18 Like the emergence, just the property.
03:05:21 In fact, that could be a fundamental property of reality
03:05:25 is something within the emergence
03:05:28 from simple things interacting,
03:05:30 somehow miraculous things happen.
03:05:33 And like that, I don’t understand that.
03:05:36 That could be fundamental.
03:05:38 That like something about the layers of abstraction,
03:05:45 like layers of reality,
03:05:46 like really small things interacting
03:05:48 and then on another layer emerges actual complicated behavior
03:05:54 even on the underlying thing is super simple.
03:05:57 Like that process, we don’t really don’t understand either.
03:06:00 And that could be bigger than any of the things
03:06:02 we’re talking about.
03:06:04 That’s the basic force behind everything
03:06:07 that’s happening in the universe
03:06:09 is from simple things, complex phenomena can happen.
03:06:14 Phenomena can happen.
03:06:16 And the thing that gives me pause
03:06:19 is that I’m concerned about a threshold there.
03:06:24 Like how is it likely that,
03:06:26 now there may be, and there may be some qualitative shift
03:06:28 that in the realm of like,
03:06:30 we don’t even understand complexity yet,
03:06:32 like you’re saying.
03:06:33 Like, so maybe there is,
03:06:34 but I do think like if it is a result of the complexity,
03:06:38 well, just having helium versus hydrogen
03:06:41 is a form of complexity.
03:06:43 Having the existence of stars versus clouds of gas
03:06:45 is a complexity.
03:06:46 The entire universe has been this increasing complexity.
03:06:50 And so that kind of brings me back to then the other
03:06:53 of like, okay, if there’s,
03:06:55 if it’s about complexity, then we should,
03:06:57 then it exists at a certain level
03:06:59 in these simple systems like a star
03:07:02 or a more complex atom.
03:07:05 Hence the panpsychism, that’s right.
03:07:06 But we humans, the qualitative shift,
03:07:09 we might have evolved to appreciate certain kinds
03:07:13 of thresholds.
03:07:14 Right. Yeah.
03:07:15 I do think it’s likely that this idea that,
03:07:18 whether or not there’s an inner experience,
03:07:20 which is phenomenal, it’s the hard problem,
03:07:22 that acting like an agent, like having an algorithm
03:07:26 that basically like operates as if there is an agent,
03:07:29 that’s clearly a thing that I think has worked
03:07:32 and that there is a whole lot to figure out there that,
03:07:37 and I think psychedelics will be extremely helpful
03:07:40 in figuring more out about that because they do seem
03:07:44 to a lot of times eliminate that or whatever,
03:07:48 radically shift that sense of self.
03:07:51 Let me ask the craziest question.
03:07:53 Indulge me for a second.
03:07:54 I’ll, this is a joke.
03:07:57 Compared to what we’ve been talking about?
03:07:58 Like, okay.
03:07:59 No, all of this is assigned,
03:08:02 all of that, despite the caveats about armchair,
03:08:05 I think is within the reach of science.
03:08:08 Let me ask one that’s kind of,
03:08:11 also within the reach of science,
03:08:12 but as Joe likes to say, it’s entirely possible, right?
03:08:17 Is it possible that with these DMT trips,
03:08:21 when you meet entities, is it possible
03:08:25 that these entities are extraterrestrial life forms?
03:08:30 Like our understanding of little green men
03:08:33 with aliens that show up is totally off.
03:08:36 I often think about this,
03:08:37 like what would actual extraterrestrial intelligence
03:08:42 look like?
03:08:43 And my sense is it will look like very different
03:08:47 from anything we can even begin to comprehend.
03:08:51 And how would it communicate?
03:08:52 And how would it communicate?
03:08:53 Would it be necessarily spaceships
03:08:55 within your civil travel or?
03:08:57 Could it be communicating through chemicals,
03:09:00 through if there’s the panpsychism situation,
03:09:03 if there’s something, not if.
03:09:05 I almost for sure know we don’t understand a lot
03:09:09 about the function of our mind in connection
03:09:12 to the fabric of the physics in the universe.
03:09:16 A lot of people seem to think
03:09:17 we have theoretical physics pretty figured out.
03:09:20 I have my doubts because I’m pretty sure
03:09:22 it always feels like we have everything figured out
03:09:24 until we don’t.
03:09:25 Right, I mean, there’s no grand unifying theory yet, right?
03:09:28 But even then, we could be missing out,
03:09:32 like the concept of the universe
03:09:34 just can be completely off.
03:09:36 Like how many other universes are there?
03:09:38 All those kinds of things.
03:09:40 I mean, just the basic nature of information,
03:09:43 the time, time, all of those things.
03:09:48 Yeah, whether that’s just like a thing we assign value to
03:09:51 or whether it’s fundamental or not,
03:09:53 that’s whole, I could talk to Shankar forever
03:09:57 about whether time is emergent
03:09:58 or fundamental to the reality.
03:10:01 But is it possible that the entities we meet
03:10:04 are actual alien life forms?
03:10:06 Do you ever think about that?
03:10:08 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do.
03:10:10 And I’ve, to some degree, laid my cards out
03:10:13 by identifying as a radical empiricist, you know?
03:10:16 And it’s like, so the answer, is it possible?
03:10:18 And I think, you know, ultimately,
03:10:20 if you’re a good scientist, you gotta say,
03:10:22 now that’s at the extremes, it’s a like, yes.
03:10:25 Yes.
03:10:26 It might get more interesting when you’re asked to guess
03:10:30 about the probability of that.
03:10:31 Is that a one in a million, one in a trillion,
03:10:34 one in more than the number of atoms
03:10:38 in the universe probability?
03:10:41 And as an empiricist, it’s like, what is a good testable?
03:10:44 Like, how would you know the answer to that question?
03:10:47 Or how would you be able to validate?
03:10:49 I mean.
03:10:50 Well, can you get some information that’s verifiable,
03:10:52 like information about some other planet or some aspect?
03:11:01 And gosh, it would be an interesting range,
03:11:03 but what range of discovery that we can anticipate
03:11:06 we’re gonna know within, you know, whatever,
03:11:10 a few years, next five, 10, 20 years,
03:11:13 and seeing if you can get that information now,
03:11:17 and then over time, it might be verified.
03:11:20 You know, the type of thing like, you know, part of Einstein’s
03:11:23 work was ultimately verified,
03:11:24 not until decades and decades later,
03:11:26 at least certain aspects through empirical observations.
03:11:31 But it’s also possible that the alien beings
03:11:34 have a very different value system
03:11:36 and perception of the world,
03:11:37 where all of this little capitalistic improvements
03:11:40 that we’re all after, like predicting,
03:11:42 the concept of predicting the future too,
03:11:45 is like totally useless to other life forms
03:11:51 that perhaps think in a much different way,
03:11:56 maybe a more transcendent way, I don’t know, but.
03:11:58 So they wouldn’t even sign the consent form
03:12:00 to be a participant in our experiment?
03:12:03 They would not, they would not.
03:12:05 And they wouldn’t even understand
03:12:07 the nature of these experiments.
03:12:08 I mean, maybe it’s purely in the realm
03:12:12 of the consciousness thing that we talked about.
03:12:16 So communicating in a way that is totally different
03:12:20 than the kinds of communication that we think of
03:12:23 as on Earth.
03:12:24 Like what’s the purpose of communication for us?
03:12:27 For us humans, the purpose of communication
03:12:30 is sharing ideas, it feels like.
03:12:32 Like converging, like it’s the Dawkins like memes.
03:12:37 It’s like we’re sharing ideas in order to figure out
03:12:41 how to collaborate together, to get food into our systems
03:12:45 and procreate and then like murder everybody
03:12:49 in the neighboring tribe because they’ll steal our food.
03:12:52 Like we are all about sharing ideas.
03:12:54 Maybe it’s possible to have another alien life form
03:12:59 that’s more about sharing experiences.
03:13:03 Like it’s less about ideas, I don’t know.
03:13:05 And maybe that’ll be us in a few years.
03:13:07 How could it not?
03:13:08 Like instead of explaining something laboriously to you,
03:13:11 like having people describe the ineffable
03:13:13 psychedelic experience, like if we could record that
03:13:17 and then get the neural link of 50 years from now,
03:13:19 like, oh, just plug this into your…
03:13:21 Just transferring the experiences.
03:13:22 Yeah, it’s like, oh, now you feel what it’s like.
03:13:24 And like, in one sense, like how could we not go there?
03:13:27 And then you get into the realm,
03:13:28 especially when you throw time into it,
03:13:30 are the aliens us in the future?
03:13:32 Or even like a transcendental, temporal,
03:13:35 like the us beyond time.
03:13:37 Like, I don’t know, like you get into this realm
03:13:39 and there’s a lot of possibilities, yeah.
03:13:42 But I think, you know, there’s one psychedelic researcher
03:13:44 that’s who did high dose DMT research in the 90s
03:13:49 who speculated that,
03:13:51 that there was a lot of alien encounter experiences.
03:13:54 Like maybe these are like entities
03:13:57 from some other dimension or…
03:13:59 He labeled it as speculation, but you know.
03:14:02 Do you remember the name?
03:14:03 Oh, Rick Strassman.
03:14:04 Oh, Rick Strassman.
03:14:05 Yeah, yeah, the DMT work.
03:14:07 He labeled it as speculation, but you know,
03:14:10 I think that, yeah, I think we’d be wise to kind of,
03:14:16 you know, it’s always that balance
03:14:18 between being empirically grounded and skeptical,
03:14:22 but also not being, and I think in science,
03:14:24 well, often we are too closed,
03:14:27 which relates to like, you’re talking about Elon,
03:14:29 like in academia, it’s like often like,
03:14:31 I think you’re punished for thinking
03:14:33 or even talking about 20 years from now
03:14:35 because it’s just so far removed from your next grant
03:14:37 or for your next paper that it’s easy pickings
03:14:41 and you know, that you’re not allowed to speculate, so.
03:14:45 I think though, I’m a huge fan of,
03:14:47 I think the best way to me at least to practice like science
03:14:52 or to practice good engineering is to like do two things
03:14:57 and just bounce off, like spend most of the time
03:15:00 doing the rigor of the day to day
03:15:03 of what can be accomplished now in the engineering space
03:15:05 or in the science, like what can actually,
03:15:08 what can you construct an experiment around,
03:15:10 do like that, the usual rigor of the scientific process,
03:15:14 but then every once in a while on a regular basis,
03:15:17 to step outside and talk about aliens and consciousness
03:15:21 and we just walk along the line of things
03:15:25 that are outside the reach of science currently.
03:15:28 Free will, the illusion or the perception
03:15:33 or the experience of free will of anything,
03:15:37 just the entirety of it, being able to travel in time
03:15:41 through wormholes, it’s like it’s really useful to do that,
03:15:45 especially as a scientist, like if that’s all you do,
03:15:49 you go into a land where you’re not actually able
03:15:53 to think rigorously, there’s something at least to me
03:15:56 that if you just hop back and forth,
03:15:59 you’re able to, I think do exactly the kind of injection
03:16:03 of out of the box thinking
03:16:06 to your regular day to day science
03:16:08 that will ultimately lead to breakthroughs.
03:16:12 But you have to be the good scientist most of the time.
03:16:15 And that’s consistent with what I think
03:16:17 the great scientists of history,
03:16:19 like in most of the history, the greats,
03:16:25 the Newtons and Einsteins, I mean, they were,
03:16:29 there was less of, and this change I think
03:16:31 is time marched on, but less of a separation
03:16:33 between those realms.
03:16:34 It’s like, there’s the inclination alpha,
03:16:36 it’s like, as a scientist, and this is science,
03:16:41 this is my work, and then this, it’s like my inclination
03:16:44 to say, oh, Lex, don’t take me too seriously
03:16:46 because this is my armchair,
03:16:47 I’m not speaking as a scientist,
03:16:48 I’m bending over backwards to say, to divide that self,
03:16:52 and maybe there’s been less of, there’s been that evolution
03:16:55 and that’s, and like the greats didn’t see that.
03:17:00 I mean, Newton, and you go back in time,
03:17:02 and it’s like that obviously connects to then religion,
03:17:04 especially if that is the predominant world,
03:17:05 where Newton, like how much time did he spend
03:17:10 trying to decode the Bible and whatnot?
03:17:12 Maybe that was a dead end.
03:17:14 But it’s like, if you really believe in that,
03:17:17 in that particular religion, and you’re this mastermind,
03:17:20 and you’re trying to figure things out,
03:17:22 it’s not like, oh, this is what my job description is
03:17:24 and this is what the grant wants.
03:17:25 It’s like, no, I’ve got this limited time on the planet,
03:17:28 I’m gonna figure out as much stuff as possible.
03:17:30 Nothing is off the table
03:17:32 and you’re just putting it all together.
03:17:34 So this is kind of this trajectory
03:17:35 is really related to this, the siloing in science.
03:17:38 Like, again, related to my like, oh, I’m not a philosopher,
03:17:44 whether you consider that a science or not,
03:17:46 not empirical science,
03:17:47 but like going to these different disciplines,
03:17:49 like the greats didn’t observe the boundaries,
03:17:53 the boundaries didn’t exist, they didn’t observe them.
03:17:56 So speaking of the finiteness
03:17:59 of our existence in this world,
03:18:04 so on the front of psychedelics and teaching you lessons
03:18:09 as a researcher, as a human being,
03:18:12 what have you learned about death, about mortality,
03:18:16 about the finiteness of our existence?
03:18:18 Are you yourself afraid of death?
03:18:21 And how has your view, do you ponder it?
03:18:25 And has your view of your mortality changed
03:18:28 with the research you’ve done?
03:18:30 Yeah, yeah, so I do ponder it and…
03:18:34 Are you afraid of death?
03:18:35 Probably on a daily basis, I ponder it.
03:18:37 I’d have to pick it apart more and say,
03:18:41 yeah, I am afraid of dying, like the process of dying.
03:18:46 I’m not afraid of being dead.
03:18:48 I mean, I’m not afraid of,
03:18:49 I think it was Penn Jillette that said,
03:18:51 and he may have gotten it from someone else,
03:18:53 but I’m not afraid of the year 1862 before I existed.
03:18:58 I’m not afraid of the year 2262 after I’m gone.
03:19:02 It’s gonna be fine.
03:19:03 But yeah, dying, I’d be lying
03:19:07 if I said I wasn’t afraid of dying.
03:19:11 And so there’s both the process of dying,
03:19:13 yeah, it’s usually not good.
03:19:15 It’d be nice if it was after many, many years
03:19:18 and just sort of, I’d rather not die in my sleep.
03:19:23 I’d rather kind of be conscious,
03:19:24 but sort of just die, fade out with old age maybe.
03:19:26 But just being in an accident and horrible diseases,
03:19:31 I’ve seen enough loved ones.
03:19:33 It’s like, yeah, this is not good.
03:19:34 This is enough to be, I’d like to say
03:19:37 that I’m peaceful and sort of balanced enough
03:19:40 that I’m not concerned at all,
03:19:41 but no, like, yeah, I’m afraid of dying.
03:19:44 But I’m also concerned about, I think about family.
03:19:48 I’m really, I’m afraid or at least concerned
03:19:52 about like not being there,
03:19:55 like with a three year old, not being there,
03:19:57 not being there for him and my wife
03:20:01 and my mom the rest of her life.
03:20:03 I’m concerned about not,
03:20:05 I’m concerned more about like the harm
03:20:07 that it would cause if I left prematurely.
03:20:10 And then kind of even bigger along the lines
03:20:11 of some of the stuff that forward thinking
03:20:13 we’ve been talking about.
03:20:14 I think maybe way too much about just like,
03:20:17 and I’ll never know the answer.
03:20:19 So even if I lived to 120,
03:20:22 but like, I wanna know as much as I can,
03:20:24 but like, how is this gonna work out like as humans?
03:20:28 Are we, and a big one, I think is are we gonna,
03:20:30 and I don’t think unfortunately I’m gonna learn it
03:20:34 in my lifetime, even if I live to a ripe old age,
03:20:37 but well, I don’t know.
03:20:38 Is this gonna work out?
03:20:39 Like, are we gonna escape the planet?
03:20:41 I think that’s one of the biggies.
03:20:42 Like, are we gonna, like the survival of the speed,
03:20:45 like I think the next, like the time we’re in now,
03:20:48 it’s like with the nuclear weapons, with pandemics
03:20:51 and with, I mean, we’re gonna get to the point
03:20:54 where anyone can build a hydrogen bomb.
03:20:57 Like, you know, it’s like, you just like the,
03:21:00 or engineer like the, you know,
03:21:02 something that’s a million times worse than COVID
03:21:03 and then just spread it.
03:21:04 It’s like, we’re getting to this period of,
03:21:06 and then not to mention climate change, you know,
03:21:09 it’s like, although I think that’s not,
03:21:10 there’s probably gonna be surviving humans
03:21:12 with that regard, you know, but it could be really bad.
03:21:15 But these existential threats, I think the only real
03:21:19 guarantee that we’re gonna get another, you name it,
03:21:22 thousand million, whatever years is like diversity,
03:21:26 diversify our portfolio, get off the planet, you know,
03:21:31 don’t leave this one, hopefully we keep, you know,
03:21:33 but like, and I, you know, it’s like,
03:21:36 either we’re gonna get snuffed out like really quickly
03:21:40 or we’re gonna like, if we reach that point
03:21:44 and it’s gonna be over the next like 100, 200 years,
03:21:46 like we’re probably gonna survive like until like,
03:21:51 I mean, you know, like our sun, like, and even beyond that,
03:21:55 like we’re probably gonna be talking about millions
03:21:57 and millions of years.
03:21:58 It’s like, and we’re, I don’t know,
03:22:01 in terms of the planet, 4 billion years into this.
03:22:04 And depending on how you count our species, you know,
03:22:06 we’re, you know, we’re millions of years into this.
03:22:08 And it’s like, this is like the point of the relay race
03:22:11 where we can really screw up.
03:22:13 So that would make you feel pretty good
03:22:15 when you’re on your deathbed at 120 years old
03:22:19 and there’s something hopeful about,
03:22:21 there’s a colony starting up on Mars and it’s like.
03:22:24 Yeah, Titan, like whatever, you know, like, yeah,
03:22:27 like that we have these colonies out there
03:22:29 that would tell me like, yeah, then at least we’d be good
03:22:33 until like the, you know, hopefully, probably
03:22:36 until the sun goes red giant, you know what I mean?
03:22:40 Rather than, oh, like 20 years from now
03:22:43 when there’s someone with their finger on the nuclear button
03:22:46 that just, you know, misperceives, you know, the radar,
03:22:50 you know, like the signal they think Russia’s attacking,
03:22:54 they’re really not or China.
03:22:56 And like, that’s probably how a nuclear accident,
03:22:58 war is gonna start rather than, you know,
03:23:01 or the, like I said, these other horrible things.
03:23:03 Does it not make you sad that you won’t be there
03:23:07 if we are successful at proliferating
03:23:10 throughout the observable universe
03:23:13 that you won’t be there to experience any of it?
03:23:17 Just the ego death, right?
03:23:19 It’s the death, because you’re still gonna die
03:23:21 and it’s still gonna be over.
03:23:23 That’s, you know, Ernest Becker and those folks
03:23:28 really emphasize the terror of death that if we’re honest,
03:23:33 we’ll discover if we search within ourselves,
03:23:36 which is like, this thing is gonna be over.
03:23:38 Most of our existence is based on the illusion
03:23:44 that it’s gonna go forever.
03:23:47 And when you sort of realize it’s actually gonna be over,
03:23:50 like today, like I might murder you
03:23:53 at the end of this conversation.
03:23:54 And it might be over today, or like on going home,
03:23:59 this might be your last day on this earth.
03:24:02 And it’s, I mean, like pondering that,
03:24:07 I suppose one thing to be me,
03:24:11 I, if I were to push back, it’s interesting,
03:24:16 is you actually, I think you see comfort in the sadness
03:24:21 of how unfortunate it will be for your family
03:24:24 to not have you, because the really,
03:24:27 even the deeper, yes, but that’s the simple fear.
03:24:34 Even the deeper terror is like this thing
03:24:39 doesn’t last forever.
03:24:41 Like I think, I don’t know, like it’s hard to put
03:24:46 the right words to it, but it feels like
03:24:49 that’s not truly acknowledged by us, by each of us.
03:24:54 Yeah, I think this is the, I mean,
03:24:57 getting back to the psychedelics in terms of the people
03:24:59 and our work with cancer patients who,
03:25:01 we had psilocybin sessions to help them,
03:25:03 and it did substantially help them, the vast majority,
03:25:08 in terms of dealing with these existential issues.
03:25:10 And I think, you know, it’s something we,
03:25:12 I could say that I really feel that I’ve come along
03:25:15 in that both like being with folks who have died
03:25:18 that are close to me, and then also that work,
03:25:20 I think are the two biggies in sort of,
03:25:23 you know, I think I’ve come along in that,
03:25:26 that sort of acceptance of this, like it’s not gonna last.
03:25:31 And whether at the personal level
03:25:33 or even at the species level, like at some point,
03:25:35 all the stars are gonna fade out,
03:25:37 and it’s gonna be the realm of,
03:25:38 which is gonna be the vast majority,
03:25:40 unless there’s a big crunch,
03:25:41 which apparently doesn’t seem likely.
03:25:43 Like most of the universe, there’s this blink of an eye
03:25:45 that’s happening right now that life is even possible,
03:25:47 like the era of stars.
03:25:49 So it’s like, we’re gonna fade out at some point.
03:25:52 Like, you know, and you know,
03:25:55 then we get at this level of consciousness and like, okay,
03:25:58 maybe there is life after death.
03:26:00 Maybe there’s, maybe time’s an illusion.
03:26:02 Like that part I’m ready for.
03:26:04 Like, I’m like, you know, like that,
03:26:06 that would be really great.
03:26:08 And I’m looking, I’m not afraid of that at all.
03:26:10 It’s like, even if it’s just strange,
03:26:12 like if I could push a button to enter that door,
03:26:14 I mean, I’m not gonna, you know, die,
03:26:16 you know, I can kill myself, but it’s like,
03:26:18 if I could take a peek at what that reality is
03:26:20 or choose at the end of my life,
03:26:22 if I could choose of entering into a universe
03:26:25 where there is an afterlife of something completely unknown
03:26:28 versus one where there’s none,
03:26:29 I think I’d say, well, let’s see what’s behind that.
03:26:32 That’s a true scientist way of thinking.
03:26:34 If there’s a door, you’re excited about opening it
03:26:36 and going in.
03:26:38 Right.
03:26:39 When I am attracted to this idea, like, you know,
03:26:43 and I recognize it’s easier said than done
03:26:45 to say I’m okay with not existing.
03:26:47 It’s like the real test is like, okay, check me on my deathbed.
03:26:50 You know, it’s like, oh, I’ll be all right.
03:26:52 It’s a beautiful thing and the humility of surrendering.
03:26:55 And I really hope, and I think I’d probably be more likely
03:26:58 to be in that realm right now than I would,
03:27:01 or check me when I get a terminal cancer diagnosis,
03:27:05 and I really hope I’m more in that realm.
03:27:07 But I know enough about human nature to know that, like,
03:27:10 I can’t really speak to that
03:27:12 because I haven’t been in that situation.
03:27:14 And I think there can be a beauty to that
03:27:17 and the transcendence of like, yeah,
03:27:19 and, you know, it was beautiful,
03:27:21 not just despite all that, but because of that,
03:27:24 because ultimately there’s going to be nothing
03:27:27 and because we came from nothing
03:27:28 and we dealt with all this shit,
03:27:30 the fact that there was still beauty and truth
03:27:32 and connection, like, that, you know,
03:27:35 like it just, it’s a beautiful thing.
03:27:38 But I hope I’m in that.
03:27:40 It’s easy to say that now.
03:27:42 Like, yeah.
03:27:44 Do you think there’s a meaning to this thing
03:27:47 we got going on, life, existence on earth to us individuals
03:27:55 from a psychedelics researcher perspective
03:27:58 or from just a human perspective?
03:28:00 Those merged together for me, like, because it’s just hard.
03:28:04 I’ve been doing this research for almost 17 years
03:28:07 and like, not just the cancer study,
03:28:09 but so many times people like,
03:28:12 I remember a session in one of our studies,
03:28:15 someone who wasn’t getting any treatment for anything,
03:28:18 but one of our healthy normal studies
03:28:19 where he was contemplating the suicide of his son
03:28:23 and just these, I mean,
03:28:25 just like the most intense human experiences
03:28:28 that you can have in the most vulnerable situations.
03:28:32 Sometimes like people like, you know,
03:28:35 and it’s just like, you have to have a,
03:28:38 and you just feel lucky to be part of that process
03:28:40 that people trust you to let their guards down like that.
03:28:46 Like, I don’t know, the meaning,
03:28:47 I think the meaning of life is to find meaning.
03:28:52 And I think, actually, I think I just described it a minute ago.
03:28:55 It’s like that transcendence of everything.
03:28:57 Like, it’s the beauty despite the absolute ugliness.
03:29:02 It’s the, and as a species, and I think more about this,
03:29:07 like, I think about this a lot.
03:29:08 It’s the fact that we are, I mean, we come from filth.
03:29:15 I mean, we’re, you know, we’re animals.
03:29:18 We come from, like, we’re all descendant
03:29:21 from murderers and rapists.
03:29:23 Like, we, despite that background,
03:29:27 we are capable of the self sacrifice and the connection
03:29:33 and figuring things out, you know, science
03:29:37 and other forms of truth, you know, seeking,
03:29:40 and an artwork, just the beauty of music
03:29:44 and other forms of art.
03:29:45 It’s like the fact that that’s possible
03:29:48 is the meaning of life.
03:29:51 I mean…
03:29:52 And ultimately, that feels to be creating
03:29:54 more and richer experiences.
03:29:57 The, from a Russian perspective, both the dark,
03:30:03 you mentioned the cancer diagnosis
03:30:05 or losing a child to suicide or all those dark things
03:30:11 is still rich experiences.
03:30:14 And also the beautiful creations, the art,
03:30:17 the music, the science, that’s also rich experience.
03:30:20 So somehow we’re figuring out from just like psychedelics
03:30:24 expand our mind to the possibility of experiences.
03:30:26 Somehow we’re able to figure out different ways
03:30:29 as a society to expand the realm of experiences.
03:30:33 And from that we gain meaning somehow.
03:30:35 Right. And that’s part of like this,
03:30:36 we’re going across different levels here,
03:30:38 but like the idea that so called bad trips
03:30:40 or challenging experiences are so common
03:30:42 in psychedelic experiences, it’s like,
03:30:44 that’s a part of that.
03:30:46 Like, yeah, it’s tough.
03:30:47 And most of the important things in life
03:30:49 are really, really tough and scary.
03:30:51 And most of the things like the death of a loved one,
03:30:54 like the greatest learning experiences
03:30:57 and things that make you who you are are the horrors.
03:31:01 And it’s like, yeah, we try to minimize them.
03:31:03 We try to avoid them, but I don’t know.
03:31:06 I think we all need to get into the mode
03:31:08 of like giving ourselves a break,
03:31:09 both personally and societally.
03:31:12 I mean, I went through like the,
03:31:14 I think a lot of people do these days in my twenties,
03:31:16 like, oh, the humans are just kind of a disease
03:31:20 on the planet.
03:31:22 And then in terms of our country,
03:31:23 in terms of the United States, it’s like,
03:31:25 oh, we have all these horrible sins in our past.
03:31:28 And it’s like, I think about that like the,
03:31:32 I think about it like my three year old.
03:31:34 It’s like, yeah, you can construct a story
03:31:36 where this is all just horrible.
03:31:38 You can look at that stuff and say,
03:31:40 this is all just horror.
03:31:42 Like there’s no logical answer to our rational answer
03:31:47 to say we’re not a disease on the planet.
03:31:48 From one lens we are.
03:31:50 And you could just look at humanity as that,
03:31:57 like nothing but this horrible thing.
03:31:58 You can look at, and you name the system,
03:32:01 modern medicine, Western medicine,
03:32:04 the university system.
03:32:05 And it’s like, you could dismiss everything.
03:32:07 So, big pharma, like hopefully these vaccines work.
03:32:10 And then like, yeah, I’d like to,
03:32:12 I’m kind of glad the big pharma was a part of that.
03:32:15 And it’s like the United States,
03:32:17 you can like point to the horrors,
03:32:20 like any other country that’s been around a long time
03:32:22 that has these legitimate horrors
03:32:24 and kind of dismiss like these beautiful things.
03:32:27 Like, yeah, we have this like modifiable constitutional republic
03:32:31 that just like I still think is the best thing going.
03:32:35 That as a model system of like how humans have to figure out
03:32:40 how to work together.
03:32:41 It’s like, there’s no better system that I’ve come across.
03:32:46 Yeah, there’s, if we’re willing to look for it,
03:32:50 there’s a beautiful core to a lot of things we’ve created.
03:32:53 Yeah, this country is a great example of that.
03:32:57 But most of the human experience has a beauty to it,
03:33:00 even the suffering.
03:33:01 Right.
03:33:02 So, the meaning is choosing to focus on that positivity
03:33:06 and not forget it.
03:33:07 Beautifully put.
03:33:08 Speaking of experiences,
03:33:09 this was one of my favorite experiences on this podcast
03:33:13 talking to you today, Matthew.
03:33:15 I hope we get a chance to talk again.
03:33:17 I hope to see you and Joe Rogan.
03:33:19 It’s a huge honor to talk to you.
03:33:21 Can’t wait to read your papers.
03:33:23 Thanks for talking today.
03:33:24 Likewise, I very much enjoyed it.
03:33:26 Thank you.
03:33:27 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matthew Johnson.
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03:34:07 And now let me leave you with some words from Terrence McKenna.
03:34:10 Nature loves courage.
03:34:12 You make the commitment and nature will respond
03:34:15 to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
03:34:18 Dream the impossible dream
03:34:20 and the world will not grind you under.
03:34:23 It will lift you up.
03:34:24 This is the trick.
03:34:26 This is what all these teachers and philosophers
03:34:28 who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold.
03:34:32 This is what they understood.
03:34:34 This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
03:34:37 This is how magic is done
03:34:39 by hurling yourself into the abyss
03:34:42 and discovering it’s a feather bed.
03:34:45 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.