The following is a conversation with Matthew Johnson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral
science at Johns Hopkins, and is one of the top scientists in the world conducting seminal
research on psychedelics.
This was one of the most eye-opening and fascinating conversations I've ever had on this podcast.
I'm sure I'll talk with Matt many more times.
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As a side note, let me say that psychedelics is an area of study that is fascinating to
me, in that it gives hints that much of the magic of our experience arises from just a
few chemical interactions in the brain, and that the nature of that experience can be
expanded through the tools of biology, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
The fact that a world-class scientist and researcher like Matt can apply rigor to our
study of this mysterious and fascinating topic is exciting to me beyond words, as is
the case with any of my colleagues who dare to venture out into the darkness of all that
is unknown about the human mind, with both an openness of first-principle thinking and
the rigor of the scientific method.
Can you give an introduction to psychedelics, like a whirlwind overview?
Maybe what are psychedelics and what are the kinds of psychedelics out there in whatever
way you find meaningful to categorize.
You can categorize them by their chemical structure, so phenethylamines, tryptamines,
ergalines.
That is less of a meaningful way to classify them.
I think that their pharmacological activity, their receptor activity is the best way.
Let me start even broader than that, because there I'm talking about the classic psychedelics.
Broadly speaking, when we say psychedelic, that refers to, for most people, a broad number
of compounds that work in different pharmacological ways.
It includes the so-called classic psychedelics.
That includes psilocybin and solosin, which are in mushrooms, LSD, dimethyltryptamine
or DMT, it's in ayahuasca, people can smoke it too, mescaline, which is in peyote and
San Pedro cactus.
Those all work by hitting a certain subtype of serotonin receptor, the serotonin 2A receptor.
They act as agonists at that receptor.
Other compounds like PCP, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine, they all are more broadly speaking called
psychedelics, but they work by very different ways pharmacologically.
They have some different effects, including subjective effects, even though there's enough
of an overlap in the subjective effects that people informally refer to them as psychedelic.
I think what that overlap is, compared to, say, caffeine and cocaine and Ambien, etc.,
other psychoactive drugs, is that they have strong effects in altering one's sense of
reality and including the sense of self.
I should throw in there that cannabis, more historically like in the 70s, has been called
a minor psychedelic.
I think with that latter definition, it does fit that definition, particularly if one doesn't
have a tolerance.
You mentioned serotonin, so most of the effect comes from something around the chemistry
around neurotransmitters and so on.
It's chemical interactions in the brain, or is there other kinds of interactions that
have this kind of perception and self-awareness altering effects?
Well, as far as we know, all of the psychedelics of all the different classes we've talked
about, their major activity is caused by receptor-level events.
Either acting at the post-receptor side of the synapse, in other words, neurotransmission
operates by one neuron releasing neurotransmitter into a synapse, a gap between the two neurons.
The other neuron receives, it has receptors that receives, and then there can be an activation
caused by that.
It's like a pitcher and a catcher.
All of the major psychedelics work by either mimicking a pitcher or a catcher.
For example, the classic psychedelics, they fit into the same catcher's mitt on the post-receptor,
post-synaptic receptor side, as serotonin itself.
But they do a slightly different thing to the cell, to the neuron, than serotonin does.
There's a different signaling pathway after that initial activation.
Something like MDMA works at the presynaptic side, the pitcher side, and basically it floods
the synapse or the gap between the cells with a bunch of serotonin, the natural neurotransmitter.
It's like the pitcher in a baseball game all of a sudden just starts throwing balls every
second.
Everything we're talking about is it often more natural, meaning found in the natural
world?
You mentioned cacti, cactus, or is it chemically manufactured artificially in the lab?
In the classic psychedelics, there's...
What are the classics?
Using terminology that's not chemical terminology, not like the terminology you see in titles
of papers, academic papers, but more common parlance.
It would be good to define their effects, like how they're different.
It includes LSD, psilocybin, which is in mushrooms, mescaline, DMT.
Which one is mescaline?
One is in the different cacti, so the one most people will know is peyote, but it also
shows up in San Pedro or Peruvian torch.
All of these classic psychedelics, at the right dose, and typically, they have very
strong effects on one sense of reality and one sense of self.
Some of the things that make them different than other, more broadly speaking, psychedelics
like MDMA and others, is that there, at least the major examples, there are some exotic
ones that differ, but the ones I've talked about are extremely safe at the physiological
level.
LSD and psilocybin, there's no known lethal overdose unless you have really severe heart
disease because it modestly raises your blood pressure, so the same person might be hurt,
troubling snow or going up the stairs, they could have a cardiac event because they've
taken one of these drugs, but for most people, someone could take 1,000 times what the effective
dose is and it's not going to cause any organ damage, affect the brainstem, make them stop
breathing.
So in that sense, they're freakishly safe at the physiological, I would never call any
compounds safe because there's always a risk, they're freakishly safe at the physiological
level.
You'll hardly find anything over the counter, I mean, aspirin's not like that, caffeine
is not like that.
Most drugs, you take 5, 10, 20, maybe it takes 100, but you get to some times the effective
dose and it's going to kill you or cause some serious damage, and so that's something that's
a remark about most of these classic psychedelics.
That's incredible, by the way, that you can go on a hell of a journey in the mind, probably
transformative, potentially in a deeply transformative way, and yet there's no dose that in most
people would have a lethal effect.
That's kind of fascinating.
There's this duality between the mind and the body.
It's like, okay, sorry if I bring him up way too much, but David Goggins is like the kind
of things you go on a long run, like the hell you might go through in your mind.
Your mind can take a lot, and you can go through a lot with the mind, and the body will just
be its own thing.
You can go through hell, but after a good night's sleep, be back to normal, and the body is always
there.
So bringing it back to Goggins, it's like you can do that without even destroying your
knee or whatever, coming close and riding that line.
That's true.
So the unfortunate thing about the running, which he uses running to test the mind, so
the aspect of running that is negative in order to test the mind, you really have to
push the body, take the body through a journey.
I wish there was another way of doing that in the physical exercise space.
I think there are exercises that are easier on the body than others, but running sure
is a hell of an effective way to do it.
And one of the ways that where it differs is that you're unlike exercise, you're essentially,
most exercise required to really get to those intense levels, you really need to be persistent
about it.
Right.
So you're really out of shape, just jogging for five minutes.
But to really get to those intense levels, you need to have the dedication.
And so some of the other ways of altering subjective effects or states of consciousness
take that type of dedication, psychedelics though, I mean, someone takes the right dose.
They're strapped into the roller coaster, and something interesting is going to happen.
And I really like what you said about that distinction between the mind or the contrast
between the mind effects and the body effects because I think of this, I do research with
all the drugs, caffeine, alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, legal, illegal.
Most of these drugs, thinking about, say, cocaine and methamphetamine, you can't give
to a regular user, you can't safely give a dose where the regular cocaine user is going
to say, oh man, that's the strongest coke I've ever had because you get it past the
ethics committee and you need approval.
And I wouldn't want to give someone something that's dangerous.
So to go to those levels where they would say that, you would have to give something
that's physiologically riskier.
You know, psilocybin or LSD, you can give a dose at the physiological level.
That is a very good chance it's going to be the most intense psychological experience
of that person's life and have zero chance for most people if you screen them of killing
them.
The big risk is behavioral toxicity, which is a fancy way of saying, doing something
stupid.
It's really intoxicated.
Like, if you wander into traffic or you fall from a height, just like plenty of people
do on high doses of alcohol.
And the other kind of unique thing about classic psychedelics is that they're not addictive,
which is pretty much unheard of when it comes to so-called drugs of abuse or drugs that
people, at least at some frequency, choose to take.
Most of what we think of as drugs, you know, caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, cannabis, most
of these you can get into alcohol, you can get into a daily use pattern.
And that's just so unheard of with psychedelics.
Most people have taken these things on a daily basis.
It's more like they're building up the courage to do it and then they build up a tolerance
or they're in college and they do it on a dare.
And you take acid seven days in a row and that type of thing, rather than a self-control
issue where you have and say, oh, God, I got to stop taking this, I got to stop drinking
every night, I got to cut down on the coke, whatever.
So that's the classic psychedelics.
What are the, what's the good term, modern psychedelics or more maybe psychedelics that
are created in the lab?
What else is there?
Right.
So MDMA is the big one.
And I should say that with the classic psychedelics that LSD is sort of, you can call it a semi-synthetic
because there's natural, you know, from both ergot and in certain seeds, morning glory
seeds as one example, there's a very close, there are some very close chemical relatives
of LSD.
So LSD is close to what occurs in nature, but not quite it.
But then when we get into the other non-classic psychedelics, probably the most prominent
one is MDMA.
People call it ecstasy, people call it molly.
And it is, it differs from classic psychedelics in a number of ways.
It can be addictive, but not so.
It's like, you can have cocaine on this end of the continuum and classic psychedelics
here.
Continuum of addiction.
Continuum of addiction.
You know, so it's certainly no cocaine.
It's pretty rare for people to get into daily use patterns, but it's possible.
And they can get into more like, you know, using once a week pattern where they can find
it hard to stop.
But it's somewhere in between mostly towards the, to the classic psychedelic side in terms
of like relatively little addiction potential.
But it's also more physiologically dangerous.
I think that the, certainly the therapeutic use, it's showing really promising effects
for treating PTSD and the models that are used, I think those are extremely acceptable
when it comes to the risk-benefit ratio that you see all throughout medicine.
But nonetheless, that we do know that at a certain dose and a certain frequency that
MDMA can cause long-term damage to the serotonin system in the brain, so it doesn't have that
level of kind of freakish bodily safety that, that the classic psychedelics do.
And it has more of a heart load, a cardiovascular, I don't mean kind of emotion, I mean, in this
sense, although it is very emotional and that's something unique about its subjective effects,
but it's more of a presser.
And the terminology used instead of like a freakish capacity, allowing you from a researcher
perspective, but a personal perspective too of taking a journey with some of these psychedelics
that is the heroic dose, as they say.
So like these are tools that allow you to take a serious mental journey, whatever that
is.
That's what you mean.
With MDMA, there's a little bit, it starts entering this territory where you got to be
careful about the risks to the body potentially.
So yes, that in the sense that you can't kind of push the dose up as high as you safely
as one can if they're in the right setting, like in our research, as they can with the
classic psychedelics.
But probably more importantly, just the nature of the effects with MDMA aren't the full
on psychedelic.
It's not the full journey.
So it's sort of a psychedelic with rose-colored glasses on, a psychedelic that's more of
it's been called more of a heart trip than a head trip.
The nature of reality doesn't unravel as frequently as it does with classic psychedelics.
But you're able to more directly sense your environment.
So your perception system still works.
It's not completely detached from reality with MDMA.
That's true.
And speaking that said, at most doses of classic psychedelics, you still have a tether to reality.
Changes a little bit when you're talking about smoking DMT or smoking 5-mythoxy DMT, which
are some interesting examples we could talk more about.
But with MDMA, for example, it's very rare to have what's called an ego loss experience
or a sense of transcendental unity where one really seemingly loses the psychological construct
of the self.
But MDMA, it's very common for people to have this, they still are perceiving themselves
as a self, but it's common for them to have this warmth, this empathy for humanity and
for their friends and loved ones.
So it's more, and you see those effects under the classic psychedelics, but that's a subset
of what the classic psychedelics do.
So I see MDMA in terms of its subjective effects is if you think about Venn diagrams, MDMA is
all within the classic psychedelics.
So everything that you see on a particular MDMA session, sometimes a psilocybin session
looks just like that, but then sometimes it's completely different with psilocybin.
It's a little more narrowed in terms of the variability with MDMA.
Is there something general to say about what the psychedelics do to the human mind?
You mentioned kind of an ego loss experience in the space of Venn diagrams.
If we were to draw a big circle, what can we say about that big circle?
In terms of people's report of subjective experience, probably one of the most general
things we can say is that it expands that range.
So many people come out of these sessions saying that they didn't know it was possible
to have an experience like that.
So there's an emphasis on the subjective experience.
Is there words that people put to it that capture that experience or is it something
that just has to be experienced?
As a researcher, that's an interesting question because you have to kind of measure the effects
of this and how do you convert that into numbers that's the ultimate challenge.
Is that possible to one, convert it into words and the second, convert the words into
numbers somehow?
So we do a lot of that with questionnaires, some of which are very psychometrically validated,
so lots of numbers have been crunched on them.
And there's always a limitation with questionnaires.
Subjective effects are subjective effects.
Ultimately, it's what the person is reporting and that doesn't necessarily point towards
a ground truth.
So for example, if someone says that they felt like they touched another dimension or
they felt like they sensed the reality of God or if they just you name it, people's
ontological views can sometimes shift.
I think that's more about where they're coming from and I don't think it's the quintessential
way in which they work.
There's plenty of people that hold on to a completely naturalistic viewpoint and have
profound and helpful experiences with these compounds.
But the subjective effects can be so broad that for some people, it shifts their philosophical
viewpoint more towards idealism, more towards thinking of that the nature of reality might
be more about consciousness than about material.
That's a domain I'm very interested in.
Right now, we have essentially zero to say about that in terms of validating those types
of claims, but it's even interesting just to see what people say along those lines.
You're interested in saying, can we more rigorously study this process of expansion?
What do we mean by this expansion of your sense of what is possible in the experiences
in this world?
As much as what we can say about that through naturalistic psychology, especially as much
as we can root it to solid psychological constructs and solid neuroscientific constructs.
And I wonder what the impact is of the language that you bring to the table.
So you mentioned about God or speaking of God, a lot of people are really interested
in theoretical physics these days at a very surface level and you can bring the language
of physics.
You can talk about quantum mechanics, you can talk about general relativity and curvature
of space-time and using just that language without a deep technical understanding of
it to somehow start thinking like sort of visualizing atoms in your head and somehow
through that process because you have the language, using that language to kind of dissolve
the ego, like realize that we're just all little bits of physical objects that behave
in mysterious ways.
And so that has to do with the language, like if you read a Sean Carroll book or something
recently, it seems like as a huge influence on the way you might experience, might perceive
the world and might experience the alteration that psychedelics brings to your perception
system.
So I wonder like the language you bring to the table, how that affects the journey you
go on with the psychedelics.
I think very much so.
And I think there's, I'm a little concerned some of the science is going a little too
far in the direction of around the edges, speaking about changing beliefs in this sense
or that sense about particular domains.
And I think what really a lot of what's going on is what you just discussed, it's the priors
coming into it.
So if you've been reading a lot of physics, then you might bring up like space-time and
interpret the experience in that sense.
I mean, it's not uncommon for people come out talking about visions of the, it's not
the most typical thing, but it's come up in sessions, I've guided the Big Bang and this
sort of nature of reality.
I think probably the best way to think about these experiences is that, and the best evidence
even though we're in our infancy and understanding it, they really tap into more general psychological
mechanisms.
I think one of the best arguments is they reduce the influence of our priors, of what
we bring into the, all of the assumptions that we all, that we're essentially especially
as adults, we're riding on top of heuristic after heuristic to get through life.
And you need to do that.
And that's a good thing.
And that's extremely efficient and evolution has shaped that, but that comes at an expense.
And it seems that these experiences will allow someone greater mental flexibility and openness.
And so one can be both less influenced by their prior assumptions, but still nonetheless,
the nature of the experience can be influenced by what they've been exposed to in the world.
And sometimes they can get it in a deeper way.
Like maybe they've read, I mean, I had a philosophy professor at one time as a participant in
a high-dose psilocybin study, and I remember him saying, my God, it's like Hegel's opposites
defining each other.
I get it.
I've taught this thing for years and years and years.
I get it now.
And so like that, and even at the psychological, emotional level, like the cancer patients
we worked with, they told themselves a million times over the people trying to quit smoking.
I need to quit smoking.
Oh, I'm ruining my life with this cancer.
I'm still healthy.
I should be getting out.
I'm letting this thing defeat me.
It's like, yeah, you told yourself that in your head, but sometimes they had these experiences
and they kind of feel it in their heart, like they really get it.
So in some sense that you bring some prize to the table, but psychedelics allow you
to acknowledge them and then throw them away.
So like one popular terminology around this in the engineering space is first principles
thinking that Elon Musk, for example, espouses a lot.
Let me ask a fun question before we return to a more serious discussion.
With Elon Musk as an example, but it could be just engineers in general.
Do you think there's a use for psychedelics to take a journey of rigorous first principles
thinking?
So like throwing away, we're not talking about throwing away assumptions about the nature
of reality in terms of like our philosophy of the way we live day to day life, but we're
talking about like how to build a better rocket or how to build a better car or how to build
a better social network or all those kinds of things.
Some questions.
I absolutely think there's huge potential there.
There was some research in the late 60s, early 70s that was very early and not very rigorous
in terms of methodology, but it was consistent with the, I mean, there's just countless anecdotes
of folks.
I mean, people have argued that just Silicon Valley was largely influenced by psychedelic
experience.
I think the person that came up with the concept of freeware or shareware, it's like it kind
of was generated out of or influenced by psychedelic experience.
So to this, I think there's incredible potential there and we know really next, there's no
rigorous research on that.
Is there anecdotal stuff like with Steve Jobs?
I think there's stories, right?
In your exploration of the, is there something a little bit more than just stories?
Is there like a little bit more of a solid data points, even if they're just experiential
like anecdotes?
Is there something that you draw inspiration from like in your intuition?
Because we'll talk about you're trying to construct studies that are more rigorous around
these questions, but is there something you draw inspiration from, from the past from
the 80s and the 90s and Silicon Valley, that kind of space?
Or is it just like you have a sense based on everything you've learned and these kind
of loose stories that there's something worth digging at?
I am influenced by the, gosh, the just incredible number of anecdotes surrounding these.
I mean, Kerry Mullis, he invented PCR, I mean, absolutely revolutionized biological sciences.
He says he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize from it, said he wouldn't have come up with
that had he not had psychedelic experiences.
You know, now he's an interesting character.
People should read his autobiography because you could point to other things he was into.
But I think that speaks to the casting your nets wide and this mental flex.
Or these general mechanisms where sometimes if you cast your nets really wide and it's
going to depend on the person and their influences, but sometimes you come up with false positives.
You connect the dots where maybe you shouldn't have connected those dots.
But I think that can be constrained and so much of our, not only a personal psychological
suffering, but our limitations academically and in terms of technology are because of
the self-imposed limitations and heuristics, these entrance ways of thinking, like those
examples throughout the history of science where someone has come up with the paradigm,
Kuhn's paradigm shifts.
It's like, here's something completely different.
This doesn't make sense by any of the previous models and we need more of those and then
you need the right balance between that because so many of the novel crazy ideas are just
bunk and that's what science is about separating them from the valid paradigm shifting ideas.
But we need more paradigm shifting ideas in a big way.
And I think you could argue that we've, because of the structure of academia and science in
modern times, it heavily biases against those.
Right.
There's all kinds of mechanisms in our human nature that resist paradigm shift quite sort
of obviously.
And psychedelics, there could be a lot of other tools, but it seems like psychedelics
could be one set of tools that encourage paradigm shifting thinking.
So like the first principle is kind of thinking.
So it's a kind of, you're at the forefront of research here.
There's just kind of anecdotal stories.
There's early studies.
There's a sense that we don't understand very much, but there's a lot of depth here.
How do we get from there to where Elon and I can regularly, like I wake up every morning
and have deep work sessions where it's well understood, like what dose to take, like if
I want to explore something where it's all legal, where it's all understood and safe,
all that kind of stuff.
How do we get from where we are today to there?
Not speaking in terms of legality in the sense like policymaking, all that like laws
and stuff, meaning like how do we scientifically understand this stuff well enough to get to
a place where I can just take it safely in order to expand my thinking, like this kind
of first principles thinking, which I mean, my personal life currently doing, like how
do I have revolutionized particular several things?
Like it seems like the only tools I have right now, it's just just, but my mind going doing
the first principles like, wait, wait, wait, okay.
Why has this been done this way?
Can we do it completely differently?
It seems like I'm still tethered to the priors that I bring to the table and I keep trying
to untether myself.
Maybe there's tools that can systematically help me untether.
Yeah.
Well, we need experiments and that's tied to kind of the policy level stuff and I should
be clear, I would never encourage anyone to do anything illicitly, but yeah, in the future,
we could see these compounds used for technical and scientific innovation.
What we need are studies that are digging into that right now, most of what the funding,
which is largely from philanthropy, not from the government, largely what it's for is treatment
of mental disorders like addiction and depression, et cetera.
But we need studies.
One of the early initial stabs on this question decades ago was they took some architects
and engineers and said, what problems have you been working on?
Very you've been stuck for months like working on this damn thing and you're not getting
anywhere, your head's butting up against the wall.
Come in here, take, and I think it was 100 micrograms of LSD, so not a big session and
a little bit different model where they were actually working, it was a moderate enough
dose where they could work on the problem during the session.
I think probably, I'm an empiricist so I'd like to see all the studies done, but the
first thing I would do is a really high dose session where you're not necessarily in front
of your computer, which you can't really do on a really high dose.
And then the work has been talked about, you take a really high dose, you take a journey
and then the breakthroughs come from when you return from the journey and integrate quote
unquote that experience.
I think that's where all the head, and again, we're babies at this point, but my gut tells
me that it's the so-called integration, the aftermath.
We know that there's some different forms of neuroplasticity that are unfolding in the
days following a psychedelic, at least in animals.
Probably going on humans, we don't know if that's related to the therapeutic effects.
My gut tells me it is, although it's only part of the story, but we need big studies
where we compare people, like let's get 100 people like that, scientists that are working
on a problem, and then randomize them too.
And then I think you need a even more credible active controls or active placebo conditions
to tease this out.
And then also in conjunction with that, and you can do this in the same study, you want
to combine that with more rigorous experimental models where we actually get there are problem
solving tasks that we know, for example, that you tend to do better on after you've
gotten a good night's sleep versus not.
And my sense is there's a relationship there.
People go back to first principles, questioning those first principles they're operating
under, and getting away from their priors in terms of creative problem solving.
And so I think wrap those things, and you could speak a little more rigorously about
those.
Because ultimately, if everyone's bringing their own problem, that's more in the face
of outside, but you can't dig in as much and get as much experimental power and speak to
the mechanisms as you can with having everyone do the same canned problem solving task.
So we've been speaking about psychedelics generally.
Is there one you find from the scientific perspective or maybe even philosophical perspective
most fascinating to study?
Therapeutically, I'm most interested in psilocybin and LSD, and I think we need to do a lot more
with LSD because it's mainly been psilocybin in the modern era.
I've recently gotten a grant from the Hefter Research Institute to do an LSD study, so
I haven't started it yet, but I'm going through the paperwork and everything.
Therapeutic meaning there's some issue and you're trying to treat that issue.
In terms of just what's the most fascinating, understanding the nature of these experiences,
if you really want to wrap your head around what's going on when someone has a completely
altered sense of reality and sense of self, there, I think you're talking about the high
dose, either smoked vaporized or intravenous injection, which all kind of, they're very
similar pharmacologically, of DMT and five-mythoxy DMT.
This is like when people, this is what, I don't know if you're familiar with Terence
McKinnon, he would talk a lot about smoking DMT, Joe Rogan has talked a lot about that.
People will say that, and there's a close relative called five-mythoxy DMT.
Most people who know the terrain will say that's an order of magnitude or orders of
magnitude beyond anything one could get from even a high dose of psilocybin or LSD.
I think it's a question about whether, how therapeutic, I think there is a therapeutic
potential there, but it's probably not as sure of a bet because one goes so far out,
it's almost like they're not contemplating their relationship and their direction in
life, they are like, reality is ripping apart at the seams and the very nature of the self
and of the sense of reality.
The amazing thing about these compounds, and same to a less degree with oral psilocybin
and LSD is that unlike some other drugs that really throw you far out there, anesthetics,
and even alcohol, as reality starts to become different at higher and higher doses, there's
this numbing, there's this ability for the sense of being the center, having a conscious
experience that's memorable, that is maintained throughout these classic psychedelic experiences.
One can go as far, so far out while still being aware of the experience and remembering
the experience.
Interesting, so being able to carry something back.
Can you dig in a little deeper?
What is DMT?
How long is the trip usually?
How much do we understand about it?
Is there something interesting to say about just the nature of the experience and what
we understand about it?
One of the common methods for people to use it is to smoke it or vaporize it.
This is a pretty good kind of description of what it might feel like on the ground.
The caveat is it's a completely insufficient description and someone's going to be listening.
It's like nothing you could say is going to come close.
But it'll take about three big hits, inhalations, in order to have what people call a breakthrough
dose.
There's no great definition of that, but basically meaning moving away from not just having the
typical psilocybin or LSD experience where things are radically different, but you're
still basically a person in this reality to go in somewhere else.
That'll typically take three hits, and this stuff comes on like a freight train.
One takes a hit and around the time of the first exhalation, we're talking about a few
seconds in, or maybe just sometime between the first and the second hit, it'll start
to come on.
They're already up to what they might get from a 30 milligram or 300 microgram LSD trip,
a big trip.
They're already there at the second hit, but they're going, their consciousness is gear.
This is like acceleration, not speed to speak of physics.
Those receptors are getting filled like that, and they're going from 0 to 60 in Tesla time.
At the second hit, again, they're at maybe the strongest psychedelic experience they've
ever had.
Then if they can take that third hit, and some people can't, they're propelled into
this other reality.
The nature of that other reality will differ depending on who you ask, but folks will often
talk about, and we've done some survey research on this, entities of different types, elves
tend to pop up.
The caveat is, I strongly presume all of this is culturally influenced, but thinking more
about the psychology and the neuroscience, there is probably something fundamental.
For someone that might be colored as elves, others that might be colored as Terrence McKinnon
called himself dribbling basketballs.
For someone else, it might be little animals, or someone else that might be aliens.
I think that probably is dependent on who they are and what they've been exposed to,
but just the fact that one has a sense that they're surrounded by autonomous entities.
Intelligent autonomous entities.
People come back with stories that are just astonishing, like there's communication between
these entities, and often they're telling them things that the person says are self-validating,
but it seems like it's impossible.
It really seems like, and again, this is what people say oftentimes, that it really is downloading
some intelligence from a higher dimension or whatever metaphor you want to use.
Sometimes these things come up in dreams where it's like someone is exposed to something
that I've had this in a dream, where it seems like what they are being exposed to is physically
impossible, but yet at the same time self-validating, it seems true that they really are figuring
something out.
Of course, the challenge is to say something in concrete terms after the experience where
you could verify that in any way, and I'm not familiar of any examples of that.
But there's a sense in which I suppose the experience is like you're a limited cognitive
creature that knows very little about the world, and here's a chance to communicate with much
wiser entities that in a way that you can't possibly understand are trying to give you
hints of deeper truths.
So there's that kind of sense that you can take something back, but you can't, where
our cognition is not capable to fully grasp the truth, we'll just get a kind of sense
of it, and somehow that process is mind expanding, that there's a greater truth out there.
That seems like what, from the people I've heard talk about, that seems to be what it
is.
It's fascinating that there's fundamentally to this whole thing is a communication between
an entity that is other than yourself, entities.
So it's not just like a visual experience, like you're like floating through the world,
is there's other beings there, which is kind of, I don't know, I don't know what to sort
of, from a person who likes Freud and Carl Jung, I don't know what to think about that.
That being, of course, from one perspective is just you looking in the mirror.
But it could also be, from another perspective, like actually talking to other beings.
Yeah, you mentioned Jung, and I think that's, he's particularly interesting, and it kind
of points to something I was thinking about saying is that I think what might be going
on from a naturalistic perspective, so regardless, whether or not there are, it doesn't depend
on autonomous entities out there.
What might be happening is that just the associative net, the level of learning, the comprehension
might be so beyond what someone is used to that the only way for the nervous system,
for the aware sense of self to orient towards it is all by metaphor.
And so I do think when we get into these realms as a strong empiricist, I think we always
got to be careful and be as grounded as possible, but I'm also willing to speculate and sort
of cast them that's wide with caveat.
But I think of things like archetypes, and it's plausible that there are certain stories,
there's certain, we've gone through millions of years of evolution, it may be that we have
certain characters and stories that are central nervous system is sort of wired to tend to-
Yeah, those stories, we carry those stories in us, and this unlocks them in a certain
kind of way.
And we think about stories, like our sense of self is basically narrative self is a story.
And we think about the world of stories, this is why metaphors are always more powerful
than sort of laying out all the details all the time, speaking in parables, it's like
if you really get something, this is why as much as I hate it, if you're presenting to
Congress or something and you have all the best data in the world, it's not as powerful
as that one anecdote as the mom dying of cancer that had the psilocybin session and it transformed
her life.
That's a story, that's meaningful.
And so when this kind of unimaginable kind of change and experience happens with a DMT
ingestion, these stories of entities, they might be that, stories that are constructed
that is the closest, which is not to say the stories aren't real, I mean, I think we're
getting to layers where it doesn't really-
What is real, man?
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's the closest we can come to making sense out of it because what we do know about
these psychedelics, one of the levels beyond the receptor is that the brain is communicating
it with itself in a massively different way.
There's massive communication with areas that don't normally communicate.
And so I think that comes with both it's casting the nets wide, I think that comes with the
insights and helpful novel ways of thinking, I do think it comes with false positives that
could be some of the delusion.
And so when you're so far out there, like with the DMT experience, like maybe alien
is the best way that the mind can wrap some arms around that.
So I don't know how much you're familiar with Joe Rogan, but he does bring up DMT quite
a bit, it's almost a meme, it is a meme, have you ever tried DMT?
I think he talks about this experience of having met other entities and they were mocking
him, I think, if I remember the experience correctly, like laughing at him and saying
FU, FU or something like that, I may be misremembering this, but there's a general mockery and what
he learned from that experience is that he shouldn't take himself too seriously.
So it's the dissolution of the ego and so on.
Like, what do you think about that experience and maybe if you have more general things
about Joe's infatuation with DMT and if DMT has that important role to play in popular
culture in general?
I'm definitely familiar with it, I remember telling you offline that the first time I
learned who Joe Rogan was, it's probably 15 years ago, and I came upon a clip and I realized
there's another person in the world who's into both DMT and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and
I think both those worlds have grown dramatically since and it's probably not such a special
club these days, so he definitely got onto my radar screen quickly.
You weren't to both before was cool.
Right.
I mean, this is all relative because there's people that were before the late 90s and early
2000s who were into it to say, you're a Johnny come lately, but yeah, compared to where we're
at now.
But yet, one of the things I always found fascinating by Joe's telling of his experiences, I think,
is that they resemble very much Terrence McKenna's experiences with DMT and Joe has talked very
much about Terrence McKenna and his experiences.
If I had to guess, I would guess that probably just having heard Terrence McKenna talk about
his experiences, that influenced the coloring of Joe's experience.
It's funny how that works because I mean, that's why McKenna has, I mean, poets and
great orders give us the words to then start to describe our experiences because our words
are limited, our language is limited, and it's always nice to get some kind of nice
poetry into the mix to allow us to put words to it.
But I also see some elements that seem to relate to Joe's psychology, just from what
I've seen from hours of watching him on his podcast is that he's a self-critical guy.
And I think with always his positive been, I'm always struck being a behavioral pharmacologist
and no one else really says it about cannabis.
I'll get back to the DMT thing about he likes the paranoid side of things.
He's like, that's you radically examining yourself.
It's like, that's not just a bad thing.
That's you need to look hard at yourself and something's making you uncomfortable, dig
into that.
And it's sort of along the lines of Goggins with exercise and it's like, yeah, things
learning experiences aren't supposed to be easy, take advantage of these uncomfortable
experience.
That's why we call in our research in a safe context with psychedelics, they're not bad
trips, they're challenging experiences.
Yes.
So yeah.
It's fascinating just that's a tiny tangent.
It's always cool for me to hear him talk about marijuana like weed as the paranoia,
the anxiety, whatever that the experience as actually the fuel for the experience.
Like I think he talks about smoking weed when he's writing.
That's inspiring to me because then you can't possibly have a bad experience.
I'm a huge fan of that.
Every experience is good.
Right, which is very Goggins.
Yeah, it's very Goggins.
Is it bad?
Okay.
All right.
Great.
Well, see Goggins is one side of that.
He wants it bad.
He wants the experience to be challenging always.
But I mean, both are good.
The few times I've taken mushrooms, the experience was like everything was beautiful.
There's zero challenging aspect to it.
It was just like the world is beautiful and it gave me this deep appreciation of the world.
I would say, so like that's amazing, but also ones that challenge you are also amazing.
All the times I drink vodka, but that's another lesson.
So back to DMT.
Yeah, Joe's treating cannabis as a psychedelic, which is something that I'd say, like a lot
of people treat it more like Xanax or like beer or vodka.
But he's really trying to delve into those, it's been called a minor psychedelic.
So with DMT, as you brought up, it's like the entity's mocking him and it's like, this
reminds me of him describing his writing his or just his entire method of comedy.
It's like, watch the tape of yourself.
Don't just ignore it.
That's where I screwed up.
That's where I need to do better, this sort of radical self-examination, which I think
our society is kind of getting away from because all the children win trophies type of thing.
It's like, no, don't go overboard, but recognize when you've messed up.
And so that's a big part of the psychedelic experience.
People come out sometimes saying, my God, I need to say sorry to my mom.
It's so obvious or whatever interpersonal issue or my God, I'm not pulling enough weight
around the house and helping my wife, and these things that are just obvious to them,
the self-criticism that can be a very positive thing if you act on it.
You've mentioned addiction, maybe we could take a little bit detour into a darker aspect
of things or not even darker, it's just an important aspect of things.
What's the nature of addiction?
You've mentioned some things within the big umbrella of psychedelics, maybe usually not
addictive, but maybe MDMA, I think you said might have some addictive properties, but
the point is stuff outside of the psychedelics umbrella can often be highly addictive.
So you've studied addiction from several angles, one of which is behavioral economics.
What have you understood about addiction?
What is addiction from the biological, physiological level to the psychological, to whatever is
the interesting way to talk about addiction?
Yeah, and the lenses that I view addiction through very much are behavioral economic,
but I also think they converge on, I think it's beautiful, at the other end of the spectrum
sort of just a completely humanistic psychology perspective, and it converges on what people
come out of 12-step meetings talking about.
Can you say what is behavioral economics and what is humanistic psychology?
What do you mean by that?
And more importantly, behavioral economics lens, what is that?
So behavioral economics, my definition of it is the application of economic principles,
mostly microeconomic principles.
So understanding the behavior of individual agents surrounding commodities in the marketplace
applying microeconomic types of analyses to non-economic behavior.
So basically at one point, psychologists figured out that there's this whole other discipline
that's been studying behavior, it just happened to be all focused on monetary behavior, spending
and saving money, et cetera.
But it comes with all of these principles that can be wildly and fruitfully applied to
understanding behavior.
So for example, I've studied things like demand curve analysis of drug consumption.
So I look at, for example, the tobacco cigarettes and nicotine products through the lens of
demand curves.
And in other words, at different prices, if there's different work requirements for being
able to smoke cigarettes, sort of modeling price.
In that price data, there is some indication of addiction, how much the habits that you
form around these particular drugs.
It's one important dimension.
So I think a particularly important one there is elasticity or inelasticity, two ends of
the spectrum.
So that's the price sensitivity.
So for example, you could have something that's pretty price inelastic like gasoline.
So the price of gas at times can keep going up and Americans are just going to pretty
much buy the same amount of gas or maybe the price of gas doubles, but their consumption
only decreases by 10%.
So it's a sub-proportional reduction.
So that's inelastic.
And that changes.
You push the price up high enough.
I mean, if it was $100 a gallon, it would eventually turn the curve would turn and go
downward more drastically and it would be elastic.
But you can apply that to someone, you know, someone who regular cigarette smoker, who
is working for cigarette puffs, who has gotten six hours without smoking and you're asking
questions like, you know, how many times are they willing to pull this knob in the lab during
this three-hour session?
I do a lot of work like this in order to earn a cigarette.
How does the content of nicotine in that affect it?
How does the availability of nicotine replacement products like nicotine gum or e-cigarettes
affect those decisions?
So you can, it's a certain lens of it's sort of a way to take the kind of the classic behavioral
psychology definition of reinforcement, which is just basically reward, you know, how much
is this a good thing?
And it kind of breaks that apart into a multi-dimensional space.
So it's not just the idea is reward or reinforcement is not unidimensional.
So for example, you can unpack that with demand curves at a cheap price, you might prefer
one good to another, you know, so the classic examples, luxury versus necessity, so diamonds
versus toilet paper.
So at those cheap prices, you can look at something called intensity of demand.
You know, if it was basically as cheap as possible or essentially zero, how much would
you buy of this good?
But then you keep jacking up the price and you'll see, so diamonds will look like the
better reward at that low price or of intensity of demand side of things.
But as you keep jacking up the price, you got to have some toilet paper and we can get
into the whole like bidet thing, but forget that, you know, like, I know Joe's been pushing
that too, but you know, you're going to hang on and keep buying the toilet paper to a greater
degree than you will the diamonds.
So you'll see a crossing of demand curves.
So what's the better reinforcer?
What's the better reward depends on your price, you know?
And so that's one, that's an example of one way to, of look at addiction.
So specifically drug consumption, which isn't all of addiction, but it's like, in order
for something to be addictive, it has to be a reward and it has to compete with other
rewards in your life.
And one of the two main aspects of addiction in my view, and this doesn't map onto how
the DSM, the psychiatry Bible defines addiction, which I think is largely bunk, you know?
But there's some value to have some common description, but it's, you know, how rewarding
is it from this multi-dimensional lens?
And specifically, how does it, how does that rewarding value compete with other rewards,
other consequences in your life?
So it's not a problem if the use of that substance is rewarding, you know, okay, yeah, you like
to have a couple beers every once in a while and it's like not a problem.
But then you have the alcoholic who is drinking so much that it tanks their career, it ruins
their marriage, it's in competition with these pro-social aspects to their life.
It's all about comparing to the other choices you're making, the other activities in your
life and if it, you evaluate it as a much higher reward than anything else that becomes
an addiction.
Right, right.
And so it's not just the rewarding value, but it's the relative rewarding value.
And in the other major aspect, again, from behavioral economics, the thing that makes
addiction is something called delayed discounting.
So in economics, sometimes it's called time preference.
This is, it's what compound interest rates are based upon.
It's the idea that delaying a good access to a good or a reward comes with a certain
decrement to its value.
So we'd all rather have things now than later and we can study this at the individual level
of, you know, would you rather have $9 today or $10 tomorrow?
And you get, when you do that, you get huge differences between addicted populations and
non-addicted, not just heroin and cocaine, but like just cigarette smokers, like normal,
everyday cigarette smokers.
And even when you look at something like monetary rewards, and so you can go into the rabbit
hole with this delayed discounting model.
So it's not only those huge differences that seem to have a face valid aspect to it, like
the cigarette smoker is choosing this thing that's rewarding today, but I know it comes
with increased risk of having these horrible consequences down the line.
So it's this competition between what's good for me now and what's good for me later.
And the other aspect about delayed discounting is that if you quantitatively map out that
discounting curve over time, so you don't just do the, you know, how much, you know,
$10 tomorrow, how much is it worth to you today, so you can say, what about $9?
What about $8?
What about $7?
And you can titrate it to find that indifference point.
And so we can say, aha, $6, you know, $10 tomorrow is worth $6 to you today.
So it's by the one day, it's decreased by 40%.
We can do that also at one week and one month and one year and 10 years and map out that
curve, get a shape of that curve.
And one of the fascinating things about this is that whether you're talking about pigeons,
making these types of choices between a little bit of food now or a little bit of food a
minute from now or rats, or every, like dozens of species of animals tested, including humans,
the tendency is pretty consistently that we discount hyperbolically rather than exponentially.
What exponentially means is that every unit of time is associated with the same proportional
reduction.
Every unit of delay is associated with the same causes, the same proportional reduction
in value.
And that's the way the compound interest rate works.
There's compound, every day, you get this out of whatever values in there.
At the beginning of that day, you get this, we'll give you this amount of extra money
to compensate you for that delay.
But then the way that all animals tend to function is of this very different way where
the reductions, that initial delay, so like one day's worth of delay, you see a much
stronger discounting rate or reduction in value than you do over those.
So you see the super proportional, then it changes to these lesser rates.
And so the implication of that, I know I've gotten really into the weeds quantitatively,
but what that means is that there's these preference reversals.
When you have curves of that nature, the decay that's hyperbolic, it maps on to this phenomenon
we see both in terms of how people deal with future rewards, but also how perception works.
When two things are far away, whether it's physical distance or whether in terms of
perception or whether it's in terms of time, when you're really far away, the subjective
value for that further, that delayed reward is larger.
So for example, let's say we're talking about 360 days from now, you can get $9 or 365 days
a year.
Now you get $10 and you're like, dude, it's a year, no difference.
I'll take, why not get one more dollar?
You bring that same exact set of choices close or nothing's changed other than the time to
both rewards and it's like, would you rather have $9 today or $10 tomorrow and plenty of
people would say, ah, just about the size, go ahead and take it today.
So you see this preference reversal.
And so that's a model of addiction in the sense that consistently with true addiction,
I would argue, you see this competition between molar and molecular utility.
It's like intrapersonal, like within the person competing agents.
Someone sometimes has control of the bus that wants to do what's good for you in the short
term and someone at other times is in control of driving the bus and they want to do what's
good for you in the long term.
So you tell the, you're trying to quit and you see a doctor, you see your 12-step therapist
and say, I know this stuff is killing me, I'm really, I'm on the path, I'm done.
And that's when you're kind of in their office or wherever you're not, it's not around you.
And then later on that day, your buddy says that, hey man, I just scored, I've got it
right here.
Do you want it?
And that reward is right in front of you.
That's like bringing those two choices right in front of you and it's like, hell yeah,
I want to use.
And then you can go through that cycle for like years of the person telling themselves,
I want to quit.
But then other times that same person is saying, I don't want to, you know, functionally they're
saying I don't want to because they're saying, yeah, like, yeah, give me some.
So in the moment, it's very difficult to quit.
And this isn't just something, this is something that has, has huge clinical ramifications
with addiction, but it's like all humans do it.
Anyone who's had hit the snooze alarm in the morning, like the night before they realized,
oh, I got to get up extra early tomorrow, that's what's ultimately better for me.
So I'm going to set the alarm for, you know, five AM.
And they, it goes off at five AM, you know, and then, so now those two consequences have
come sooner.
And it's like, what the hell?
And they hit the snooze alarm and sometimes not just once, but then five minutes later
and five minutes later, you know, and so, and it's why it's easier to exert exercise
and self-control at the grocery store compared to in your fridge.
Like if that snack is like 30 seconds away in your fridge, you're going to more likely
yield to temptation than if it is further away.
So then to take a step back to something you brought up earlier, the inelasticity of pricing.
Is it from a perspective of the dealers, whether we're talking about cigarettes or maybe venturing
slightly into the illegal realm, you know, of people who sell drugs illegally, they also
have an economics to them that they said prices and all those kinds of things.
Does addiction allow you to mess with the nature of pricing?
Like, so I kind of assume that you meant that there's a correlation between things you're
addicted to and the inelasticity of the price.
So you can jack up the price.
Is there something interesting to be said both for legal drugs and illegal drugs about
the kind of price games you can play because the consumers of the product are addicted?
Right.
I mean, I think you just described it, yeah, you can jack up the price and some people
are going to drop off, but the people, you know, and it's not dichotomous because you
could just consume less, but some people are going to consume less and the people that
are most addicted are going to keep, you know, I mean, you see this, they're going to keep
purchasing.
So you see this with cigarettes and so it's interesting when you interface this with policy,
like in one respect, heavily taxing cigarettes is a good thing.
You know, it keeps, you know, adolescents particularly price sensitive.
So you definitely, people smoke less and especially kids smoke less when you keep cigarette prices
high and you tax the hell out of them.
But one of the downsides you've got to balance and keep in mind is that you disproportionately
have working class, poor people, and then you get into a point where someone's spending,
you know, quarter of their paycheck on cigarettes.
So they're going to smoke no matter what.
And basically because they're addicted, they're going to smoke no matter what and usually,
yeah, you're taxing their existence.
Right.
So you're making it worse for, if they don't, if they are completely inelastic, you're
actually making that person's life worse.
Because we know that that by interfering with the amount of money they have, you're interfering
with the other pro-social, the potential competitors to smoking, you know, and we know that when
someone's in more impoverished environments and they have less sort of non-drug alternatives,
you know, the more likely they're going to stay addicted.
So, you know.
Is there data, this is interesting, from a scientific perspective of those same kind
of games in illegal drugs, sort of, because that's where most drug, I was, I mean, I don't
know, maybe you can correct me, but it seems like most drugs that are currently illegal
and so, but they're still in economics to them, obviously, as the drug war and so on.
Is there data on the setting of prices or like how good are the business people running
the selling of drugs that are illegal?
Are they all the same kind of rules apply from a behavioral economics perspective?
I think so.
I mean, they're basically, whether they're crunching the numbers or not, they're basically
sensitive to that demand curve and they're doing the same thing that businesses do in
a legal market and, you know, you want to sell as much of a product to get as much money.
You're looking more at the total income, so if you jack the price a little bit, you're
going to get some reduction in consumption, but it may be that the total amount of money
that you rake in is going to be more than, it's going to overcompensate for that.
So, you're willing to take, okay, I'm going to lose 10% of my customers, but I'm getting
more than enough to compensate from that, from the extra money from the people who
still are buying.
So, I think they're more, you know, and especially when we get to the lower, I wouldn't be surprised
if people are crunching those numbers and looking at demand curves, maybe at the really
high levels of the, you know, up the chain with the cartels and whatnot.
I don't know.
That wouldn't surprise me at all, but I think it's probably more implicit at the lower levels
where something, you brought up drug policy, I will say that for years now, it's been this
kind of unquestioned goal by, for example, the drug czar's office in the U.S. to make
the price of illegal drugs as high as possible without this kind of nuanced approach that,
yeah, if you make, you know, for some people, if you make the price so high, you're actually
making things worse.
I mean, I'm all about reducing the problems associated with drugs and drug addictions.
And part of that is that are more direct consequences of those drugs themselves, but a whole lot
is what you get from indirectly and, you know, sort of the, both for the individual and for
society.
So, like making it a poor person who doesn't have enough money for their kids, making them
even poorer.
So now you've made their children's future worse because they're growing up in deeper
poverty because you've essentially levied a tax onto this person who's heavily addicted.
But then at the societal level, you know, so everything we know about the drug war in
terms of the heavy criminalization and filling up prisons and reducing employment and educational
opportunities, which in the big picture, we know are the things that in a free market
compete against some of the worst problems of addiction is actually having educational
and employment opportunities.
But when you give someone a felony, for example, you're pretty much guaranteeing they're never
going to go very high on the economic ladder.
And so you're making drugs a better reward for that person's future.
So this is a quick step into the policy realm.
And I think for both you and I, I'm not sure you can correct me, but I'm more comfortable
into studying the effects of drugs on the human behavior and human psychology versus
like policies seems like the whole giant mess.
But you know, there's some libertarian candidates for president and just libertarian thinkers
that had a nice thought experiment of possibly legalizing, I've spoken about possibly legalizing
basically all drugs in your intuition.
Do you think a world where all drugs are legal is a safer world or a less safe world for
the users of those drugs?
It really depends on what we mean by legalization.
So this is one of my beefs with this, you know, how these things are talked about.
I mean, we have very few completely laissez-faire, you know, legal drugs.
So even caffeine is one of the few examples.
So for example, caffeine and tea and coffee is in that realm.
Like there's no limits, no one's testing, there's no laws, regulation at any level
of how much caffeine you're allowed to buy or how much in a product.
But even like with this Starbucks, like Nitro, there are rules with soda and with canned products,
you can only put so much in there.
Yeah.
So this is FDA regulated and it's kind of weird because there's a limit to sodas that's not
there for energy drinks and other things.
But, you know, so even caffeine, it depends on what product we're talking about, like
no-dos and other caffeine products over the counter, like you can't just put 800 milligrams
in there.
The pills are like one or 200 milligrams.
And so it's FDA regulated as an over-counter drug.
Some of the most dangerous drugs in society, I would say arguably one of the most dangerous
classes of drugs are the volatile anesthetics, huffing.
People huffing gasoline and airplane glue, toluene, whatnot, severely damaging to the
nervous system, pretty much legal.
But there's some regulation in the sense that there's a warning label, like it's illegal
to do it for, not that it necessarily, they're busting people for this, but, you know, it's
against federal law to use this in a way other than intended type of the basic thing, like,
yeah, don't huff this, you know, your paint thinner, whatnot, at least keeps people from
selling it for that, like no, because they're going to go after that person.
You're not going to be able to find the 12-year-old who's huffing.
So anyway, just as some extreme examples at the end, and then, you know, even the so-called
illegal, like schedule one drug, psilocybin, we do plenty in terms of schedule two, which
is ironically less restrictive than psilocybin, but methamphetamine and cocaine, I've done
human research with.
My research has been legal, so they're scheduled compounds, but they're not completely illegal.
Like you can do research with them with the appropriate licensees and approval.
So there really is no such thing, and like alcohol, well, it's illegal if you're 12-years-old
or 18-years-old or 20-years-old, and for anyone, it's illegal to be drinking it while you're
driving.
So there's always a nuance.
There's rules, right?
It's not dichotomy.
And I actually should admit, it's been on my to-do list for a while to buy in Massachusetts
some like adibolas, buy weed legally.
I, yeah, haven't done that in Massachusetts, put it this way.
And I wonder what that experience is like, because I think it's fully legal in Massachusetts.
And so I wonder what legal drugs look like to me, you know, I grew up with even weed
being like, you know, not, it's like this forbidden thing, you know, not forbidden,
but it's illegal.
And most people, of course, I never partook, but most people I knew would attain it illegally.
And so that big switch that's been happening across the country, there's like federal stuff
going on to make a marijuana legal federally, I'm half paying attention.
There's some movement there.
I mean, the House passed a bill that's not going to be passed by the Senate, but yeah,
it's progress.
But there's clearly a change in it.
Right.
It's moving in a trend.
An example of a drug that used to be illegal is now becoming more and more and more legal.
So I wonder what like cocaine being legal looks like, what a society with cocaine being
legal looks like, the rules around it, you know, the processes in which you can consume
it in a safer way and be more educated about its consequences, be able to control dose
and like purity much better, be able to get help for overdose, I don't know, all those
kinds of things.
It does, in a utopian sense, feel like legalizing drugs at least should be talked about and
considered versus keeping them in the dark.
I agree.
But yeah, in your sense, it's possible that in 50 years we legalize all drugs and it
makes for a better world.
The way I like to talk about it is that I would say that it's possible and it would
probably be a good thing if we regulate all drugs.
How would you regulate like cocaine, for example, is there ideas there?
So yeah, and you were already going where I was going with that kind of first I described
how there's always a new one.
And even like the cannabis in Massachusetts, federally illegal.
So for example, if I was a colleague that do cannabis research where they get people
high in the lab, like you're a federal funded researcher within NIH funds, you can't get
that stuff from the dispensary because you're breaking a federal law, even though the feds
don't have the resources to go after, they don't want the controversy at this point
to go after the individual users or even the sellers in those legal states.
So there's always this nuance, but it's about the right regulation.
So I think we already know enough that, for example, I think safe injection sites for
hard drugs makes a lot of sense.
I wouldn't want heroin and cocaine at the convenience stores.
And I don't think, maybe there's some extreme libertarians that want that.
I think even the folks that identify as libertarians probably most of them don't, well, I don't
know.
Not all of them want that.
I think that as a form of regulation, like, look, if you're using these hard drugs on
a regular basis, you're putting yourself at risk for lethal overdose.
You're putting yourself at risk for catching HIV and hepatitis.
If you're doing it anyway, come to this place where at least you're not pulling the water
out of the puddle on the side of the street.
So it's done by professionals, and those professionals are able to educate you also.
So a 7-Eleven clerk may not be both capable of helping you to inject the drug properly,
but also won't be equipped to educate you yet, but the negative consequences, all those
kinds of things.
That's a huge part of it, the education.
But then I think with the opioids, the big part of it is just like with naloxone, which
is an antagonist, it goes into the receptor.
It's called Narcan.
That's the trade name, but it's what they revive people on an opioid overdose.
That's almost completely effective.
If there's a medical professional there and someone's ODing on an opioid, they're virtually
guaranteed to live.
That's remarkable that if 100% at the opioid crisis, if all of those people right now that
are dying were doing that in the presence of a medical professional, like a nurse with
Narcan, there'd be basically almost no deaths.
There's always some exceptions, but almost no deaths.
That's staggering to me.
So the idea that people are doing this, that we could have that level of positive effect
without encouraging the drug, and this is where you get into this terrain of sending
the wrong message, and it's like, no, you can do that.
You can say we're not encouraging this.
In fact, probably one of the greatest advertisements for not getting hooked on heroin is visiting
a methadone clinic, visiting a safe injection site.
This is not an advertisement for getting hooked on this drug, but knowing that we can save
people.
Now, you have a landscape here because a lot of times it just supervises injection, but
you bring your own stuff.
You bring your own heroin, which could still be dirty and filled with fentanyl and fentanyl
atives, which because of the incredible potency and the more difficulty measuring it and some
differences at the receptor, you may be more likely, you are more likely on average to
lethally overdose on it.
The level that's been more explored in Switzerland is, in some places, is you actually provide
the drug itself and you supervise the injection.
So I don't see...
Would you like that idea?
Yeah.
The public health data are completely on the side of there's really no credible evidence
to this if we allow that we're sending the wrong message and everyone's going to...
I mean, I'm not showing up.
It's different by drug.
Yeah, you legalize, you set up cannabis shops and some people are going to say, so you're
going to go there.
I don't think a whole lot of people are going to go to one of these places and say, I'm
going to shoot up heroin for the first time.
Even if it's a country of 300 million people, even if someone does that, you have to compare
this to the everyday people are dying from opioid overdoses.
People's kids, people's uncles, people's like, these are real lives that are being shattered.
So you just look at that.
And then the other thing, and I know this from having done residential, even non-treatment
research where we just have a cocaine user or something, stay on our inpatient ward for
a month and you really get to know them and sometimes you see...
Oftentimes that's the first time this person has had a discussion with a medical professional,
any type of professional in their entire life around their drug use, even if they're not
looking to quit.
And it's like, you could imagine that in the safe injection settings where it's like,
it might be a year into treatment and they're like, Doc, I know you're not the cops.
You really care for me.
I think I'm ready to try that methadone thing.
I think I'm really...
Just having a conversation about it, yeah.
Yeah, they get to trust the people and realize that they're there because they truly...
They have a compassion, a love for this community as human beings and they don't want people
to die and you get real human connections and again, those are the conditions where people
are going to ultimately seek treatment and not everyone always will, but you're going
to get that and then you're going to get people looking into treatment options.
Sometimes maybe it's years into the treatment, so it's like they're just all of these indirect
benefits that I think at that level, I don't know if you'd call that legalizing.
I think again, at least well-regulated, whatever that word is, yeah, well-regulated, but out
in the open.
Right.
Minimizing as many harms as we can while not encouraging.
We don't encourage people to drink all the...
People die every year from caffeine overdose.
There's different ways to...
Just by allowing something doesn't mean we're sending the message that by saying we're not
going to give you a felony, which is actually often the penalty for psychedelics.
I just actually testified for the Judiciary Committee, the Senate, the Assembly in New
Jersey and just to move psilocybin from a felony to misdemeanor, they use different
language in New Jersey.
It's weird, but like the equivalent of felony and misdemeanor and that was like two people
didn't vote for that on this committee because one of them said it might be sending the
wrong message and it's like a felony, I mean, there's real harms.
That's the scarlet letter the rest of your life, you're stuck at the lower ends of the
employment ladder, you're not going to get loans for education, all of this, maybe because
of a stupid mistake you made once as a 19-year-old, doing something that a presidential candidate
could have done and admitted to and had no problem.
What drug is the most addictive, the most dangerous in your view?
Not maybe specifically which drug, but more like in our society today, what is a highly
problematic drug?
We talked about psychedelics not being that addictive on the other flip side of that.
You mentioned cocaine.
Is that the top one?
Is there something else that's a concern to you?
It depends and you've already alluded to this nuance, it depends on how you define it.
If we're talking about on the ground today in modern society, I'd say nicotine tobacco.
In terms of mortality, it kills far more than any other drug known to humankind, four times
more than alcohol, like a half million deaths in the US every year and about five to six
million worldwide due to tobacco.
That's four times more in the US than alcohol.
If you graph all of the drugs, legal and illegal, put all of the illegal drugs in one category
on that figure and you put alcohol and tobacco on that figure, all the illegal drugs combined,
they're a barely visible blip to this incredible, even all of the opioid epidemic rolled up
along with cocaine and everything else in the meth, barely shows up compared to tobacco.
That's one of those uncomfortable truths that I don't know what to do with.
It's like where everybody's freaking out about coronavirus, and it's all relative.
If you look at the relative thing, it's like, well, why aren't we freaking out about cigarettes,
which we are increasingly so over the historically speaking, right?
It's like terrorism versus swimming pools, I remember that being back after the war
on terror started.
It's like, yeah, there's not even comparison.
Okay.
That's a little sobering truth there, because I was thinking like cocaine, I was thinking
about all of these hard drugs, but the reality is relatively nicotine is the big one.
You didn't ask about mortality or deaths, you asked about addiction, but that really
is hard to evaluate.
It gets into those nuances I spoke of before about there's not a unidimensional way to
measure reinforcement, it depends on the situation and what measure we're looking at.
More people have access to tobacco, and I'm not advocating that we make it an illegal
drug.
I think that would be a horrible mistake, although there is a very credible push to mandate
the reduction of nicotine in cigarettes, which I have most scientists that study it are for
it.
I think there's some real dangers there, because I see that in the broader history of drug
use.
It's like, when has drug prohibition worked, broadly speaking, and to me, that path would
only make sense in very good conjunction with e-cigarettes, which once they're fully regulated
can be a safer, not safe, but much safer alternative.
If we tax the hell out of e-cigarettes and ban every attractive feature, like flavors
and everything, then that's going to push people to a black market if they can't get
the real thing from real cigarettes.
Some people will just quit straight out, but I think with the regulators and what a lot
of scientists that study tobacco like myself, it's a big part still of what I study, they're
not used to thinking about tobacco really as a drug, largely speaking, in terms of,
for example, the history of prohibition.
We already know there's an illicit market, a black market for tobacco to get around taxes.
And for selling even loose cigarettes, that's what initially caused in Staten Island the
police to approach, was it Eric Garland who was selling loose cigarettes and he got choked
out?
The thing that caused that police contact was he was selling, well, I think reported
it to sell individual cigarettes for like, you could sell them for a quarter, it happens
in Baltimore.
And it's like, that's technically illegal, but are you not going to have massive boats
of supplies coming over from China and elsewhere of real deal cigarettes if you ban the sale
of nicotine?
That's fascinating.
It's obviously going to happen and you have to weigh that against, you're going to create
a black market to one size or another.
And your intuition that really hasn't worked throughout the history when we've tried it.
Right, but I see a potential path forward, but only if it's well, if it's not in conjunction
with e-cigarettes.
If there's a clear alternative, that's a positive alternative that it kind of stares the population
towards an alternative, yeah.
The difference here, the unique thing that could be taken advantage of here is nicotine
is by and large not what causes the harm.
It's the aromatic hydrocarbons, it's the carcinogens and tobacco, it's burning tobacco smoke.
It's not the nicotine.
It's not like alcohol prohibition where you couldn't create the adules, the near beer
is not going to have the alcohol.
Here you do have the possibility of giving another medium the ability to deliver the
drug, which still aren't, to a lot of people, isn't preferred to the tobacco, but nonetheless,
again, if you over-regulate those and make them less attractive, like if you aren't thoughtful
about the nicotine limits and thoughtful about whether you're allowing flavors and everything
and if you over-tax them, you're actually decreasing the ability to compete with the
more dangerous product.
So I feel like there is a potential path forward, but I don't have a lot of confidence that
that's going to be done in a thoughtful, analytical way, and I'm afraid that it could increase
the black market, cause all of the harms, like every other drug we're moving away from
the heavy, from the prohibition models slowly, but the big barge ship is making a very slow
turn and like, okay, we really had to step back and question if we went with nicotine
tobacco or we moving into that direction, like big picture.
It doesn't quite make sense.
You've done a study on cocaine and sexual decision-making, can you explain the findings?
In a broad sense, how do you do a study that involves cocaine and the other, how do you
do a study involving this sexual decision-making and then how do you do a study that combines
both?
Yeah.
Sex and drugs too.
I'm just missing the rock and roll.
The rock and roll.
The two controversial.
Rock and roll isn't very controversial anymore, but yeah, so the cocaine, you know, lots of
hoops to drum through.
You got to have a lot of medical support.
You got to be at basically an institution, a research unit like I'm at that has a long
history and the ability to do that and get ethics approval, get FDA approval, but it's
possible and whenever you're dealing with something like cocaine, you would never want
to give that to someone who hasn't already used cocaine and you want to make sure you're
not giving it to someone who's an active user who wants to quit.
So the idea is like, okay, if you're using this type of drug anyway and you're really
sure you're not looking to quit, hey, use a couple times in the lab with us so we can
at least learn something and part of what we learned is maybe to help people not use
and reduce the harms of cocaine.
So there's hoops to jump through.
With the sexual decision-making, I looked at the main thing I looked at was this model
of I applied delayed discounting to what we talked about earlier than now versus later,
that kind of decision-making that goes along with addiction.
I applied that to condom use decisions and I've done, probably published about 20 or
so papers with this and different drugs.
So the primary metric is whether you do or don't use a condom?
Right.
All hypothetical, and so this is using hypothetical decision-making, but I've published some studies
looking at showing a tight correspondence to self-reported in correlational studies to
self-reported behavior.
So this is like, so how do you do a questionnaire kind of thing?
Right.
So it's not quite a questionnaire, but it's a behavioral task requiring them to respond
to see, you show pictures of a bunch of individuals and it's kind of like one of these fun behavioral
stuff, a lot of them you get numbers of boring, but it's like, okay, hot or not, which of
these 60 people would you have a one night stand with?
Men, women, so pick whatever you like, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, whatever
you're into, it's all variety there.
Out of that group, you pick some subsets of people.
Who do you think is the one you most want to have sex with the least?
He thinks most likely to have an STI or at least likely a sexually transmitted disease
by STI.
And then you could do certain decision making questions of what I've done is ask, say this
person you've redeven yet, this person wants to have sex with you now, you've met them,
you get a long casual sex scenario, like a one night stand, would a condom's available,
just rate your likelihood from one to 100 on this kind of scale, would you use it?
Would you use a condom?
But then you can change your scenario to say, okay, now imagine you have to wait five minutes
to use a condom.
So the choice is now instead of using condom versus not in terms of your likelihood scale,
it now it ranges from have sex now without a condom versus on the other end of the scale
is wait five minutes to have sex with a condom.
So you rate your likelihood of where your behavior would be along that continuum.
And then you could say, okay, well, what about an hour?
What about three hours?
What about, you know, what about 24 hours?
Wait, I'm misunderstanding.
Now without a condom or five minutes later with a condom, is in the, so what's supposed
to be the preference for the person, like is like, there's a lot of factors coming into
play, right?
Right.
There's like pleasure, personal preference, and then there's also the safety.
Those are two like, are those competing objectives?
Right.
And so we do get at that through some individual measures and this task is more of a face valid
task where there's a lot underneath the hood.
So for most people, sex with the condom is the better reward, but underneath the hood
of that is just at the purely physical level, they'd rather have sex with without the condom.
It's going to feel better.
What do you mean by reward?
Like when they calculate their trajectory through life and try to optimize it, then sex
with the condom is a good idea?
Well, it's really based on, I mean, yeah, yeah, presumably that's the case that there's,
but it's measured by like what would really that first question where there is no delay.
Most people say they would be at the higher net scale.
A lot of times a hundred percent, they would say they would definitely use a condom, not
everybody.
And we know that's the case.
See, it's like that some people don't like, some people say, yeah, I want to use a condom,
but quarter of the time ended up not because I just get lost in the passion of the moment.
So for the people, I mean, the only reason that people, so behaviorally speaking, at
least for a large number of people in many circumstances, condom use is a reinforcer
just because people do it.
Like, you know, why are they doing it?
They're not because it makes the sex feel better, but because it allows for at least
the same general reward, even if, actually, even if it feels a little bit not as good,
you know, with the condom, nonetheless, they get most of the benefit without the concurrent,
oh my gosh, there's this risk of either unwanted pregnancy or getting HIV or way more likely
than HIV, you know, herpes, you know, in general, the words, et cetera, all the lovely ones.
And we've actually done research saying, like, where we gauge the probability of these individual
different STIs, and it's like, what's the heavy hitter in terms of what people are
using to judge, you know, to evaluate whether they're going to use a condom.
So that's why the condom use is the delayed thing.
Five minutes or more, and then, yeah, because that's the preferred.
Which would normally be the larger, later reward, like the $10 versus the nine.
It's like the $10, which is counterintuitive if you just think about the physical pleasure.
So that's a good thing to measure.
So condom use is a really good, concrete, quantifiable thing that you can use in a study,
and then you can add a lot of different elements, like the presence of cocaine and so on.
Yeah, you can get people loaded on, like, any number of drugs, like cocaine, alcohol,
methamphetamine, or the three that I've done and published on.
And it's interesting that...
These are fun studies, man.
Right.
I love to get people loaded in a safe context, and like, but to really...
It started, like, there was some early research on alcohol.
Fascinating.
I mean, the psychedelics are the most interesting, but it's like, all of these drugs are fascinating.
The fact that all of these are keys that unlock a certain, like, psychological experience
in the head.
And so there was this work with alcohol that showed that it didn't affect those monetary
delay discounting decisions, you know, $9 now versus $10 later, and then, like, getting
people drunk.
And I thought to myself, are you telling me that, you know, getting someone that people
being drunk does not cause people, at least sometimes, to make, to choose what's good
for them in the short term at the expense of what's good for them in the long term?
It's like, you know, bullshit, you know, like, we see it, like, but in what context does
that happen?
That's what, that's something that inspired me to go in this direction of, like, aha,
risky sexual decisions is something they do when they're drunk.
They don't necessarily go home, and even though some people have gambling problems and alcohol
interacts with that, the most typical thing is not for people to go home, you know, log
on and change their allocation and their retirement account or something like that.
You know, like...
But they're more likely, risky sexual decisions, they're more likely to not wait the five minutes
for the condom and instead go no condom now.
Right.
That's the effect, and we see that, and interestingly, we do not see, with those different drugs,
we don't see an effect if we just look at that zero delay condition.
In other words, the condom's right there waiting to be used, would you, how likely are to use
it?
You don't see it.
I mean, people, people are, by and large, going to use the condom.
So, and that's the way most of this research outside of behavioral economics that's just
looked at condom use decisions, very little of which has ever actually administered the
drugs, which is another unique aspect.
But they usually just look at, like, assuming the condom is there, but this is more using
behavioral economics to delve in and model something that, and I've done survey research
on this, modeling what actually happens.
Like, you meet someone at a laundry mat, like, you weren't planning on, like, you know, one
thing leads to another, they live around the corner, you know.
These things, you know, and like we did one survey with men who have sex with men and
found that 25% of them, 24%, about a quarter reported in the last six months that they
had unprotected anal intercourse, which is the most risky in terms of sexually transmitted
infection.
In the last six months, in a situation where they would have used a condom, but they simply
didn't use one just because they didn't have one on them.
So, this to me, it's like, if unless we delve into this and understand this, these suboptimal
conditions, we're not going to fully address the problem.
There's plenty of people that say, yep, condom use is good.
I use it a lot of the time.
You know, it's like, where is that failing?
And it's under these suboptimal conditions, which in Frank, if you think about it, it's
like most of the case.
Action is unfolding, things are getting hot and heavy, someone's like, do you got a condom?
Eh, no.
It's like, do they break the action and take 10 minutes to go to the convenience store
or whatever?
Maybe everything's closed.
Maybe they got to wait till tomorrow.
And though there's something to be studied there on the, that just seems like an unfortunate
set of circumstances.
Like what's the solution to that is, I mean, what's the psychology that needs to be like
taken apart there?
Because it just seems like that's the way of life.
We don't expect the things that to happen.
Are we supposed to expect them better to be like, be self-aware enough about our calculations?
Or you see the 10 minute detour to a convenience store as a kind of thing that we need to understand
how we humans evaluate the cost of that.
I think in terms of like, how we use this to help people, it's mostly on the environment
side rather than on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the
those, those interact.
So it's like, you know, in one sense, if you're especially, if you're going to be drinking
or using another substance that, that is associated with, you know, a stimulant, alcohol and
stimulants go along with risky sex, you know, good to be aware that you might make decisions
just to tell yourself, you might make a decision that, that it's going to, that you wouldn't
made in your sober state.
And so, hey, throwing a condom in the, in the purse and the, in the pocket, you know,
might be, you know, a good idea.
I think at the environmental level, just more condom of it, I mean, it highlights what
we know about just making condoms widely available.
Something that I'd like to do is like, you know, reinforcing condom use, you know, so,
you know, just getting people used to carrying a condom everywhere they go, because it's
such a once it's in someone's habit, if they are, say, like a young single person and,
you know, it's, you know, they occasionally have unprotected sex, like training those
people, like, what if you got a text message, you know, once every few days saying, ah,
if you show me a, send back a photo of a condom within a minute, you get a reward of $5.
You could shape that up, like that it's a process called contingency management.
It's basically just straight up operant reinforcement.
You could shape that up with no problem.
And, and I mean, those procedures of contingency management, giving people systematic rewards
is like, for example, the most powerful way to, to, to reduce cocaine use and addicted
people.
And, um, uh, but, but by saying, if you show me a negative, negative, negative, negative,
negative urine for cocaine, I'm going to give you a monetary reward.
And like that has huge effects in terms of decreasing cocaine use.
If that can be that powerful for something like stopping cocaine use, how powerful for
that?
Could that be for shaping up just carrying a condom?
Cause the primary, unlike cocaine use here, we're not saying you can't have the main reward.
Like you could still have sex and you can even have sex in the way that you tell yourself
you'd rather do it, you know, if the condom is available.
You know, so, you know, like, you're not, you know, it's relatively speaking, it's
way easier than like not using cocaine.
If you like using cocaine, it's just basically getting in the habit of carrying a condom.
So that's just one idea of like, well, there could be also the capitalistic solutions of
like, there could be a business opportunity for like a door dash for condoms, like delivery.
I thought about this within five minute delivery of a condom at any location, like Uber for
condoms.
I thought about it, not with condoms, but a very similar line of thinking, a line that
you're going into in terms of Uber and people getting drunk when they intend, they into
the bar playing to have one or two, they ended up having five or six and it's like, okay,
yeah, you could take the cab home with the Uber home, but you've left your car there.
It might get towed.
You might like, there's also the hassle of just, you know, you want to wake up tomorrow
with your hangover and forget about it and move on.
Like, and I think a lot of people in their situation and they're like, screw it.
I'm going to take the risk, just get it.
What if you had an Uber service where you have a car come out with two drivers and one
of them, two sober drivers, obviously, and the person, the one driver drops off the other
that then drives you home in their car, in your car.
So that you can, I mean, I think a lot of people would pay 50 bucks.
It's going to be more than a regular Uber, but it's like, it's going to be done.
I got the money.
I already spent 60 bucks at the bar tonight.
Like, just get the damn thing done tomorrow.
I'm done with it.
I wake up, my car's in front of my house.
I think that would be, I think someone could, I'm not going to open that business.
So like, if anyone hears this and wants to take off with that, like, I think it could
help a lot of people.
Yeah, definitely an Uber itself, I would say, helped a huge amount of people, just making
it easy to make the decision of going home while not driving yourself.
I read about in Austin where they, I don't know where it's at now, where they outlawed
Uber for a while, because of the whole taxi cab union type thing and how just, yeah, there
were like hordes of drunk people that were used to Uber that now didn't have a cheap
alternative.
So, just, we didn't exactly mention, you've done a lot of studies in sexual decision making
with different drugs.
Is there some interesting insights or findings on the difference between the different drugs?
So, I think you said meth as well, so cocaine.
Is there some interesting characteristics about decision making that these drugs alter
versus like alcohol, all those kinds of things?
I think, and there's much more to study with this, but I think the biggie there is that
the stimulants, they create risky sex by really increasing the rewarding value of sex.
Like, if you talk to people that are really, especially that are hooked on stimulants,
one of the biggies is like, sex on coke or meth is like so much better than sex without.
And that's a big part of why they have trouble quitting, because it's so tied to their sex
life.
I think your decision making is broken, it's just that you, well, you allocate.
It's a different aspect of their decision, yeah, on the reward side.
I think on the alcohol, it works more through disinhibition.
It's like, alcohol is really good at reducing the ability of a delayed punisher to have
an effect on current behavior.
In other words, there's this bad thing that's going to happen tomorrow or a week from now
or 20 years from now.
Being drunk is a really good way, and you see this in like rats making decisions.
A high dose of alcohol makes someone less sensitive to those consequences.
So I think that's the lever that's being hit with alcohol, and it's more just increasing
the rewarding value of sex by the psychostimulants on that side.
We actually found that it, and it was amazing, because hundreds of millions of dollars have
been spent by NIH to study the connection between cocaine and HIV.
We ran the first study on my grant that actually just gave people cocaine under double-blind
conditions and showed that when people are on coke, their ratings of sexual desire, even
though they're not in a sexual situation, yeah, you showed them some pictures, but they're
just saying they're horny.
You get subjective ratings of how much sexual desire you're feeling right now.
People get horny when they're on stimulants, and a lot of people say duh if they really
know these drugs.
But that's a rigorous study that's in the lab that shows, like, there's a plot.
Right, the dose effects of that, the time course of that, yeah, it's not just-
Can you please tell me there's a paper with a plot that shows dose versus evaluation of
like horniness?
Yeah, we didn't say horniness, we said sexual arousal.
Yeah, basically, yeah.
There's a plot.
I'm going to find this plot.
Right, I'll send it to you.
There was one headline from some publicity on the work that said horny cocaine users
don't use condoms or something like that.
You got to love journalism.
I wouldn't have put it that way, but yeah, that's right on.
I guess that's what it finds.
So you've published a bunch of studies on psychedelics.
Is there some especially favorite insightful findings from some of these that you could
talk about?
Like maybe favorite studies or just something that pops to mind in terms of both the goals
and the major insights gained and maybe the side little curiosities that you discovered
along the way?
Yeah, I think of the work with using psilocybin to help people quit smoking and we've talked
about smoking being such a serious addiction and so that what inspired me to get into that
was just having behavioral psychology as my primary lens, this sort of radical empirical
basis of, I'm really interested in the mystical experience and all of these reports.
Very interested.
But at the same time, I'm like, okay, let's get down to some behavior change and something
that we can record, like quantitatively verify biologically.
To find all kinds of negative behaviors that people practice and see if we can turn those
into positive.
Right, like really change it, not just people saying, which again is interesting, I'm not
dismissing it, but folks that say my life has turned around, I feel this has completely
changed me.
It's like, yep, that's good.
All right, let's see if we can harness that and test that into something that's real
behavior change.
You know what I mean?
It's quantifiable.
It's like, okay, you've been smoking for 30 years.
That's a real thing and you've tried a dozen times like seriously to quit and you haven't
been able to long-term, okay, and if you quit, we'll ask you and I'll believe you, but I
don't trust everyone reading the paper to believe you.
So we're going to have you pee in a cup and we'll test that and we'll have you blow into
this little machine that measures carbon monoxide and we'll test that.
So multiple levels of biological verification.
Now we're getting like, to me, that's where the rubber meets the road in terms of therapeutics.
It's like, can we really shift behavior?
And so much as we talked about my other scientific work outside of psychedelics is about understanding
addiction and drug use.
So it's like looking at addiction, it's a no-brainer and smoking is just a great example.
And so back to your question, we've had really high success rates.
It rivals anything that's been published in the scientific literature.
The caveat is that that's based on our initial trial of only 15 people, but extremely high
long-term success rates, 80% at six months per foot, smoke-free.
So can we discuss the details?
So first of all, which psychedelic we're talking about, and maybe can you talk about
the 15 people and how the study ran and what you found?
Yeah, yeah.
So the drug we're using is psilocybin and we're using moderately high and high doses of psilocybin.
And I should say this about most of our work.
These are not kind of museum-level doses.
In other words, nothing, even big fans of psychedelics want to take and go to a concert
or go to the museum.
If someone's a burning man on this type of dose, they're probably going to want to find
their way back to their tent and zip up and hunker down for not be around strangers.
By the way, the delivery method, psilocybin, is mushrooms, I guess.
What's the usual?
Is it edible?
Is there some other way?
How are people supposed to think about the correct dosing of these things?
Because I've heard that it's hard to dose correctly.
That's right.
So in our studies, we use the pure compound psilocybin, so it's a single molecule, a bunch
of molecules.
And we give them a capsule with that in it.
And so it's just a little capsule, they swallow.
When psilocybin is used outside of research, it's always in the context of mushrooms, because
they're so easy to grow.
There's no market for synthetic psilocybin, there's no reason for that to pop up.
The high dose that we use in research is 30 milligrams body weight adjusted.
So if you're a heavier person, it might be like 40 or even 50 milligrams.
We have some data that, based on that data, we're actually moving into getting away from
the body weight adjusting of the dose and just giving an absolute dose.
It seems like there's no justification for the body weight based dosing, but I digress.
Generally, 30, 40 milligrams, it's a high dose.
And based on average, even though, as you alluded to, there's variability, which gets
people into some trouble in terms of mushrooms, like psilocybe cubensis, which is the most
common for species in the illicit market in the US.
This is about equivalent to five dried grams, which is right at about where, right where
McKenna and others, they call it a heroic dose.
This is not hanging out with your friends, going to the concert again.
So this is a real deal dose, even to people that really, just even to psychonauts.
And even we've even had a number of studies.
Psychonauts?
Yeah, people that, yeah.
That's a great term.
Cosmonaut, for psychedelics, going as far out as possible.
But even for them, even for those who've flown to space before.
Right, right.
They're like, holy shit.
I didn't know the orbit would be that far out, or I escaped the orbit.
I was in interplanetary space there.
So these folks, the 15 folks in the study, there's not a question of dose being too low
to truly have an impact.
Right, right.
Very, out of hundreds of volunteers over the years, we've only seen a couple of people
where there was a mild effect of the 30 milligrams.
Who knows?
That person's their serotonin, they might have lesser density of serotonin, two-way receptors
or something.
We don't know.
It's definitely rare.
For most people, this is like something interesting is going to happen, put it that way.
Joe Rogan, I think that Jamie, his producer, is immune to psychonauts.
So maybe he's a good recruit for the study to test.
So that's interesting.
Now, I'm not, the caveat is I'm not encouraging anything illicit, but just theoretically,
my first question as a behavioral pharmacologist is like, increase the dose.
Increase the dose?
Like really?
Nobody's immune.
I'm not telling him Jamie to do that, but like, okay, you're taking the same amount
that friends might be taking, but yeah.
But he was also referring to the psychedelic effects of edible marijuana, which is, is
there rules on dosage for marijuana?
Is there limits?
Like what place where it's, this all goes, it probably is state by state, right?
It is, but most, they've gone that direction and states that didn't initially have these
rules to have now have them.
So it was like, you'll get, I think, you know, five, 10, I think 10, five or 10 milligrams
of THC being a common, and, and like, and this is an important thing, like where they've
moved from not being allowed to say, like have a whole candy bar and have each of the
eight or 10 squares in the canner bar being 10 milligrams, but it's like, no, the whole
thing because like, you know, somebody gets a candy bar, they're eating the freaking candy
bar.
And it's like, unless you're a daily cannabis user, if you, if you take, you know, a hundred
milligrams, it's like, that's what could lead to a bad trip for someone.
And it's like, you know, a lot of these people, it's like, oh, you used to smoke a little
weed in college, they might say, they're visiting Denver for a business trip.
And they're like, why not?
Let's give it a shot.
You know, and they're like, oh, I don't want to smoke something because it's going to,
so I'm going to be safer with this edible, this massive, you know, but there's huge tolerance.
So a regular, like for someone who's smoking weed every day, they might take five milligrams
and kind of hardly feel anything.
And they may, they may really need something like 30, 40, 50 milligrams have a strong effect.
But yeah, so that's, they've evolved in terms of the rules about like, okay, what constitutes
a dose, you know, which is why you see less big candy bars and more, or if it is, you're
only, if it is a whole candy bar, you're only getting a smaller dose, like 10 milligrams
or yeah, because that's where people get in trouble more often with edibles.
Yeah, except Joe Ideas, which I've heard.
That's definitely something I want to talk to out of the crazy comedians I want to talk
to.
Anyway, so yeah, 15, the study of the 15 and the dose not being a question.
So like, what was the recruitment based on?
What was the, like, how did the study get conducted?
Yeah.
So the recruitment, I really liked this fact.
It wasn't people that, you know, largely were, you know, we were honest about what we were
studying, but for most people, it was, they were in the category of like, you know, not
particularly interested in psychedelics, but more of like, they want to quit smoking,
they've tried everything, but the kitchen sink.
And this sounds like the kitchen sink, you know, and it's like, well, it's Hopkins.
So, you know, thinking that sounds like it's safe enough.
So like, what the hell, let's give it a shot.
Like most of them were in that category, which I really, you know, I appreciate because it's
more of a test, you know, of, yeah, just like a better model of what, if these are approved
as medicines, like what you're going to have the average participant, you know, be like.
And so the therapy involves a good amount of non-silocybin sessions of preparatory sessions,
like eight hours of getting to know the person, like the two people who are going to be their
guides or the person in the room with them during the experience, having these discussions
with them where you're both kind of rapport building, just kind of discussing their life,
getting to know them, but then also telling them, preparing them about the, the, the psilocybin
experience, so it could be scary in this sense, but here's how to handle it, trust, let go
be open.
And also during that preparation time, preparing them to quit smoking, using really standard
bread and butter techniques that can all fall under the label, typically of the cognitive
behavioral therapy, just stuff like before you quit, we assign a target quit date ahead
of time, you're not just quitting on the fly, and, and that happens to be the target
quit date in our study was the day that, where they got the first psilocybin dose, but doing
things like keeping a smoking diary, like, okay, during the three weeks until you quit,
every time you smoke a cigarette, just like jot down what you're doing, what you're feeling,
what situation, that type of thing, and then having some discussion around that, and then
going over the pluses and minuses in their life that smoking kind of comes with and being
honest about the, this is what it does for me, this is why I like it, this is why I don't
like it, preparing for like, what if you, what if you do slip, how to handle it, like
don't dwell on guilt, because that leads to more full on relapse, you know, just kind
of treat it as a learning experience, that type of thing.
Then you have the real, the session day where they come in, they, they, um, five minutes
of questionnaires, but pretty much they jump into the, we, we touch base with them, they,
we, we give them the capsule, it's a serious setting, but you know, a comfortable one,
they're in a room that looks more like a living room than like a research lab, we measure
their blood pressure than any experience, but kind of minimal, kind of medical vibe
to it, and, um, they lay down on a couch and it's a, it's a, purposefully an introspective
experience, so they're laying on a couch during most of the, uh, five to six hour experience
and they're wearing eye shades, which is a better connotation as a name than blindfold,
but like, you know, so they're wearing eye shades, but that's, and, and, and they're
wearing headphones through which music is played, um, mostly classical, although we've
done some variation of that, I have a paper that was recently accepted, kind of comparing
it to more like gongs and, and, and harmonic bowls and, and that type of thing, kind of
like sound, you know, kind of, um,
You've, you've, uh, you've also added this to the science and have a paper on the musical
accompaniment to the psychedelic experience, that's fascinating.
Right.
And we found basically that the, about the same effect, even by a trend not significant,
but a little bit better of an effect, both in terms of, um, subjective experience and
long term, whether it helped people quit smoking, just a little tiny, non-significant trend
even favoring the, the, the, the novel playlist with the, the Tibetan singing bowls and, and
the gongs and all didgeridoo and all of that.
And, um, so, so anyway, just saying, okay, we, we can deviate a little bit from this,
like what goes back to the 1950s of this method of using classical music as part of this psychedelic
therapy, but they're listening to the music and they're not playing DJ in real time.
You know, it's like, you know, they're, just be the baby, you're not the decision maker
for today.
Go inward, trust, let go be open and pretty much the only interaction, like that we're
there for is to deal with any anxiety that comes up.
So guide is kind of a misnomer in a sense.
It's we're more of a safety net.
And so like, tell us if you feel some butterflies that we can provide reassurance, a hold of
their, their hand can be very powerful.
I've had people tell me that that was like the thing that really just grounded them.
Can you break apart trust, let go be open?
What, uh, what?
So in a sense, how would you describe the experience, the, uh, intellectual and the
emotional approach that people are supposed to take to really let go into the experience?
Yeah.
So trust is trust the context, you know, trust the guides, trust the overall in institutional
context.
You know, the layers of like safety, even though it's everything I told you about the
relative bodily safety of psilocybin, nonetheless, we're still getting blood pressure throughout
the session.
Just in case we have a physician on hand who can respond just in case we're literally across
the street from the emergency department.
Just in case, you know, all of that, you know,
Privacy is another thing you've talked about is just trusting that you're at whatever happens
is just between you and the people in the study.
Right.
And you've really gotten that by that point deep into the study that like they realized
where we take that seriously and everything else, you know, and so it's really kind of
like a very special role you're playing as a, as a researcher or guide and, and hopefully
they have your, your trust.
And so, you know, and trust that they could be as emotional, everything from laughter to
tears, like that's going to be welcomed.
We're not judging them.
It's like, it's a therapeutic relationship where, you know, this is a safe container.
It's a safe space.
Safe space.
That's a lot of baggage to that term.
It really is, it's a safe space for that, for this type of experience and to, to let
go.
So trust, let's see, let go.
So that relates to the emotional, like you feel like crying, cry.
You feel like laughing your ass off, laugh your ass off, you know, it's like all the
things actually that sometimes it's more challenging with a recreation, someone has a large recreational
use.
Sometimes it's harder for them because people in that context and understandably so, it's
more about holding your shit.
Yeah.
So one's had a bunch of mushrooms at a party.
Maybe they don't want to go into the back room and start crying about this, these thoughts
about the relationship with their mother.
And they don't want to be the drama queen or king that bring their friends down because
their friends are having an experience too.
And so they want to like compose, you know, and also just the appearance in social settings
versus the, so like prioritizing how you appear to others versus the prioritizing the depth
of the experience.
And here in the study, you can prioritize the experience.
Right.
And it's all about, like you're the astronaut and we're, there's only one astronaut.
We're ground control.
And I use this often with, I have a photo of the space shuttle on a plaque in my office
and I kind of often use that as an example.
And it's like, we're here for you, like we're a team, but we have different roles.
It's just like, you don't have to like compose yourself, like you don't have to like be concerned
about our safety.
Like we're playing these roles today.
And like, yeah, your job is to go as deep as possible or as far out, whatever your analogy
is like as possible.
And we're keeping you, you safe.
And so, yeah, and you really, the emotional side is a hard one, you know, because you
really want people to like, if they go into realms of subjectively of despair and sorrow,
like, yeah, like cry, you know, like it's okay, you know, and especially if someone's
a, you know, more macho and, you know, you want this to be the place where they can let
go.
And, and, and again, something that they wouldn't or shouldn't do if someone was to theoretically
use it in a, in a social setting.
And like, and also these other things, like even that you get in those social settings
of like, yeah, you don't have to like worry about your wallet for being taken advantage
or for socially for a woman sexually assaulted by some creep at a concert or something because
they're in, you know, they're laying down, even being far out of the session.
There's like a million sources of anxiety that are external versus internal.
So you can just focus on your own, like the beautiful thing that's going on in your mind.
And even the cops at that layer, even though it's extremely unlikely for most people that
cops would come in and bust them right when, like even at that theoretical, like that one
in a billion chance, like that might be a real thing psychologically.
In this context, we even got that covered.
This is, we've got DEA approval.
Yeah.
Like you are, this is okay by every level of society that counts, you know, that has
the authority.
So it's, so go deep, trust the, you know, trust the setting, trust yourself, you know,
let go and be open.
So in the experience, and this is all subjective and by analogy, but like, if there's a door,
open it, go into it.
If there's a stairwell, go down it or stairway, go up it.
If there's a monster in the mind's eye, you know, don't run, approach it, look it in the
eye and say, you know, let's talk.
Read it.
Yeah.
What's up?
What are you doing here?
Let's talk turkey, you know.
Dick Goggins entered the chat.
Okay.
Right.
It really is that.
That really is a heart of this, this radical courage.
Like it.
Courage.
People are often struck by that coming out.
Like this is heavy lifting.
This is hard work.
People come out of this exhausted.
And it can be extremely...
Some people say it's the most difficult thing they've done in their life.
Like choosing to let go on a moment, a microsecond by microsecond basis.
Everything in their inclination is to say stop, sometimes stop this.
I don't like this.
I didn't know it was going to be like this.
This is too much.
And Terrence McKenna put it this way.
It's like comparing to meditation and other techniques.
It's like spending years trying to press the accelerator to make something happen.
Kudos psychedelics is like you're speeding down the mountain in a fully loaded semi-truck
and you're charged with not slamming the brake.
It's like, let it happen.
So it's very difficult and to engage.
Always go further into it and take that radical courage throughout.
What do they say in self-report?
If you can put general words to it, what is their experience like?
What do they say it's like?
Because these are many people like you said that haven't probably read much about psychedelics
or they don't have like with Joe Rogan, like language or stories to put on it.
So this is very raw self-report of experiences.
What do they say the experience is like?
Yeah.
And some more so than others because everyone has been exposed at some level or another,
but some it is pretty superficial as you're saying.
One of the hallmarks of psychedelics is just their variability.
So it's like not the mean, but the standard deviation is so wide that it could be like
hellish experiences and just absolutely beautiful and loving experiences.
Everything in between and both of those.
Those could be two minutes apart from each other.
And sometimes kind of at the same time concurrently.
So let's see, there's different ways to...
There were some Jungian psychologists back in the 60s, masters in Houston that wrote
a really good book, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, which is a play on varieties of
religious experience by William James, that they described as a perceptual level.
So most people have that, whether they're looking at the room without the eyeshades
on or inside their mind's eye with the eyeshades on, colors, sounds like this.
It's a much richer sensorium, which can be very interesting.
And then at another level, a master's in Houston called it the psychodynamic level.
And I think you could think about it more broadly than that's kind of Jungian, but just
the personal psychological levels, how I think of it, like this is about your life, there's
a whole life review.
And oftentimes people have thoughts about their childhood, about their relationships,
their spouse or partner, their children, their parents, their family of origin, their current
family.
That stuff comes up a lot, including people just pouring with tears about how much it
hits them so hard, how much they love people.
In a way, people that they'd love their family, but it just hits them so hard that how important
this is and the magnitude of that love and what that means in their life.
So those are some of the most moving experiences to be present for is where people, it hits
home like what really matters in their life.
And then you have this sort of what master's in Houston called the archetypal realm, which
again is sort of Jungian with the focus on archetypes, which is interesting, but I think
of that more generally as like symbolic level.
So just really deep experiences where you have, you do have experiences that seem symbolic
of, very much in like what we know about dreaming and what most people think about dreaming.
There's this randomness of things, but sometimes it's pretty clear and retrospect, oh, like
this came up because this thing has been on my mind recently.
So it seems to be there, there seems to be this symbolic level.
And then they have this, the last level that they describe is the mystical integral level,
which in this is where there's lots of terms for it, but transcendental experiences, experiences
of unity, mystical type effects we often, you know, measure on Europeans use a scale
that will refer to oceanic boundlessness.
This is all pretty much the same thing.
This is like at some sense, the deepest level of the very sense of self seems to be dissolved,
minimize or expanded such that the boundaries of the self go into and here, I think some
of this is just semantics, but whether the self is expanding such that there's no boundary
between the self and the rest of the universe or whether there's no sense of self again,
might be just semantics, but this radical shift or sense of loss of sense of self or
self boundaries.
And that's like the most typically when people have that experience, they'll often report
that as being the most remarkable thing.
And this is what you don't typically get with MDMA, these deepest levels of the nature
of reality itself, the subjectivity and objectivity just like the seer and the scene become one
and it's a process.
And yeah.
And they're able to bring that experience back and be able to describe it?
Yeah, but one of the, to a degree, but one of the hallmarks going back to William James
of describing a mystical experience is the ineffability.
And so even though it's ineffable, people try as far as they can to describe it, but
when you get the real deal, they'll say, and even though they say a lot of helpful things
to help you describe the landscape, they'll say, no matter what I say, I'm still not even
coming anywhere close to what this was.
Like the language is completely failing.
And I like to joke that even though it's ineffable, we're researchers, so we try to
eff it up by asking them to describe the experience.
I love it, it's a good one.
But to bring it back a little bit, so for that particular study on tobacco, what was
the results, what was the conclusions in terms of the impact of psilocybin on their addiction?
So when that pilot study was very, it was a very small and it wasn't a randomized study,
so it was limited.
The only question we could really answer was, is this worthy enough of follow-up?
And the answer to that was absolutely freaking lootily, because the success rates were so
high, 80% biologically confirmed successful at six months, that held up to 60% biologically
confirmed abstinence at an average of two and a half years, a very long fall.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, the best that's been reported in the literature for smoking cessation is
in the upper 50%, and that's with not one, but two medications for a couple of months,
followed by regular cognitive behavioral therapy, where you're coming in once a week or once
every few weeks for an entire year.
And so-
But this is what-
Very heavy.
And this is just like a few uses of psilocybin?
So this was three doses of psilocybin, over a total course, including preparation, everything
a 15-week period, where there's mainly like, for most part, one meeting a week, and then
the three sessions are within that.
And so it's, and we scale that back in the more, the study we're doing right now, which
I can tell you about, which is a randomized, controlled trial.
But it's the original pilot study was these 15 people.
So given the positive signal from the first study telling us that it was a worthy pursuit,
we hustled up some money to actually be able to afford a larger trial.
So it's randomizing 80 people to get either one psilocybin session, we've scaled that
down from three to one, mainly because we're doing FMRI neuroimaging before and after,
and it made it more experimentally complex to have multiple sessions.
But one psilocybin session versus the nicotine patch using the FDA-approved label, like
standard use of the nicotine patch.
So it's randomized, 40 people get randomized to psilocybin, one session, 40 people get
nicotine patch, and they all get the same cognitive behavioral therapies for the standard
talk therapy.
And we've scaled it down somewhat, so there's less weekly meetings, but it's within the
same ballpark.
And right now, we're still, the study's still ongoing, and in fact, we just recently started
recruiting again, we paused for COVID, now we're starting back up with some protections
like masks and whatnot.
But right now, for the 44 people who have gotten through the one-year follow-up, and
so that includes 22 from each of the two groups, the success rates are extremely high.
For the psilocybin group, it's 59% have been biologically confirmed as smoke-free at one
year after their quit date.
And that compares to 27% for the nicotine patch, which by the way is extremely good
for the nicotine patch compared to previous research.
So the results could change because it's ongoing, but we're mostly done, and it's still looking
extremely positive.
So if anyone's interested, they have to be sort of be in commuting distance to the Baltimore
area, but, you know.
To participate.
Right.
Right.
To participate.
This is a good moment to bring up something.
I think a lot of what you talked about is super interesting, and I think a lot of people
listening to this.
So now it's anywhere from 300 to 600,000 people for just a regular podcast.
I know a lot of them will be very interested in what you're saying, and they're going to
look you up, and they're going to find your email, and they're going to write you a long
email about some of the interesting things they found in any of your papers.
How should people contact you?
What is the best way for that?
Would you recommend you're a super busy guy, you have a million things going on?
How should people communicate with you?
Thanks for bringing this up.
I'm glad to get the opportunity to address this.
If someone's interested in participating in a study, the best thing to do is go to the
website.
Of the study or of which website?
So we have all of our psilocybin studies.
So everything we have is up on one website, and then we link to the different study websites,
but hopkinspsychedelic.org.
So everything we do, or if you don't remember that, just go to your favorite search engine
and look up Johns Hopkins Psychedelic, and you're going to find one of the first hits
is going to be our, is this website.
And there's going to be links to the smoking study and all of our other studies.
If there's no link to it there, we don't have a study on it now.
And if you're interested in psychedelic research more broadly, you can look up at another university
that might be closer to you, and there's a handful of them now across the country.
And there's some in Europe that have studies going on, but you can, at least in the US,
you can look at clinicaltrials.gov and look up the term psilocybin.
And in fact, optionally, people even in Europe can register their trial on there.
So that's a good way to find studies.
But for our research, rather than emailing me, a more efficient way is to go straight,
and you can do that first, the first phase of screening, there's some questions online,
and then someone will get back in touch with you.
But I do already, and I expect it's going to increase, but I'm already at the level
where my simple, limited mind and limited capacity is already, I sometimes fail to get
back to emails.
I mean, I'm trying to respond to my colleagues, my mentees, all these things, my responsibilities.
And as many of the people just inquiring about, I want to go to graduate school, I'm interested
in this.
I have a daughter that took us like a duck, and she's having trouble, and I try to respond
to those, but sometimes I just simply can't get to all of them already.
To be honest, from my perspective, it's been quite heartbreaking, because I basically don't
respond to any emails anymore.
And especially as you mentioned, mentees and so on, outside of that circle, it's heartbreaking
to me how many brilliant people there are, thoughtful people, like loving people, and
they write long emails that are really, by the way, I do read them very often.
It's just that I don't, the response is then you're starting a conversation.
And the heartbreaking aspect is you only have so many hours in the day to have deep, meaningful
conversation with human beings on this earth.
And so you have to select who they are, and usually it's your family, it's people like
you're directly working with.
And even I guarantee you with this conversation, people will write you long, really thoughtful
emails, like there'll be brilliant people, faculty from all over, PhD students from all
over, and it's heartbreaking because you can't really get back to them.
But you're saying like, many of them, if you do respond, it's more like, here, go to this
website, when you're interested in the study, it makes sense to directly go to the site
if there's applications open, just apply for the study.
Right.
Right.
As either a volunteer or if we're looking for somebody, we're gonna be posting, including
on the Hopkins University website, we're gonna be posting if we're looking for a position.
I am right now actually looking through, and it's mainly been through email and contacts,
but should I say it, because I think I'd rather cast my nets, but I'm looking for a postdoc
right now.
Oh, great.
So I've mentored postdocs for, I don't know, like a dozen years or so, and more and more
of their time is being spent on psychedelics, so someone's free to contact me.
That's more of a, that's sort of so close to home, that's a personal, you know, like emailing
me about that.
But I come to appreciate more the advice that folks like Tim Ferriss have of like, I think
it's him like five sins emails, you know, like, you know, a subject that gets to the
point that tells you what it's about so that like you break through the signal to the noise.
But I really appreciate what you're saying because part of the equation for me is like,
I have a three year old and like my time on the ground, on the floor playing blocks or
cars with him is part of that equation.
And even if the day is ending and I know some of those emails are slipping by and I'll never
get back to them and I have, I'm struggling with it, I'm already, and I get what you're
saying.
It's like, I haven't seen anything yet with the type of exposure that like your podcast
gets.
This will bring an exposure.
And then I think in terms of postdocs, this is a really good podcast in the sense that
there's a lot of brilliant PhD students out there that are looking for poster from all
over from MIT, probably from Hopkins is just all over the place.
So this is, and I, we have different preferences, but my preference would also be to have like
a form that they could fill out for posts, because, you know, it's very difficult through
email to tell who's a really going to be a strong collaborator for you, like a strong
postdoc, strong student, because you want a bunch of details, but at the same time,
you don't want a million pages worth of email, so you want a little bit of application process.
So usually set up a form that helps me indicate how passionate the person is, how willing
they are to do hard work.
Like I often ask a question, people of what do you think it's more important to work hard
or to work smart?
And I use that, those types of questions to indicate who I would like to work with.
Because it's counterintuitive.
But anyway, I'll leave, I'll leave that question unanswered for people to figure out themselves.
But maybe if you know my love for David Goggins, you'll understand.
So anyway.
Those are good thoughts about the forms and everything.
It's difficult, and that's something that evolves.
Email is such a messy thing.
There's a little speaking of Baltimore, Cal Newport, if you know who that is, he wrote
a book called Deep Work.
He's a computer science professor, and he's currently working on a book about email, about
all the ways that email is broken.
This is going to be a fascinating read.
This is a little bit of a general question, but almost a bigger picture question that
we touched on a little bit, but let's just touch it in a full way, which is, what have
all the psychedelic studies you've conducted taught you about the human mind?
About the human brain and the human mind?
Is there something, if you look at the human scientists you were before this work and the
scientists you are now, how has your understanding of the human mind changed?
I'm thinking of that in two categories, one more scientific, and they're both scientific,
but one more about the brain and behavior in the mind, so to speak, and as a behaviorist
I always see the mind as a metaphor for behaviors, but anyway, that gets philosophical.
The one category is increasing the appreciation for the magnitude of depth.
These are all metaphors of human experience that might be a good way to, because you use
certain words like consciousness and what, and it's like we're using constructs that
aren't well-defined unless we kind of dig in, but human experience, like that the experiences
on these compounds can be so far out there or so deep, and they're doing that by tinkering
with the same machinery that's going on up there.
My assumption, and I think it's a good assumption, is that all experiences, there's a biological
side to all phenomenal experience.
There is not, the divide between biology and experience or psychology, it's not one
or the other, these are just two sides of the same coin.
You're avoiding the use of the word consciousness, for example, but the experience is referring
to the subjective experience, so it's the actual technical use of the word consciousness
of subjective experience.
Even that word, there are certain ways that, if we're talking about access consciousness
or narrative self-awareness, you can wrap a definition around that and we can talk meaningfully
about it, but so often around psychedelics, it's used in this much more, in terms of ultimately
explaining phenomenal consciousness itself, the so-called hard problem relating to that
question, and psychedelics really haven't spoken to that, and that's why it's hard,
because it's hard to imagine anything.
But I think what I was getting is that psychedelics have done this by, the reason I was getting
into the biology versus mind psychology divide is that just to kind of set up the fact that
I think all of our experience is related to these biological events.
So whether they be naturally occurring neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine
and et cetera, and a whole other sort of biological activity and kind of another layer up that
we could talk about as network activity, communication amongst brain areas, this is
always going on, even if I just prompt you to think about a loved one.
There's something happening biologically, so that's always another side of the coin.
Another way to put that is all of our subjective experience outside of drugs.
It's all a controlled hallucination in a sense.
This is completely constructed.
Our experience of reality is completely a simulation.
So I think we're on solid ground to say that that's our best guess, and that's a pretty
reasonable thing to say scientifically.
All the rich complexity of the world emerges from just some biology and some chemicals.
So that definition implied a causation, it comes from, and so we know at least there's
a solid correlation there, and so then we delve deep into the philosophy of idealism
or materialism and things like this, which I'm not an expert in, but I know we're getting
into that territory.
You don't even necessarily have to go there, at least go to the level of, okay, we know
there seems to be this one-on-one correspondence, and that seems pretty solid.
You can't prove a negative, and you can't put in that category of like, you could come
up with an experience that maybe doesn't have a biological correlate, but then you're talking
about there's also the limits of the science, so is it a false negative?
But I think our best guess and a very decent assumption is that every psychological event
has a biological correlate.
So with that said, the idea that you can throw, alter that biology in a pretty trivial manner,
I mean, you could take a relatively small number of these molecules, throw them into
the nervous system, and then have a 60-year-old person who has, you name it, I mean, that
has hiked to the top of Everest and that speaks five languages, and that has been married
and has kids and grandkids, and has, you name it, like, been at the top and say, this fundamentally
changed who I am as a person and what I think life is about, like, that's the thing about
psychedelics that just floors me, and it never fails.
I mean, sometimes you get bogged down by the paperwork and running studies and all the,
I don't know, all of the BS that can come with being in academia and everything, and
sometimes you get some dud sessions where it's not the full, all the magic isn't happening,
and it's, you know, more or less, it's either a dud or somewhere, and I don't mean to dismiss
them, but, you know, it's not like these magnificent sort of reports, but sometimes you get the
full Monty report from one of these people, and you're like, oh, yeah, that's why we're
doing this, whether it's, like, therapeutically or just to understand the mind, and you're,
like, you're still floored, like, how is that possible?
How did we slightly alter serotonergic neurotransmission and say, and this person is now saying that
they're making fundamental differences in the priorities of their life after 60 years?
It also just fills you with all of the possibility of experiences we're yet to have uncovered
if just a few chemicals can change so much.
It's like, man, what if this could be, I mean, like, because we're just, like, took a little,
it's like lighting a match or something in the darkness, and you could see there's a
lot more there, but you don't know how much more, and that's-
Right.
It didn't, like, where's that going to go with, like, I mean, I'm always, like, aware
of the fact that, like, we always, as humans and as scientists, think that we figured out
about 99% and we're working on that first 1%, and we got to keep reminding ourselves
that it's hard to do, like, we figured out, like, not even 1%, like, where we know nothing.
And so, like, I can speculate, and I might sound like a fool, but, like, what are drugs,
even the concept of drugs, like, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years if we're
surviving, like, you know, molecules that go to a specific area of the brain in combination
with technology, in combination with the magnetic stimulation, in combination with, you know,
like, targeted pharmacology of, like, oh, like, this subset of serotonin 2A receptors in
the classroom, you know, at this time in this particular sequence, in combination with this
other thing, like, this baseball cap you wear that, like, has, you know, you know, has one
of the- is doing some of these things that we can only do with these, like, giant, like,
pieces of equipment now, like, where it's going to go is going to be endless, and it
becomes easy to, you know, combine within virtual reality where the virtual reality
is going to move from being something out here to being more in there.
And then we're getting, like we talked about before, we're already in a virtual reality
in terms of human perception and cognition models of the universe being all representations
and, you know, sort of, you know, color not existing, it's just, you know, our representations
of EM wavelengths, et cetera, you know, sound being vibrations and all of this, and so
as the external VR and the internal VR come closer to each other, like, this is what I
think about in terms of the future of drugs, like, all of this stuff sort of combines and,
and like, where that goes is just, it's unthinkable, like, we're probably going to, you know, again,
it might sound like a fool and this may not happen, but I think it's possible, you know,
to go completely offline, like, where most of people's experiences may be going into
these internal worlds, and, I mean, maybe you through some, through a combination of
these techniques, you create experiences where someone could live a thousand years in terms
of maybe they're living a regular lifespan, but in over the next two seconds, you're living
a thousand years worth of experience.
Inside, inside your mind.
Yeah, through this manipulation of them, like, is that possible?
Like just based on, like, first principles, and like, I think so.
Yeah.
Like, give us another 50, 500, like, who knows, but like, how could it not go there?
In a small tangent, what are your thoughts in this broader definition of drugs, of psychedelics,
of mind altering things?
What are your thoughts about neural link and brain computer interfaces sort of being able
to electrically stimulate and read and neuronal activity in the brain and then connect that
to the computer, which is another way from a computational perspective for me is kind
of appealing, but it's another way of altering subtly the behavior of the brain that's kind
of, if you zoom out, reminiscent of the way psychedelics do as well.
So what do you have, like, what are your thoughts about neural link, what are your hopes as
a researcher of mind altering devices, systems, chemicals?
I guess broadly speaking, I'm all for it.
I mean, for the same reason I am with psychedelics, but it comes with all the caveats, you know,
you're going into a brave new world where it's like all of a sudden there's going to
be a dark side, there's going to be, you know, serious ethical considerations, but that
should not stop us from moving there.
I mean, particularly the stuff from an unknown expert, but on the short list in the short
term, it's like, yeah, can we help these serious neurological disorders?
Like, hell yeah.
And I'm also sensitive to something being someone that has lots of neuroscience colleagues,
you know, with some of this stuff, and I can't talk about particulars I'm not recalling,
but in terms of stuff getting out there and then kind of a mocking of, oh gosh, they're
saying this is unique.
We know this or sort of like this belittling of like, oh, you know, this sounds like it's
just a, I don't know, a commercialization or like an oversimplification.
I forget what the example was, but something like something that came off to some of my
neuroscientific colleagues as an oversimplification, or at least the way they said it.
Oh, from a Neolink perspective.
Right.
Oh, we've known that for years and like, but I'm very sympathetic to like, maybe it's
just because of my very limited, but relatively speaking, the amount of exposure the psychedelic
work has had to my limited experience of being out there.
And then you think about someone like Musk, who's like, like really, really out there
and you just get all these arrows that like, and it's hard to be like when you're plowing
new ground, like you're going to get, you're going to get criticized like every little
word that you, like this balance between speaking to like people to make it meaningful.
Like scientists aren't very good at having people understand what you're saying and then
being belittled by oversimplifying something in terms of the public message.
So I'm extremely sympathetic and I'm a big fan of like what that, you know, what Elon
Musk does.
Yeah.
Tunnels through the ground and SpaceX and all this is like, hell yeah.
Like this guy has some, he has some great ideas.
And there's something to be said, it's not just the communication to the public.
I think his first principle is thinking it's like, because I get this in the artificial
intelligence world is probably similar to neuroscience world where Elon will say something
like, or I worked at MIT, I worked on autonomous vehicles and he's sort of, I could sense how
much he pisses off like every roboticist at MIT and everybody who works on like the human
factor side of safety of autonomous vehicles in saying like, we don't need to consider
human beings in the car, like the car will drive itself.
It's obvious that neural networks is all you need.
Like it's obvious that like we should be able to systems that should be able to learn constantly
and they don't really need LiDAR.
They just need cameras because we humans just use our eyes and that's the same as cameras.
So like it doesn't, why would we need anything else?
And you just have to make a system that learns faster and faster and faster and neural networks
can do that.
And so that's pissing off every single community.
It's pissing off human factors community saying, you don't need to consider the human
driver in the picture.
You can just focus on the robotics problem.
It's pissing off every robotics person for saying LiDAR can be just ignored.
It can be camera.
Every robotics person knows that camera is really noisy.
There's really difficult to deal with.
But he's, and then every AI person who hears neural networks and says like neural networks
can learn everything, like almost presuming that it's kind of going to achieve general
intelligence.
The problem with all those haters in the three communities is that they're looking one year
ahead, five years ahead.
The hilarious thing about the quote unquote ridiculous things that Elon Musk is saying
is they have a pretty good shot at being true in 20 years.
And so when you just look at the progression of these kinds of predictions, and sometimes
first principles thinking can allow you to do that, is you see that it's kind of obvious
that things are going to progress this way.
And if you just remove the prejudice you hold about the particular battles of the current
academic environment, and just look at the big picture of the progression of the technology,
you can usually see the world in the same kind of way.
And so in that same way, looking at psychedelics, you can see like there is so many exciting
possibilities here if we fully engage in the research.
Same thing when you're a link, if we fully engage, so we go from a thousand channels
of communication of the brain to billions of channels of communication of the brain.
And we figure out many of the details of how to do that safely with neurosurgery and so
on, that the world would just change completely in the same kind of way that Elon is.
It's so ridiculous to hear him talk about symbiotic relationship between AI and the
human brain.
But it's like, is it though?
Is it?
Because I can see in the 50 years that's going to be an obvious, like everyone will have,
like obviously you have, like why are we typing stuff in the computer?
It doesn't make any sense, that's stupid.
People used to type on a keyboard with a mouse.
What is that?
And it seems pretty clear, like we're going to be there.
Yeah.
Like and the only question is like, what's the time frame?
Is that going to be 20 or is it 50 or 100?
How could we not?
And the thing that I guess upsets with Elon and others is the timeline he tends to do.
I think a lot of people tend to do that kind of thing.
I definitely do it, which is like, it'll be done this year versus like it'll be done
in 10 years.
The timeline is a little bit too rushed, but from our leadership perspective, it inspires
the engineers to do the best work of their life to really kind of believe, because to
do the impossible, you have to first believe it, which is a really important aspect of
innovation.
And there's the delayed discounting aspect I talked about before.
It's like saying, oh, this is going to be a thing 20, 50 years from now, it's like,
what motivates anybody?
And even if you're fudging it or like wishful thinking a little bit, or let's just say airing
on one side of the probability distribution, like there's value in saying like, yeah,
there's a chance we could get this done in a year.
And you know what?
And if you set a goal for a year and you're not successful, hey, you might get it done
in three years, whereas if you had aimed at 20 years, well, you either would have never
done it at all, or you would have aimed at 20 years and then would have taken you 10.
So the other thing I think about this, like in terms of his work and I guess we've seen
with psychedelics, it's like there's a lack of appreciation for like sort of the variability
you need in natural selection, sort of extrapolating from biological, you know, from evolution,
like, hey, maybe he's wrong about focusing only on the cameras and not these other things.
Be empirically driven.
It's like, yeah, you need to like, when he's, you know, when you need to get the regulations,
is it safe enough to get this thing on the road?
Those are real questions and be empirically driven.
And if he can meet the whatever standard is relevant, that's the standard and be driven
by that.
So don't let it affect your ethics, but if he's on the wrong path, how wonderful someone's
exploring that wrong path, he's going to figure out it's a wrong path.
And like other people, he's, damn it, he's doing something.
Like he's, you know, and appreciating that variability, you know, that like it's valuable
even if he's not on, I mean, this is all over the place in science.
It's like a good theory.
One standard definition is that it generates testable hypotheses and like the ultimate
model is never going to be the same as reality.
Some models are going to work better than others like, you know, Newtonian physics got
us a long ways, even if there was a better model, like waiting.
And some models weren't as good as, you know, we're never that successful, but just even
like putting them out there and test it, we wouldn't know something is a bad model until
someone puts it out anyway.
So yeah.
Diversity of ideas is essential for progress.
Yeah.
So we brought up consciousness a few times.
There's several things I want to kind of disentangle there.
The one you've recently wrote a paper titled consciousness, religion and gurus pitfalls
of psychedelic medicine.
So that's one side of it.
You've kind of already mentioned that these terms can be a little bit misused or are used
in a variety of ways that they can be confusing.
But in a specific way, as much as we can be specific about these things about the actual
heart problem of consciousness or understanding what is consciousness, this weird thing that
it feels like, it feels like something to experience things have psychedelics giving
you some kind of insight on what is consciousness.
You've mentioned that it feels like psychedelics allows you to kind of dismantle your sense
of self, like step outside of yourself.
That feels like somehow playing with this mechanism of consciousness.
And if it is in fact playing with a mechanism of consciousness using just a few chemicals,
it feels like we're very much in the neighborhood of being able to maybe understand the actual
biological mechanisms of how consciousness can emerge from the brain.
So yeah, there's a bunch there, I think.
My preface is that I certainly have opinions that I can say, here are my best speculations
as just a person and an armchair philosopher, and that philosophy is certainly not my training
and my expertise.
So I have thoughts there, but that I recognize are completely in the realm of speculation
that are things that I would love to wrap empirical science around, but there's no data
and getting to the hard problem, like no conceivable way, even though I'm very open.
I'm hoping that that problem can be cracked.
As an armchair philosopher, I do think that is a problem, I don't think it can be dismissed
as some people argue it's not even really a problem.
It strikes me that explaining just the existence of phenomenal consciousness is a problem.
So anyway, I very much keep that divide in mind when I talk about these things, what
we can really say about what we've learned through science, including by psychedelics
versus what I can speculate on in terms of the nature of reality and consciousness.
But in terms of by and large, skeptically I have to say psychedelics have not really taught us anything
about the nature of consciousness.
I'm hopeful that they will.
They have been used around certain, I don't even know if features is the right term, but
things that are called consciousness.
So consciousness can refer to not only just phenomenal consciousness, which is the source
of the hard problem and what it is to be like Nagel's description, but the sense of self,
which can be the experiential self moment to moment, or it can be the narrative self,
the string together of story.
So those are things that I think can be, and a little bit's been done with psychedelics
regarding that, but I think there's far more potential.
And so one story that unfolded is that psychedelics acutely have an effects on the default mode
network, a certain pattern of activation amongst a subset of brain areas that is associated
with self-referential processing, seems to be more active, more communication between
these areas like the posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex, for example,
taking parts of this and others that are tied with sort of thinking about yourself from
remembering yourself in the past, projecting yourself into the future.
And so an interesting story emerged when it was found that when psilocybin is on board
in the person's system, that there's less communication amongst these areas.
So with resting state fMRI imaging that there's less synchronization or presumably communication
between these areas.
And so I think it has been overstated into, ah, we see this as the dissolving of the ego.
The story made a whole lot of sense, but there's several, I think that story is really being
challenged, like one, we see increasing number of drugs that decouple that network, including
ones that aren't psychedelic.
So this may just be a property, frankly, of being screwed up, out of your head, being
like, you know.
Anytime you mess with the perception system, maybe it screws up some, our ability to just
function holistically like we do in order for the brain to perceive stuff, to be able
to map it to memory, to connect things together, the whole recurr mechanism, that could just
be messed with.
Right.
And it couldn't, I'm speculating, it could be tied to more if you had to download into
the language, everyday language, like not feeling like yourself, like, so whether that
be like really drunk or really hopped up on amphetamine or, you know, on, like we found
it like decoupling of the default mode network on salvin RNA, which is a smokable psychedelic,
which is a non-classic psychedelic, but another one where, like DMT, where people are often
talking to entities and that type of thing, that was a really fun study to run.
But nonetheless, most people say it's not a classic psychedelic and doesn't have some
of those phenomenal features that people report from classic psychedelics and not sort of
the clear sort of ego loss type, at least not in the way that people report it with classic
psychedelics.
So you get it with all these different drugs.
And so, and then you also see just broad, broad changes in network activity with other
networks.
And so I think that story took off a little too soon, although, so I think in the story
that the DMN, the default mode network relating to the self, and I know some neuroscientists
it drives them crazy if you say that it's the ego, but self-referential processing,
if you go that far, that was already known before psychedelics.
Psychedelics didn't really contribute to that, the idea that this type of brain network
activity was related to a sense of self.
But it is absolutely striking that psychedelics, that people report with pretty high reliability,
these unity experiences that where people subjectively, like they report losing or getting the boundaries
of the, however you want to say it, like these unity experiences, I think we can do a lot
with that in terms of figuring out the nature of the sense of self.
Now, I don't think that's the same as the hard problem or the existence of phenomenal
consciousness because you can build an AI system and you correct me if I'm wrong, that
will pass a turing test in terms of demonstrating the qualities of a sense of self.
It will talk as if there's a self and there's probably a certain algorithm or whatever,
computational scaling up of computations that results in somehow.
And I think this is the argument with humans, with some have speculated this, why do we
have this illusion of the self that's evolved, that we might find this with AI that it works,
having a sense of self in that state incorrectly, like acting as if there is an agent at play
and behaviorally acting like there is a self that might work.
And so you can program a computer or a robot to basically demonstrate, have an algorithm
like that and demonstrate that type of behavior.
And I think that's completely silent on whether there's an actual experience inside there.
I've been struggling to find the right words and how I feel about that whole thing, but
because I've said it poorly before.
I've before said that there's no difference between the appearance and the actual existence
of consciousness or intelligence or any of that.
What I really mean is the more the appearance starts to look like the thing, the more there's
this area where it's like, our whole idea of what is real and what is just an illusion
is not the right way to think about it.
So the whole idea is like, if you create a system that looks like it's having fun, the
more it's realistically able to portray itself as having fun, like there's a certain gray
area in which the system is having fun and same with intelligence, same with consciousness.
And we humans want to simplify, like it feels like the way we simplify the existence and
the illusion of something is missing the whole truth of the nature of reality, which we're
not yet able to understand.
It's the 1%, we only understand 1% currently, so we don't have the right physics to talk
about things, we don't have the right science to talk about things, but to me, faking it
and actually it being true is the difference is much smaller than when humans would like
to imagine.
That's my intuition, but philosophers hate that because, and guess what, it's philosophers.
What have you actually built?
So like to me is that's the difference in philosophy and engineering.
It feels like if we push the creation, the engineering, like fake it until you make it
all the way, which is like fake consciousness until you realize holy crap.
This thing is conscious, fake intelligence until you realize holy crap, this is intelligence.
And from the, my curiosity with psychedelics and just neurobiology, neuroscience is like
it feels, I love the armchair.
I love sitting in that armchair because it feels like at a certain point you're going
to think about this problem and there's going to be an aha moment.
That's what the armchair does.
Sometimes science prevents you from really thinking, wait, it's really simple.
There's something really simple.
There could be some dance of chemicals that we're totally unaware of, not from aspects
of like which chemicals to combine with which biological architectures, but more like we
were thinking of it completely wrong that just out of the blue.
Maybe the human mind is just like a radio that tunes into some other medium where consciousness
actually exists, like those weird sort of hypothetical, like maybe we're just thinking
about the human mind totally wrong.
Maybe there's no such thing as individual intelligence.
Maybe it is all collective intelligence between humans, like maybe the intelligence is possessed
in the communication of language between minds and then in fact, consciousness is a property
of that language versus a property of the individual minds and somehow the neurotransmitters
will be able to connect to that so then AI systems can join that common collective intelligence,
that common language.
Just thinking completely outside of the box, I just said a much crazy thing, I don't know,
but thinking outside the box and there's something about subtle manipulation of the
chemicals of the brain which feels like the best or one of the great chances of the scientific
process leading us to an actual understanding of the hard problem.
I am very hopeful.
And I'm a radical empiricist which I'm very strong with that, like that's what science
isn't about ultimately being a materialist, it's about being an empiricist in my view.
And so for example, I'm very fascinated by the so-called sci phenomenon, like stuff that
people just kind of reject out of hand.
I kind of orient towards that stuff with an idea of, hey, look, what we consider, like
anything exists as natural, but the boundary of what we observe in nature, like what we
recognize as in nature moves, like what we do today and what we know today would only
be described as magic 500 years ago or even 100 years ago, some of it.
So there will surely be things that, like you explained these phenomenon that just sound
like completely supernatural now where there may be, for some of it, like some of it might
turn out to be a complete bunk and some of it might turn out to be, it's just another
layer of nature, whether we're talking about multiple dimensions that are invoked or something
that we don't even have the language towards.
And what you're saying about the moving together of the model and the real thing of consciousness,
like I'm very sympathetic to that.
So that's that part of like on the arm-share side where I want to be clear, I can't say
this as a scientist, but just in terms of speculating.
I find myself attracted to these more of the sort of the panpsychism ideas and that kind
of makes sense to me.
I don't know if that's what you meant there, but seemed like related the sense that ultimately,
if you were completely modeling, unless you dismiss like the idea that there is a phenomenal
consciousness, which I think is hard given that we all, I seem like I have one that's
really all I know, but if that's so compelling, I can't just dismiss that, like if you take
that as a given, then the only way for the model and the real thing to merge is if there
is something baked into the nature of reality, sort of like in the history of like they're
certain just like fundamental forces or fundamental, like, and that's been useful for us.
And sometimes we find out that that's pointing towards something else or sometimes it's still,
seems like it's a fundamental and sometimes it's a placeholder for somewhere to figure
out, but there's something like this is just a given.
This is just, you know, and sometimes I'm like, gravity seems like a very good placeholder
and then there's something better that comes to replace it.
So, you know, I kind of think about like consciousness and I didn't, I kind of had this inclination
where I knew there was a term for it, Rosalian monism, the idea that, which is a form of
pan, again, I'm not, I'm an armchair philosopher, not a very good one.
Broadly, panpsychism, by the way, is the idea that sort of consciousness permeates all matter
and or it's a fundamental part of physics of the universe kind of thing.
So, right.
And there's a lot of different flavors of it as you're, as you're alluding to.
And something that struck me as like consistent with some just, you know, inclinations of
mind, just total speculation is this idea of everything we know in science and with
most of the stuff we think of physics, you know, really describes, it's all interactions.
It's not the thing itself.
Like there's a, there, there is something to the, and this sounds very new agey, which
is why it's very difficult and I've had a high bullshit like meter and everything.
But like an is-ness, I mean, think about like Huxley, all this Huxley with his mescaline
experience indoors of processional, like there's an is-ness there in, you know, Alan Watson,
like there is a nature of being, again, very new agey sounding, but maybe there is something
to, and when we say consciousness, we think of like this human experience, but maybe that's
just, that's so processed and so, that's so far, so derivative of this kind of basic
thing that we wouldn't even recognize the basic thing.
But the basic thing might just be, this is not about the interaction between particles,
this is what it is like to exist as a particle, and maybe it's not even particles, maybe it's
like space-time itself, I mean, again, totally in the speculation area, so it's funny because
we don't have this, neither the science nor the proper language to talk about it.
All we have is kind of little intuitions about there might be something in that direction
of the darkness to pursue, and in that sense, I find panpsychism interesting in that, like,
it does feel like there's something fundamental here, the consciousness is not just like,
okay, so the flip side consciousness could be just a very basic and trivial symptom,
like a little hack of nature that's useful for survival of an organism, it's not something
fundamental, it's just this very basic, boring chemical thing that somehow has convinced
us humans, because we're very human-centric, we're very self-centric, that this is somehow
really important, but it's actually pretty obvious, or it could be something really
fundamental to the nature of the universe.
So both of those are, to me, pretty compelling, and I think eventually scientifically testable,
it is so frustrating that it's hard to design a scientific experiment currently, but I think
it's, that's how Nobel Prizes are won, is nobody did it until they do it.
The reason I lean towards, and again, armchair spec, if I had a bet like $1,000 on which one
of these ultimately be proved, I would lean towards, I'd put my bets on something like
panpsychism rather than the emergence of phenomenal consciousness through complexity
or computational complexity, because although certainly, if there is some underlying fundamental
consciousness, it's clearly being processed in this way through computation in terms of
resulting in our experience and the experience, presumably, of other animals.
But the reason I would bet on panpsychism is, to me, Occam's razor, it just, in terms
of truly the hard problem, at some point, you have an inside looking out, and even looking
refers to vision and it doesn't, that's just an, but just, there's an inside experiencing
something.
At some point of complexity, all of a sudden, you start from this objective universe and
all we know about is interactions between things and things happen, and at this certain
level of complexity, magically, there's an inside.
That to me doesn't pass Occam's razor as easily as maybe there is a fundamental property of
the universe of, there's both subjective and objective.
There is both interactions amongst things and there is the thing itself.
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm of two minds, I agree with you totally, half of my mind, and the other half is I've
seen looking at cellular automata a lot, which is complete, it sure does seem that we don't
understand anything about complexity, like the emergence, just the property.
In fact, that could be a fundamental property of reality is something within the emergence
from simple things interacting, somehow miraculous things happen.
And I don't understand that, that could be fundamental, that something about the layers
of abstraction, layers of reality, really small things interacting, and then on another
layer emerges actual complicated behavior, even on the underlying things, super simple.
That process, we don't really don't understand either, and that could be bigger than any of
the things we're talking about.
That's the basic force behind everything that's happening in the universe is from simple things,
complex phenomena can happen.
And the thing that gives me pause is that I'm concerned about a threshold there, like
how is it likely that, now there may be, and there may be some qualitative shift that in
the realm of we don't even understand complexity yet, like you're saying, so maybe there is.
But I do think if it is a result of the complexity, well, just having helium versus hydrogen is
a form of complexity.
Having the existence of stars versus clouds of gas is a complexity, the entire universe
has been this increasing complexity.
And so that brings me back to the other of, okay, if it's about complexity, then it exists
at a certain level in these simple systems like a star or a complex atom.
They all have the panpsychism, that's right.
But we humans, the qualitative shift, we might have evolved to appreciate certain kinds of
thresholds.
Right.
Yeah.
I do think it's likely that this idea that whether or not there's an inner experience,
which is phenomenal, it's the hard problem, that acting like an agent, like having an
algorithm that basically operates as if there is an agent, that's clearly a thing that I
think has worked and that there is a whole lot to figure out there and I think psychedelics
will be extremely helpful in figuring more out about that because they do seem to a lot
of times eliminate that or whatever, radically shift that sense of self.
Let me ask the craziest question.
Tell me for a second, oh, this is a joke.
You've heard of what we've been talking about, like, okay, I'll get this seatbelt on.
All of this is assigned.
All of that, despite the caveat about armchair, I think is within the reach of science.
Let me ask one that's kind of also within the reach of science, but as Joe likes to
say, it's entirely possible, right?
Is it possible that with these DMT trips, when you meet entities, is it possible that
these entities are extraterrestrial life forms, like our understanding of little green men
with aliens that show up is totally off?
I often think about this, like, what would actual extraterrestrial intelligence look
like, and my sense is that it will look like very different from anything we can even begin
to comprehend.
And how would it communicate?
How would it communicate?
Would it be necessarily spaceships?
Right.
Could it be communicating through chemicals, through if there's the panpsychism situation,
if there's something, not if, I almost for sure know we don't understand a lot about
the function of our mind in connection to the fabric of the physics in the universe.
A lot of people seem to think we have theoretical physics pretty figured out.
I have my doubts, because I'm pretty sure it always feels like we have everything figured
out until we don't.
Right.
I mean, there's no grand unifying theory yet, right?
I mean, that's been widely recognized.
We could be missing out, like, the concept of the universe just can be completely off,
like how many other universes are there, all those kinds of things, I mean, just the basic
nature of information, the time, all of those things, whether that's just like a thing we
assign value to, or whether it's fundamental or not, that's whole, I can talk to Shankar
forever about whether time is emergent or fundamental to the reality.
But is it possible that the entities we meet are actual alien life forms?
Do you ever think about that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do.
And to some degree, I laid my cards out by identifying as a radical empiricist.
So the answer, is it possible?
And I think ultimately, if you're a good scientist, you got to say, now that's at the extremes,
it's a yes.
And it might get more interesting when you had to, you're asked to guess about the probability
of that.
Is that a one in a million, one in a trillion, one in more than the number of atoms in the
universe probability?
And as an empiricist, what is a good testable, like how would you know the answer to that
question?
Well, how would you be able to validate?
Well, can you get some information that's verifiable, like information about some other
planet or some aspect, and gosh, it would be an interesting range.
But what range of discovery that we can anticipate we're going to know within whatever, a few
years, next 5, 10, 20 years, and seeing if you can get that information now and then
over time, it might be verified.
The type of thing like part of Einstein's work was ultimately verified not until decades
and decades later, at least certain aspects through empirical observations.
But it's also possible that the alien beings have a very different value system and perception
of the world where all of this little capitalistic improvements that we're all after, the concept
of predicting the future to is totally useless to other life forms that perhaps think in
a much different way, maybe a more transcendent way, I don't know.
So they wouldn't even sign the consent form to be a participant in our experiment?
They would not.
That would not.
And they wouldn't understand the nature of these experiments.
I mean, that maybe it's purely in the realm of the consciousness thing that we talked
about.
So communicating in a way that is totally different than the kinds of communication
that we think of as on earth.
What's the purpose of communication for us?
For us humans, the purpose of communication is sharing ideas, it feels like, like converging.
It's the Dawkins' memes, it's like we're sharing ideas in order to figure out how to
collaborate together to get food into our systems and procreate and then murder everybody
in the neighboring tribe because they'll steal our food.
We are all about sharing ideas.
Maybe it's possible to have another alien life form that's more about sharing experiences.
It's less about ideas, I don't know.
And maybe that'll be us in a few years.
How could it not?
Like instead of explaining something laboriously to you, like having people to describe the
ineffable psychedelic experience, like if we could record that and then get the neural
link of 50 years from now, like, oh, just plug this into your...
Just transferring the experiences.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, now you feel what it's like.
In one sense, how could we not go there?
And then you get into the realm, especially when you throw time into it, are the aliens
us in the future?
Or even like a transcendental temporal, like the us beyond time, like you get into this
realm and there's a lot of possibilities.
But I think there's one psychedelic researcher who did high-dose DMT research in the 90s
who speculated that in there was a lot of alien encounter experiences, like maybe these
are like entities from some other dimension or...
He labeled it as speculation, but...
Do you remember the name?
Oh, Rick Strossman, who did the DMT work.
He labeled it as speculation, but I think we'd be wise to kind of...
It's always that balance between being empirically grounded and skeptical, but also not being...
And I think in science, well, often we are too closed, which relates to like you're talking
about Elon, like in academia, it's like often...
I think you're punished for thinking or even talking about 20 years from now because it's
just so far removed from your next grant or for your next paper that you're...
It's easy pickings that you're not allowed to speculate.
So...
I think the...
I'm a huge fan of...
I think the best way to me at least to practice like science or to practice good engineering
is to do two things and just bounce off, like spend most of the time doing the rigor of
the day-to-day of what can be accomplished now in the engineering space or in the science,
like what can actually...
What can you construct an experiment around?
Do like that, the usual rigor of the scientific process, but then every once in a while on
a regular basis to step outside and talk about aliens and consciousness and we just walk
along the line of things that are outside the reach of science currently.
Free will, the illusion or the perception of the experience of free will, anything.
Just the entirety of it, being able to travel in time through warm halls.
It's like it's really useful to do that, especially as a scientist.
If that's all you do, you go into a land where you're not actually able to think rigorously.
There's something, at least to me, that if you just hop back and forth, you're able to,
I think, do exactly the kind of injection of out-of-the-box thinking to your regular
day-to-day science that will ultimately lead to breakthroughs.
You have to be the good scientist most of the time.
That's consistent with what I think the great scientists of history.
In most of the history, the greats, the Newtons and Einstein's, there was less of, and this
change I think is time-marched on, but less of a separation between those realms.
There's the inclination now for it as a scientist.
This is science, this is my work, and then this is my inclination to say, oh, Lex, don't
take me too seriously because this is my armchair, I'm not speaking as a scientist, I'm bending
over backwards to divide that self.
Maybe there's been that evolution, and the greats didn't see that, and you can go back
in time.
That obviously connects to religion, especially if that is the predominant word.
How much time did he spend trying to decode the Bible and whatnot?
Maybe that was a dead end, but it's like, if you really believe in that particular religion
and you're this mastermind and you're trying to figure things out, it's not like, oh, this
is what my job description is and this is what the grant wants.
It's like, no, I've got this limited time on the planet, I'm going to figure out as much
stuff as possible.
Nothing is off the table, and you're just putting it all together.
This is kind of the trajectory that's really related to the siloing in science, again related
to my, oh, I'm not a philosopher, whether you consider science or not, not empirical
science, but going to these different disciplines, the greats didn't observe the, the boundaries
didn't exist, they didn't observe them.
Speaking of the finiteness of our existence in this world, on the front of psychedelics
and teaching you lessons as a researcher, as a human being, what have you learned about
death, about mortality, about the finiteness of our existence?
Are you yourself afraid of death, and how has your view do ponder it, and has your view
of your own mortality changed with the research you've done?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I do ponder it.
Are you afraid of death?
Probably on a daily basis, I ponder it.
I would, I'd have to pick it apart more and say, yeah, I am afraid of dying.
Like the process of dying.
I'm not afraid of being dead.
I mean, I'm not afraid of, I think it was Penn Gillette that said, and he may have gotten
it from someone else, but like, I'm not afraid of the year, you know, 1862, before I existed.
I'm not afraid of the year 2262 after I'm gone, like, it's going to be fine.
But yeah, you know, dying, like, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid of, you know, dying.
And so there's both, like, the process of dying, like, yeah, it's usually not good.
It'd be nice if it was after many, many years, and just sort of, you know, I'd rather not
fall, you know, die in my sleep, I'd rather kind of be conscious, but sort of just fade
out with old age, maybe, but like, you know, just being in an accident and like, you know,
horrible diseases, I've seen enough loved ones, it's like, yeah, this is not good.
This is enough to be, you know, I'd like to say that I'm peaceful and sort of balanced
enough that I'm not concerned at all, but no, like, yeah, I'm afraid of dying.
But I'm also concerned about, I think about family, like, I'm really, I'm afraid or at
least, you know, concerned about, like, not being there, like with a three-year-old,
not being there, not being there for him and my wife and my mom the rest of her life.
I'm concerned about not, I'm concerned more about, like, the harm that it would cause
if I left prematurely, and then kind of even bigger along the lines of some of the stuff
that Ford think we've been talking about.
I think maybe way too much about just like, and I'll never know the answer, so even if
I lived 120, like, but like, I want to know as much as I can, but like, how is this going
to work out, like, as humans, like, are we, and a big one, I think is, are we going to,
and I don't think, unfortunately, I'm going to learn it in my lifetime, even if I lived
to a ripe old age, but well, I don't know.
Is this going to work out?
Like, are we going to escape the planet?
I think that's one of the biggies, like, are we going to, like, the survival of the speed,
like, I think the next, like, the time we're in now, it's like with the nuclear weapons,
with pandemics, and with, I mean, we're going to get to the point where anyone can build
a hydrogen bomb, like, you know, it's like, you just, like, the, or engineer, like, the,
you know, something that's a million times worse than COVID and then just spread it.
It's like, we're getting to this period of, and then not, you know, not to mention climate
change, you know, it's like, although I think that's not, there's probably going to be surviving
humans with that regard, you know, but it could be really bad.
But these existential threats, I think the only real guarantee that we're going to get
another, you name it, 1,000 million, whatever years is, like, diversity, diversify our portfolio,
get off the planet, you know, don't leave this one, hopefully we keep, you know, but,
and I, you know, it's like, either we're going to get snuffed out, like, really quickly,
or we're going to, like, if we, if we reach that point, and it's going to be over the
next, like, 100, 200 years, like, like, we're probably going to survive, like, like until
like, I mean, you know, like our sun, like, and even beyond that, like, like, we're probably
going to be talking about millions and millions of years, it's like, and we're, we're, I don't
know, in terms of the planet, 4 billion years into this.
And depending on how you count our species, you know, we're, you know, we're millions
of years into this.
And it's like, it's just like the point of the relay race where we can really screw
up.
So that would make you feel pretty good when you're on your death bed, 120 years old,
and there's something hopeful about, there's a colony starting up on Mars, and it's like,
yeah, Titan, like, whatever, you know, like, yeah, like that we have these colonies out
there that would tell me, like, yeah, then at least we'd be good until like the, you
know, hopefully, probably until the sun goes red giant, you know what I mean?
Rather than, oh, like 20 years from now, when there's someone with their finger on the nuclear
button that just, you know, misperceives, you know, the radar, you know, like the signal
they think Russia's attacking or really not, or China, and like, that's probably how a nuclear
accident war is going to start rather than, you know, or the, like I said, these other
horrible things.
Does it not make you sad that you won't be there if we are successful at proliferating
throughout the observable universe that you won't be there to experience any of it?
Yeah.
It's ego death, right?
It's the death because you're still going to die and it's still going to be over.
Right.
And, you know, Ernest Becker and those folks really emphasize the terror of death that
if we're honest, we'll discover if we search within ourselves, which is like, this thing
is going to be over.
Most of our existence is based on the illusion that it's going to go forever.
And when you sort of realize it's actually going to be over, like today, like, I might
murder you at the end of this conversation, it might be over today, or like you go on
going home.
This might be your last day on this earth and it's, I mean, like pondering that, I suppose,
I suppose one thing to be mean, I, if I were to push back, it's interesting is you actually,
I think you see comfort in the sadness of how unfortunate it would be for your family
to not have you because the really even, even the deeper, yes, but that's the simple fear.
Even the deeper terror is like, like this, this thing doesn't last forever.
Like, I think, I don't know, they're like, if it's hard to put the right words to it,
but it feels like that's not truly acknowledged by us, by each of us.
Yeah.
I think this is the, I mean, getting back to the psychedelics in terms of the people
in our work with cancer patients who we had psilocybin sessions to help them and it did
substantially help them, the vast majority, in terms of dealing with these existential
issues.
And I think, you know, it's something we, I could say that I really feel that I've come
along in that both like being with folks who have died that are close to me and then also
that work, I think are the two biggies and sort of like, you know, I think I've come
along in that sort of acceptance of this, like, like it's not going to last.
Um, any, whether at the personal level or even at the species level, like at some point,
all the stars are going to fade out and it's going to be the realm of, which is going to
be the vast majority if it can, unless there's a big crunch, which does apparently doesn't
seem likely, like most of the universe, there's this blink of an eye that's happening right
now that life is even possible, like the era of stars.
So it's like, we're going to fade out at some point, like, you know, and, you know, then
we get at this level of consciousness and like, okay, maybe there is life after death,
maybe there's maybe times in illusion, maybe we're going to, like that part I'm ready for,
like I'm, I'm like, you know, like stra, that, that would be really great.
And I'm looking, I'm not afraid of that at all.
It's like, even if it's just strange, like if I could push a button to enter that door,
I mean, I'm not going to, you know, die, you know, I can kill myself, but it's like, if
I could take a peek at what that reality is or choose at the end of my life, if I could
choose of entering into a universe where there is an afterlife of something completely unknown
versus one where there's none, I think I'd say, well, let's see what's behind that.
That's a true scientist way of thinking.
If there's a door, you're excited about opening it and going in.
Right.
But I am attracted to this idea, like, you know, it's, and I recognize it's easier said
than done to say, I'm okay with not existing.
Yeah.
It's like the real test is like, okay, check me on my deathbed, you know, it's like, it's
like, oh, I'll be all right to this beautiful thing and the humility of surrendering.
And I really hope, and I think I'd probably be more likely to be in that realm right now
than I would like, or check me when I get a terminal cancer diagnosis.
And I really hope I'm more in that realm, but I know enough about human nature to know
that like, I don't want to, I can't really speak to that because I haven't been in that
situation.
And I think there can be a beauty to that and the transcendence of like, yeah, and you
know, it was, it was beautiful, not just despite all that, but because of that, because ultimately
there's going to be nothing and because we came from nothing and we dealt with all this
shit, the fact that there was still beauty and truth and connection, like that, you know,
like it just, it's a beautiful thing.
But I hope I'm in that, it's easy to say that now, like, yeah.
Do you think there's a meaning to this thing we got going on life, existence on earth to
us individuals from a psychedelics researcher perspective or from just a human perspective?
Those merged together for me, because it's, it's just hard, I've been doing this research
for almost 17 years and like, not just the cancer study, but so many times people, like,
I remember a session in this, in one of our studies, someone who wasn't getting any treatment
for anything, but one of our healthy normal studies where he was contemplating the suicide
of his son and just these, I mean, just like the most intense human experiences that you
can have in the most vulnerable situations, sometimes like people, like, you know, and
it's just like, you have to have a, and you just feel lucky to be part of that process
that people trust you to let their guards down like that, like, I don't know, the meaning,
I think the meaning of life is defined meaning.
And I think, actually, I think I just described it a minute ago, it's like that transcendence
of everything, like the, it's the beauty despite the absolute ugliness, it's the, and
as a species, and I think more about this, like, I think about this a lot, it's the fact
that we are, I mean, we're, we come from filth, I mean, we're, we're, you know, we're animals,
we come from, like, we're all descendant from murderers and rapists, like, we, despite that
background, we are capable of this, the self-sacrifice and the connection and, and, and figuring
things out, you know, true science and other forms of truth, you know, seeking, and, and
an artwork, just the beauty of, of, of music and, and other forms of art, it's like, the
fact that that's possible is the meaning of, of life, I mean.
And ultimately that feels to be creating more and richer experiences, the, from a Russian
perspective, both the dark, the, you mentioned the cancer diagnosis or losing a, a child
to suicide or all those dark things is, is still rich experiences.
And also the, the beautiful creations, the art, the music, the science, that's also
rich experience.
So somehow we're figuring out from just like psychedelics expand our mind to the possibility
of experiences, somehow we're able to figure out different ways of society to expand the
realm of experiences.
And from that we gain meaning somehow.
Right.
And that's part of like this, we're going across different levels here, but like the idea
that so-called bad trips or challenging experiences are so common in psychedelic experiences.
It's like, that's a part of that.
Like, yeah, it's tough.
And most of the important things in life are really, really tough and scary.
And most of the things like, like the death of a loved one, like it told, like the greatest
learning experiences and things that make you who you are are the horrors.
And you know, it's like, yeah, we try to minimize and we try to avoid them.
But and I don't know, I think we all need to get into the mode of like giving ourselves
a break both personally and society, societally, I mean, I went through like the, the, I think
a lot of people do these days in my twenties, like all the humans are just kind of a disease
on the planet.
And then in terms of our country, in terms of the United States, it's like, oh, we have
all these horrible, you know, sins in our past.
And it's like, I think about that like the, I think about it like my three year olds.
Like, yeah, you can construct a story where this is all just hard.
You can look at that stuff and say, this is all just horror.
You know, where you are, does it like, there's no logical answer to our, you know, rational
answer to say, we're not a disease on the planet.
From one lens, we are, you know, you know, and like there's, you could just look at
humanity as that, like nothing but this horrible thing.
You can look at any, and you name the system, you know, oh, you know, modern medicine, Western
medicine, you know, the university system.
And it's like, you can dismiss everything as a, you know, big farm, like hopefully these
vaccines work.
And then like, yeah, I'd like to, you know, like, I'm kind of glad the big farmer was
a part of that.
You know, and it's like the United States, you can like point to the horrors, like any
other country that's been around a long time and has these legitimate horrors and kind
of dismiss like these beautiful things like, yeah, we have this like modifiable constitutional
republic that just like, I still think is the best thing going, you know, that, that
as a model system of like how humans have to figure out how to work together, it's like
it's how there's no better system that I've come across.
Yeah, there's a, if we're willing to look for it, there's a, there's a beautiful court
to a lot of things we've created.
Yeah, this country is a great example of that, but most of the human experience has a, has
a beauty to it, even the suffering.
Right.
So the meaning is fine is, is choosing to focus on that positivity and not forget it.
Beautifully put.
Speaking of experiences, this was one of my favorite experience on this podcast talking
to you today, Matthew, I hope we get a chance to talk again.
I hope to see you on Joe Rogan.
The huge honor to talk to you.
Can't wait to read your papers.
Thanks for talking today.
Likewise.
I very much enjoyed it.
Thank you.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Terence McKenna.
Nature loves courage.
You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible
obstacles.
Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under.
It will lift you up.
This is the trick.
This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the
alchemical gold, this is what they understood.
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
This is how magic is done.
By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a featherbed.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.