Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #145
the following is a conversation with matthew johnson a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at john hopkins and is one of the top scientists in the world conducting seminal research on psychedelics this was one of the most eye-opening and fascinating conversations i've ever had on this podcast i'm sure i'll talk with matt many more times quick mention of his sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode thank you to a new sponsor brave a fast browser that feels like chrome but has more privacy preserving features neuro the maker of functional sugar free gum and mints that i use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost for sigmatic the maker of delicious mushroom coffee i'm just not realizing how ironic the set of sponsors are and cash app the app i use to send money to friends please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and support this podcast as a side note let me say that psychedelics is an area of study that is fascinating to me in that it gives hints that much of the magic of our experience arises from just a few chemical interactions in the brain and that the nature of that experience can be expanded through the tools of biology chemistry physics neuroscience and artificial intelligence the fact that a world-class scientist and researcher like matt can apply a rigor to our study of this mysterious and fascinating topic is exciting to me beyond words as is the case with any of my colleagues who dare to venture out into the darkness of all that is unknown about the human mind with both an openness of first principle thinking and the rigor of the scientific method if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter lex friedman and now here's my conversation with matthew johnson can you give an introduction to psychedelics like a whirlwind overview maybe what are psychedelics and what are the kinds of psychedelics out there and in whatever way you find meaningful to categorize yeah you can categorize them by their chemical structure so phenethylamines tryptamines ergolines um that is is less of a meaningful way to classify them i think that they're pharmacological activity their receptor activity is the best way well let me let me start even broader than that because there i'm talking about the classic psychedelics so broadly speaking when we say psychedelic that refers to for most people a broad number of compounds that work in different pharmacological ways so it includes the so-called classic psychedelics that includes psilocybin and salosine which are in mushrooms lsd dimethyltryptamine or dmt it's in ayahuasca people can smoke it too mescaline which is in peyote and san pedro cactus um and those all work by hitting a certain uh subtype of serotonin receptor the serotonin 2a receptor it's they act as agonists at that receptor other compounds like pcp ketamine mdma ibogaine they all are more broadly speaking called psychedelics but they work by very different ways pharmacologically and they have some different effects including some subjective effects even though there's enough of an overlap in the subjective effects that you know people informally refer to them as psychedelic and i think what that overlap is you know compared to say you know caffeine and cocaine and you know ambien etc um other psychoactive drugs is that they have strong effects in altering one's sense of reality and including the sense of self and i should throw in there that that cannabis more historically like in the 70s has been called a minor psychedelic and i think with that latter definition it it does fit that definition particularly if one doesn't have a tolerance so you mentioned serotonin so most of the effect comes from something around like the the chemistry around neurotransmitters and so on so it's uh chemical interactions in in the brain or is there other kinds of interactions that have this kind of perception and self-awareness altering effects well as far as we know all of the the psychedelics of all the different classes we've we've talked about their major activity is caused by receptor level events so either acting at the post receptor side of the synapse in other words neurotransmission operates by you know one neuron releasing neurotransmitter into a synapse a gap between the two neurons and then the other neuron receives they have it has receptors that receives and then there can be an act activation um you know caused by that so it's like a pitcher and a catcher so all of the major psychedelics work by either acting as a pitcher mimicking a a a a a pitcher or a catcher so for example the classic psychedelics they fit into the same catcher's mitt on the post receptor uh post-synaptic receptor side as serotonin itself but they do a slightly different thing to the to the cell to the neuron than serotonin does um there's a different signaling pathway after that initial activation something like mdma works at the presynaptic side the pitcher side and basically it floods the synapse or the gap between the cells with a bunch of serotonin the natural um neurotransmitter so it's like the the pitcher in a baseball game all of a sudden just starts throwing balls like every every second everything we're talking about is it uh often more natural meaning found in the natural world you mentioned cacti cactus or is it uh chemically manufactured like artificially in the lab so the classic psychedelics there's um what are the classics so yeah using terminology that's not chemical terminology not like the terminology you've seen titles of papers academic papers but more sort of common parlance right it would be good to kind of define their you know their effects like how they're different and so it includes lsd psilocybin which is in mushrooms masculine dmt which one is masculine mescaline is in the different cacti so the one most people will know is is peyote but it also shows up in san pedro or peruvian torch and all of these classic psychedelics they have at the right dose you know and typically they have ex very strong effects on one sense of reality and one sense of self what some of the things that makes them different than other more broadly speaking psychedelics like mdma and and others is that they're um at least the the major examples there are some exotic ones that differ but the ones i've talked about are extremely safe at the physiological level like there's like lsd and psilocybin there's no known lethal overdose unless you have like really severe you know um heart disease you know because it modestly raises your blood pressure so right same person might be hurt shoveling snow or going up the stairs you know that could have a car they could have have a cardiac event because they've taken a um one of these drugs but for most people you know someone could take a thousand times what the effective dose is and it's not gonna cause any organ damage affect the brain stem make them stop breathing so in that sense you know it's they're freakishly safe at the physiology i would never call any compound safe because there's always a risk they're freakishly safe at the physiological level i mean you can hardly find anything over the counter like that i mean aspirin's not like that caffeine is not like that most drugs you take five ten twenty maybe takes a hundred but you get to some times the affected dose and it's gonna kill you yeah or cause some serious damage and so that's that's something that's remarkable about these most of these classic psychedelics that's incredible by the way that you can go on a hell of a journey in the mind like probably transformative potentially in a like deeply transformative way and yet there's no dose that in most people would have a lethal effect that's kind of fascinating there's this duality between the mind and the body it's like uh it's the okay sorry if i bring him up way too much but david goggins it's like uh you know the kind of things you go on on the long run like the hell you might go through in your mind your mind can take a lot and you can go through a lot with the mind and the body will just be its own thing you can go through hell but uh after a good night's sleep be back to normal and the body is always there so bringing it back to goggins it's like you can do that without even destroying your knee or whatever coming close and riding that line that's true so the unfortunate thing about the running which he uses running to test the mind so the the aspect of running that is negative in order to test the mind you really have to uh push the body like take the body through a journey i wish there was another way of uh doing that in the physical exercise space i think there are exercises that are easier on the body than others but running sure is a hell of an effective way to do it and one of the ways that where it differs is that you're unlike exercise you're essentially you know most exercise to really get to those intense levels you really need to be persistent about it right i mean it'll be intense if you're really out of shape just you know jogging for five minutes but to really get to those intense levels you need to you know have the dedication and so some of the other ways of of altering um subjective effects or states of consciousness take that type of dedication psychedelics though i mean someone takes the right dose they're strapped into the roller coaster um and some something interesting is going to happen and i really like what you said about that that that that distinction between the mind or the contrast between them the mind effects and the the bodily uh the body effects because um i think of this i i do research with all the drugs you know caffeine alcohol methamphetamine cocaine alcohol legal illegal most of these drugs um thinking about say cocaine and methamphetamine you can't give a to a regular user you can't safely give a dose where the regular cocaine user is going to say oh man that's like that's the strongest coke i've ever had you know um because you know you get it past the ethics committee and you need approval and i wouldn't want to give someone something that's dangerous so to go to those levels where they would say that you would have to give something that's physiologically riskier yeah you know psilocybin or lsd you can give a dose at the physiological level that is like a very good chance it's going to be the most intense psychological experience of that person's life yeah and have zero chance for most people if you screen them of killing them the big the big risk is behavioral toxicity which is a fancy way of saying doing something stupid i mean you're really intoxicated like if you wander into traffic or you fall from a height just like playing people on high doses of alcohol and the other kind of unique thing about about psych classic psychedelics is that they're not addictive which is pretty much unheard of when it comes to so-called drugs of abuse or drugs that people at least at some frequency choose to take you know most of what we think of as drugs um you know even caffeine alcohol cocaine cannabis most of these you can get into alcohol you can get into a daily use pattern and that's just extreme so unheard of with psychedelics most people have taken these things on a daily basis it's more like they're building up the courage to do it and then they build up a tolerance or yeah they're in college and they do it on a dare can you take take acid seven days in a row that type of thing rather than a self-control issue yes where you have and say oh god i gotta stop taking this i gotta stop drinking every night i gotta cut down on the coke whatever so that's the classic psychedelics uh what are the uh what's a good term modern psychedelics or more maybe psychedelics that are created in the lab what else is there right so mdma is the big one and i should say that that with the classic psychedelics that lsd is sort of you can call it a semi-synthetic because there's there's there's natural you know from from both ergot and in certain seeds um uh morning glory seeds is one example there's a very close there are some very close uh chemical relatives of lsd so lsd is close to what occurs in nature but not quite it's but then when we get into the the other um non-classic psychedelics probably the most prominent one is mdma people call it ecstasy people call it molly and it is uh it differs from classic psychedelics in a number of ways it can be addictive but not so it's like you can have cocaine on this end of the continuum and classic psychedelics here continuum of addiction continuum of addiction you know so it's certainly no cocaine it's pretty rare for people to get into daily use patterns but it's possible and they can get into more like you know using once a week pattern where they can find it hard to to stop but it's it's somewhere in between mostly towards the to the classic psychedelic side in terms of like relatively little addiction potential um but it's also more physiologically dangerous i think that the certainly the therapeutic use it's showing really promising effects for treating ptsd and the models that are used i think those are extremely acceptable when it comes to the risk benefit ratio that you see all throughout medicine but nonetheless that we do know that at a certain dose and a certain frequency that mdma can cause long-term damage to the serotonin system in the brain so it doesn't have that level of kind of freakish bodily safety that that the classic psychedelics do and it has more of a heart load a cardiovascular i don't mean kind of emotion i mean in this sense although it is very emotional and that's something unique about its uh subjective effects but it's more of a oppressor and uh the terminology using sort of uh like a freakish capacities allowing you from a researcher perspective but a personal perspective too of taking a journey with uh some of these psychedelics that is um the heroic dose as they say so like these are tools that allow you to take a serious mental journey whatever that is that's what you mean and with mdma there's a little bit it starts entering this territory where you got to be careful about the risks uh to the body potentially so yes that in in the sense that you can't kind of push the dose up as high as you safely um as one can if they're in the right setting like in our research as they can with the with the classic psychedelics but probably more importantly the just the nature of the effects with mdma aren't the full on psychedelic it's not the full journey you know so it's sort of a psychedelic with rose-colored glasses on psychedelic that's more of it's been called more of a heart trip than a head trip the nature of reality doesn't unravel as frequently as it does with classic psychedelics but you're able to more directly sense your environment so your perception system still works it's not completely detached from reality with mdma that that's true relatively speaking that said at most doses and of classic psychedelics you still have a tether to reality changes a little bit when you're talking about smoking dmt or smoking 5 methoxy dmt um which are some interes interesting examples we could talk more about but with um yet with mdma it it's for example it's it's very rare to have a a what's called an ego loss experience or a sense of transcendental unity um where one really seemingly loses the psychological construct of the self you know but um mdma it's very common for people to have this you know they still are perceiving themselves as a self but uh it's common for them to have this this warmth this empathy for humanity and for their friends and loved ones so it's more it's and you see those effects under the classic psychedelics but if that's a subset of what the classic psychedelics do so i see mdma in terms of its subjective effects is if you think about um venn diagrams it's sort of mdma is all within the classic psychedelic so okay everything that you see on a particular mdma session sometimes a psilocybin session looks just like that but then sometimes it's completely different with psilocybin it's a little more narrowed in terms of the variability with mdma is there something general to say about what the psychedelics do to the human mind you mentioned kind of an ego loss experience in the space of van diagrams if we're to like draw a big circle what can we say about that big circle in terms of people's report of subjective experience probably one of the most general things we can say is that it it expands that range so many people come out of these sessions saying that they didn't know it was possible to have an experience like that so there's an emphasis on the subjective experience that um is is there words that people put it put to it that capture that experience or is it something that just has to be experienced yeah people like as a researcher that's an interesting question because you have to kind of measure the effects of this and uh how do you convert that into numbers right that that's that's the ultimate child so how is that even is that possible to one convert it into words and the second convert the words into numbers somehow so we do a lot of that with questionnaires you know some of which are very psychometrically validated so they've lots of numbers have been crunched on them and there's always a limitation with with questionnaires i mean subjective effects are subjective effects ultimately it's what the person is reporting and and that doesn't necessarily point towards a ground truth um what what they're so for example if someone says that it they felt like they touched another dimension or they felt like they they sensed the reality of god or if they um you know um i mean just you name it people's ontological views can sometimes shift i think that's more about where they're coming from and i don't think it's the quintessential way in which they work there's plenty of people that hold on to a completely naturalistic viewpoint and come and have profound and and and helpful experiences with these compounds but the subjective effects can be so broad that for some people it shifts their their philosophical viewpoint more towards idealism more towards you know thinking of let that the nature of reality might be more about consciousness than about material that's a domain i'm very interested in right now we have essentially zero to say about that in terms of validating those types of claims but it's even interesting just to see what people say along those lines so you're interested in saying like can we more rigorously study this process of expansion like what do we mean by this expansion of your sense of what is possible in the experiences in this world right as much as what we can say about that through naturalistic psychology right especially as much as we can route it to um solid psychological constructs and solid neuroscientific constructs and i wonder what the impact is of the language that you bring to the table so you mentioned about god or um speaking of god a lot of people are really into sort of theoretical physics these days at a very surface level and you can bring the language of physics right you can talk about quantum mechanics you can talk about general general relativity and curvature space-time and using just that language without a deep technical understanding of it to somehow start thinking like sort of visualizing atoms in your head and somehow through that process because you have the language using that language to kind of dissolve the ego like realize like that we're just all little bits of physical objects that behave in mysterious ways and so that that has to do with the language like if you read a sean carroll book or something recently it seems like as a huge influence on the way you might experience my perceive the world i might experience the alteration that psychedelics brings to the um to the your perception system so i wonder like the language you bring to the table how that affects the journey you go on with the psychedelics i think very much so and and i think there's i'm a little concerned some of the science is going a little too far in the direction of of around the edges you know speaking about it changing beliefs in this sense or that sense about particular in particular domains and i think what really what a lot of what's going on is what you just discussed it's it's the priors coming into into it so if you've been reading a lot of you know um physics then you might you know um bring up you know like you know space-time and interpret the experience in that sense i mean it's not uncommon for people to come out talking about visions of the it's not the most typical thing but it's come up in sessions i've guided um the big bang um and the you know this sort of nature of reality i i think probably the the best way to think about these experiences is that and the best evidence even though we're in our infancy and understanding it the they really tap into more general psychological mechanisms i think one of the best arguments is they they they they reduce the influence of the of our priors of what we bring into the all of the assumptions that we all that you know we're essentially especially as adults we're riding on top of heuristic after heuristic to get through life and you need to do that and that's a good thing and that's extremely efficient and evolution has shaped that but that comes at an expense and i it seems that these experiences will will allow someone greater mental flexibility and openness and so one can be both less influenced by their their prior assumptions but still nonetheless the nature of the experience can be influenced by what they've been exposed to in the world and sometimes they can get it at a deep in a deeper way like maybe they've read i mean i had a philosophy professor one time as a participant yeah in a high-dose psilocybin study and he's like i remember him saying my god it's like hegel's opposites defining each other like i get it i've taught this thing for years and years and years like i get it now and so like that you know and and even at the psychological emotional level like the cancer patients um we worked with you know they told themselves a million times or this people trying to quit smoking i need to quit smoking oh i'm ruining my life with this cancer i'm still healthy i should be getting out i'm letting this thing defeat me it's like yeah you told yourself that in your head but sometimes they have these experiences and they kind of feel it in their heart like they really get it so in some sense that you bring some prize to the table but psychedelics allow you to acknowledge them and then throw them away so like one popular terminology around this in the engineering space is first principles thinking that elon musk for example espouses a lot let me ask a fun question before we return to a more serious discussion with elon musk as an example but it could be just engineers in general do you think there's a use for psychedelics to uh take a a journey of rigorous first principles thinking so like throwing away we're not talking about throwing away assumptions about the nature of reality in terms of like our philosophy of the way we live day-to-day life but we're talking about like how how to build a better rocket or how to build a better car or how to build a better uh social network or all those kinds of things engineering questions i absolutely think there's huge potential there and it's there was some research in the um late 60s early 70s that were it was very early and not very rigorous in terms of um methodology but um it was consistent with the i mean there's just countless anecdotes of folks i mean people have argued that just you know silicon valley was was largely influenced by psychedelic experience i remember the i think the the person that came up with the concept of freeware or shareware it's like it kind of was generated you know out of uh or influenced by psychedelic experience you know so to this i i think there's incredible potential there and we know really next there's no rigorous research on that but is there anecdotal stuff like with steve jobs they think their stories right in your exploration of the is there something a little bit more than just stories is there like a little bit more of a solid data points even if they're just experiential like anecdotes is there something that you draw inspiration from like in your intuition because we'll talk about it you're trying to construct studies that are more rigorous around these questions but is there something you draw inspiration from from the past from the 80s and the 90s in silicon valley that kind of space or is it just like you have a sense based on everything you've learned and these kind of loose stories that there's something worth digging at i am influenced by the gosh the the the just incredible number of anecdotes surrounding these i mean um uh kerry mullis he he invented pcr i mean absolutely revolutionized biological sciences he says he wouldn't have won the nobel prize from it said he wouldn't have come up with that had he not had psychedelic experiences um you know now he's an interesting character people should read his autobiography because he could point to other things he was into but but i think that speaks to the the casting your nets wide and this mental flex more of these general the these general mechanisms where sometimes if you cast your nets really wide and it's going to depend on the person and their influences but sometimes you come up with false positives you know um you know you connect the dots where maybe you shouldn't have connected those dots but it i think that can be constrained and and so much of our not only our personal psychological suffering but our our limitations um academically and in terms of technology are because of these self-imposed limitations and and heuristics the these entrenched ways of thinking you know like those examples throughout the history of science where someone has come up with a a rat the paradigm coons paradigm shifts it's like here's something completely different you know this doesn't make sense by any of the previous models and like we need more of those we i mean you know and then you need the right balance between that because so many of the you know novel crazy ideas are just bunk and you need that's what science is about separating them from from the valid paradigm shifting ideas but we need more paradigm shifting ideas like in a big way and i think we could i think you could argue that we've because of the structure of academia and science in modern times it heavily biases against those right there's all kinds of mechanisms in our human nature that resist paradigm shift quite sort of obviously uh so and psychedelics there could be a lot of other tools but it seems like psychedelics could be one set of tools that encourage paradigm shifting thinking so like the first principle is kind of thinking so it's a kind of um you're at the forefront of research here there's just kind of anecdotal stories there's uh early studies there's a sense that we don't understand very much but there's a lot of depth here how do we get from there to where elon and i can regularly like i wake up every morning i have deep work sessions where it's well understood uh like what dose to take like if i want to explore something where it's all legal where it's all understood and safe all that kind of stuff how do we get from uh where we are today to there not speaking in terms of legality in the sense like policy making all that like laws and stuff meaning like how do we scientifically understand this stuff well enough to get to a place where i can just take it safely in order to expand my uh thinking like this kind of first principles thinking which i'm in my personal life currently doing like how do i revolutionize particular several things like it seems like the only tools i have right now is just just but my mind going doing the first principles like wait wait okay why has this been done this way can we do it completely differently it seems like i'm still tethered to the priors that i bring to the table and i keep trying to untether myself maybe there's tools that can systematically help me on tether yeah well we need experiments you know and that's that's tied to kind of the policy level stuff um and i should be clear i would i'd never encourage anyone to do anything um illicitly but yeah i you know uh in the future we could see these these you know compounds used for the for for technical and scientific innovation what we need are studies that are digging into that right now most of what the the funding which is largely fun from philanthropy um not from the government um largely what it's for is is treatment of of mental disorders like addiction and depression etc um but we need studies you know one of the early initial stabs um on this question decades ago was they took some architects and engineers and said what what problems have you been working on where you've been stuck for months like working on this damn thing and you're not getting anywhere like your head's butting up against the wall it's like come in here take and i think it was 100 micrograms of lsd so not a big session and a little bit different model where they were actually working it was a moderate enough dose where they could work on the problem during the session i think probably i'm an empiricist so i'd like to see all the studies done but the first thing i would do is like a really high dose session where you're not necessarily in front of your you know computer you know which you can't really do on a on a really high dose and then the the work has been talked about like you take a really high dose you take a journey and then the breakthroughs come from when you return from the journey and like integrate quote unquote that experience i think that's where the all the head and we're again we're we're babies at this point but my gut tells me yeah that that it's the it's the so-called integration the aftermath we know that there's some form different forms of neuroplasticity that are unfolding in the days following a psychedelic at least in animals probably going on humans we don't know if that's related to the therapeutic effects my my gut tells me it is although it's it's only part of of the story but but we need big studies where we compare people like let's get 100 people like that scientists that are working on a problem and then randomize them too and then i think you you need a uh um even more credible you know active controls or active placebo conditions to can kind of tease this out um and then also in conjunction with that and you can do this in the same study you want to combine that with more rigorous sort of um experimental models where we actually get their problem solving tasks that we know for example that you tend to do better on after you've gotten a good night's sleep versus not and my my sense is there's a relationship there you know people go back to first principles you know questioning those first principles they're operating under and um you know getting away from their priors in terms of creative problem solving and so you i think wrap those things and you could speak a little more rigorously about those because ultimately if everyone's bringing their own problem that's that's i think that's more on the face valid side but you can't dig in as much and and get as much experimental power and speak to the mechanisms as you can with having everyone do the same sort of you know canned you know problem solving task so we've been speaking about psychedelics generally is there one you find from the scientific perspective or maybe even philosophical perspective most fascinating to study therapeutically i'm most interested in psilocybin and lsd and i think we need to do a lot more with lsd because it's mainly been psilocybin in the modern era i've recently gotten a grant from the hefta research institute to do an lsd study so i haven't started it yet but i'm going through the paperwork and everything and uh therapeutic meaning there's some issue and you're trying to treat that issue right right in terms of just like what's the most fascinating you know understanding the nature of these experiences if you really want to like wrap your head around what's going on when someone has a completely altered sense of reality and sense of self there i think you're talking about the the the high-dose either smoked vaporized or intravenous injection which all kind of um they're very similar pharmacologically of dmt and 5-methoxy dmt this is like when people this is what i don't know if you're familiar with terence mckinney he would talk a lot about smoking dmt joe rogan has has talked a lot about that people will say that and there's a close relative called five meth oxy dmt most people who know the terrain will say that's that's an order of magnitude or orders of magnitude beyond i mean anything one could get from even a high dose of psilocybin or lsd um i think it's a question about whether you know how therapeutic i think there is a therapeutic potential there but it's probably not as sure of a bet because one goes so far out it's almost like they're not contemplating their relationship and their direction in life they are like reality is ripping apart at the seams and the very nature of the of the self and of the sense of reality and the amazing thing about these compounds and same to a lesser degree with the you know with oral cell cybin and lsd is that unlike some some other drugs that that really throw you far out there um you know anesthetics and even even alcohol like it as reality starts become different at higher higher doses there's there's this numbing there's this sort of um there's this ability for the sense of being the center having a conscious experience that's memorable that is maintained throughout these classic psychedelic experiences like one can go as far so far out while still being aware of the experience and remembering the experience interesting so being able to carry something back right can you uh dig in a little deeper like what is uh dmt how long is the trip usually like how much do we understand about it is there's something interesting to say about just the the nature of the experience and what we understand about it one of the common methods for people to use is to is to smoke it or vaporize it and it usually takes and this is a pretty good kind of description of what it might feel like on the ground um the caveat is it's it's it's a completely insufficient description and someone's going to be listening who has done this it's like nothing you could say is going to come close but it'll take about three big hits inhalations in order to have what people call a breakthrough dose um and there's no great definition of that but basically meaning moving away from you know not just having the typical psilocybin or lsd experience where like things are radically different but you're still basically a person in this reality to go in somewhere else and so that'll typically take like three hits and this stuff comes on like a freight train so one takes a hit and around the time of the first exhalation so we're talking about a few seconds in or maybe just you know sometime between the first and the second hit like it'll start to come on and they're already up to say um you know what they might get from a 30 milligram or or 300 microgram lsd trip a big trip they're already there when at the second hit but it's they're going their consciousness is gear this is like acceleration not speed to speak of physics okay it's like you just those receptors are getting filled like that and they're going from zero to 60 in like you know tesla time yeah and at the second hit again they're at this maybe the strongest psychedelic experience they've ever had and then if they can take that third hit even some people can't they're i mean they're they're propelled into this other reality and the nature of that other reality it will will differ depending on who you ask but you know folks will talk often talk about and and we've done some survey research on this entities of different types elves tend to pop up yeah all the caveat is i i strongly presume all of this is culturally influenced you know but thinking more about the psychology and the neuroscience there is probably something fundamental you know like for someone that might be colored as elves others it might be colored as um terence mckenna called them self dribbling basketballs for someone else it might be little animals or someone else it might be aliens um i think that probably is dependent on who they are and what they've been exposed to but just the fact that one has a sense that they're surrounded by autonomous entities right intelligent autonomous entities right and people come back with stories that are just astonishing like there's communication between these entities and often they're telling them things that that that the person says are self-validating but it seems like it's impossible like it really seems like and again this is what people say oftentimes that it's it really is like downloading some intelligence from a higher dimension or some whatever metaphor you want to use sometimes these things come up in dreams where it's like someone is exposed to something that i've had this in a dream you know where it seems like what they are being exposed to is physically impossible but yet at the same time self-validating it seems true like that they really are figuring something out of course the challenge is to say something in in concrete terms after the experience that where you could um you know verify that in any way and i i'm not familiar of any examples of that well there's a there's a sense in which i suppose the experience like um you uh you're you're a limited cognitive creature that knows very little about the world and here's a chance to communicate with much wiser entities that in a way that you can't possibly understand are trying to give you hints of deeper truths right and so there's that kind of sense that you you can take something back but you can't where uh our cognition is not capable to fully grasp the truth we'll just get get a kind of sense of it and somehow that process is mind expanding that there's a greater truth out there right that seems like what from the people i've heard talk about that's that seems to be what uh it is and that's so fascinating that there's um there's fundamentally to this whole thing is the communication between an entity that is other than yourself entities so it's not just like a visual experience like uh like you're like floating through the world is there's other beings there which is kind of i don't know i don't know what to sort of uh from a person who likes freud and carl jung i don't know what to think about that that being of course from one perspective it's just you looking in the mirror but it could also be from another perspective like actually talking to other beings yeah you mentioned young and i think that's he's particularly interesting and it kind of points to something i was you know thinking about saying is that that i think what might be going on natural from a naturalistic perspective um so regardless you know whether or not there are you know it doesn't depend on autonomous entities out there what might be happening is that just the associative net the the the level of learning the the comprehension might be so beyond what someone is is used to that the only way for the nervous system for for the for the aware sense of self to orient towards it is all by metaphor and so i do think you know when we get into these realms as as a strong empiricist i think we always got to be careful and be as grounded as possible but i'm also willing to speculate and and sort of cast the nets wide with caveat but you know i think of things like archetypes and you know you know it's plausible that there are certain stories there are certain you know we've gone through millions of years of evolution it may be that we have certain um characters and stories that are sort of that our central nervous system are sort of wired to tend to yeah those stories that we carry those stories in us right and this unlocks them in a certain kind of way and we think about stories like our sense of self is basically narrative self is a story and we think about the world of stories this is why metaphors are always more powerful than um you know sort of laying out all the details all the time you know speaking in parables it's like if you really get so you know this is why as much as i hate it you know if you're presenting to congress or something and you have all the the best data in the world it's not as powerful as that one anecdote as as as the mom dying of cancer that had the psilocybin session and it transformed her life you know that's a story that's meaningful and so when this kind of unimaginable kind of change and and and experience happens with a dmt um ingestion it these stories of entities they might they might be that you know stories that are constructed that is the the closest which is not to say the stories aren't real i mean i think we're getting to layers where what it doesn't yeah yeah but it's the closest we can come to making sense out of it because i do what we do know about these psychedelics one of the levels beyond the receptor is that the brain is communicating it with itself in a massively different way there's massive communication with areas that don't normally communicate and so it i think that comes with both it's casting the nets wide i think that comes with the insights and helpful novel ways of thinking i do think it comes with false positives you know that could be some of the delusion um and so you know when you're so far out there like with dmat experience like maybe alien is the the best way that the mind can wrap some arms around that so uh i don't know how much you're familiar with joe rogan he does bring up dmt quite a bit it's almost a meme uh it is a name have you ever uh what is it have you ever tried dmt uh i mean he i think he talks about this experience of um having met other entities um and uh they were mocking him i think if i remember the experience correctly like laughing at him and saying f-u-f-u or something like that i may be misremembering this but but there's a general mockery and uh the the what he learned from that experience is that he shouldn't take himself too seriously so it's the dissolution of the ego and so on like what do you think about uh that experience and maybe if you have more general things about the joe's infatuation with dmt and if dmt has that important role to play in um popular culture in general i'm definitely familiar with it i remember telling you all flying that when i first the first time i learned who joe rogan was probably 15 years ago and i came up on a clip and i realized there's another person in the world who's into both dmt and brazilian jiu jitsu and i think both those worlds have grown dramatically since and it's probably not such a special club these days so he definitely you know got onto my radar screen quickly you you were into both before it was cool right i mean you know this is all relative because there's people that were you know before the late 90s and early 2000s who are into it that say you know you're a johnny come lately but but yeah compared to where we're at now but yet one of the things i always found fascinating by by joe's you know um telling of his experience experiences i think is that they resemble very much terence mckenna's experiences with dmt and joe has talked very much about terence mckenna and his experiences if i had to guess i would guess that probably just having heard terence mckenna talk about his experiences that joe's that that influenced the coloring yeah it's funny it's funny how that works because i mean that's why mckenna hasn't i mean poets and uh great orders give us the words to then like start to describe our experiences because our words are limited our language is limited and it's always nice to get some kind of nice poetry into the mix to allow us to put words to it right but i also see some elements that that that seem to relate to joe's psychology get just from what i've seen in him you know from hours of watching him on his podcast is that you know he's a self critical guy yes and i think with always this positive ben i'm always struck being a behavioral pharmacologist and he no one else really says it about cannabis i'll get back to the dnt thing about he likes the kind of the paranoid side of things he's like that's you radically examining yourself yeah it's like that sounds just a bad thing that's you need to like look hard at yourself yeah and something's making you uncomfortable like dig into that and like that's his it's sort of along the lines of goggins with exercise and it's like yeah like things learning experiences aren't supposed to be easy like take advantage of these uncomfortable experiences it's why we call in our research in a safe context with psychedelics they're not bad trips they're challenging experiences yes so yeah it's fascinating just a tiny tangent it's always cool for me to hear him talk about um marijuana like weed as the paranoia the anxiety or whatever that you experience is actually the the the fuel for the experience like i think he talks about smoking weed when he's writing that's inspiring to me because then you can't possibly have a bad experience i'm a huge fan of that like every experience is good um right which is very goggins yeah it's very good is it bad okay all right great you know well see goggins is one side of that he wants it bad i like he wants the experience to be challenging always but uh i mean like both are good like the the few times of uh taking mushrooms the experience was uh like i everything was beautiful there's zero challenging uh aspect to it it was just like the world is beautiful and it gave me this deep appreciation of the world i would say so like that's amazing but also ones that challenge you are also amazing like all the times i drink vodka but uh but that's another let's not so back to dmt um yeah and joe's treating you know cannabis as a psychedelic which is something that i'd say like not a lot of a lot of people treat it more like xanax or like beer yes you know or vodka um but he's really trying to delve into those the miners it's been called a minor psychedelic so with dmt you know as you brought up it's like the the entity's mocking him and it's like you're not i mean this reminds me of him you know him describing his like you know writing his or just just his entire method of of comedy it's like watch the tape of yourself you know don't just ignore it like that's where i screwed up that's where i need to do better this like sort of radical self-examination which i think our society is kind of getting away from because like you know all the children win trophies type of thing you know it's like no no don't go overboard but like recognize when you've messed up yes and so like that's a big part of the psychedelic experience like people come out sometimes saying my god i need to say sorry to my mom yeah you know like it's so obvious like or whatever you know interpersonal issue or like my god i don't i'm not pulling enough weight around the house and helping my wife and you know you know these things that are just obvious to them the self-criticism that can be a very positive thing if you act on it you've mentioned addiction maybe we could take a little bit detour into a darker aspect of things or not even darker it's just an important aspect of things what's the nature of addiction you've mentioned some things within the big umbrella of psychedelics may be usually not addictive but maybe mdma i think you said might have some addictive properties but the the point is stuff outside of the psychedelics umbrella can often be highly addictive so you've studied addiction from several angles one of which is behavioral economics what have you understood about addiction what is addiction from the biological physiological level to the psychological to whatever is an interesting way to talk about addiction yeah and i the lenses that i view addiction through very much are behavioral economic but i also think they converge on i think it's beautiful at the other end of the spectrum sort of just a completely um humanistic psychology perspective um and i it converges on what people come out of you know 12-step meetings talking about can you uh can you say what is behavioral economics and what is humanistic psychology uh like what do you mean by that and more importantly behavioral economics lens what is that yeah so behavioral economics my definition of it is the application of economic principles mostly microeconomic principles so understanding the the behavior of of individual agents um surrounding you know commodities and in the marketplace applying microeconomic types of analyses um to non-economic behavior so basically at one point uh like psychologists figured out that there's this whole other discipline that's been studying behavior just happened to be all focused on monetary behavior spending and saving money etc but it comes with all of these like principles that can be wildly and and fruitfully applied to understanding behavior so so for example i've studied things like um demand curve analysis of drug consumption so i look at um for example the the tobacco cigarettes and nicotine products through the lens of of of demand curves and in other words at different prices if there's different work requirements for um being able to smoke cigarettes sort of modeling price within that price data there is some indication of addiction how much you the habits that you form around these particular uh yeah it's one one important dimension so i think a particularly important one there is elasticity or inelasticity you know um two ends of the spectrum so that's the the price sensitivity so so for example you could have something that's pretty price um uh inelastic like like gasoline so the price of gas at times can keep going up and americans are just going to pretty much you know buy the same amount of gas or maybe you know the price of gas doubles but their consumption only decreases by 10 percent so it's a subproportional reduction so that's an inelastic and and and that changes like you push the price up high enough i mean if it was 100 a gallon it would eventually turn the curve would turn um and and go downward more more drastically and it would be elastic but you can apply that to someone you know someone who a regular cigarette smoker who um who is working for cigarette puffs who has who's gone six hours without smoking and you're asking questions like you know how many times are they willing to pull this knob in the lab during this three-hour session i do a lot of work like this in order to earn a cigarette how does the how does the content of nicotine in that effect it has the availability of nicotine replacement products like nicotine gum or e-cigarettes affect those those decisions so you can it's a certain lens of it's sort of a way to take the kind of the classic behavioral psychology definition of reinforcement and which is just basically reward you know how much is this a good thing and it kind of breaks that apart into a multi-dimensional um space so it's not just the ideas reward or reinforcement is not unidimensional so for example you can unpack that with demand curves at a cheap price you might prefer one good to another you know so the classic example is luxury versus necessity so diamonds versus toilet paper so at those cheap prices you can look at something called intensity of demand you know if it was basically as cheap as possible or essentially zero how much would you buy of this good but then you keep jacking up the price and you'll see so diamonds will look like the better reward at that at that low price of intensity demand side of things but as you keep jacking up the price you got to have some toilet paper yes okay we can get into the whole like bidet thing but forget that you know like uh i know joe's been pushing that too but you know you're gonna you're gonna hang on and keep buying the toilet paper to a greater degree than you will the diamonds yes so you'll see a crossing of demand curves so what's the better reinforcer what's the better reward depends on your price you know and so that's one that's an example of one way to and that a of look at addiction so specifically drug consumption which is isn't all of addiction but it's like in order for something to be addictive it has to be a a reward and it has to compete with other rewards in in your life and and one of the two main aspects of addiction in my in my view and this doesn't map on to how the you know the dsm the psychiatry bible defines addiction which i think is largely bunk you know but there's some value to have some common description but it's you know how rewarding is it from this multi-dimensional lens and specifically how does it how does that rewarding value compete with other rewards other consequences in your life so it's it's not a problem if if the use of that substance is rewarding you know okay yeah you like to have a couple beers every once in a while it's like not a problem i mean um but then you have the alcoholic who is drinking so much that they they're it tanks their career it ruins their marriage it's in competition with these pro-social aspects to their life it's all about comparing to the other choices you're making the other activities in your life and if it you evaluate as a much higher reward than anything else that becomes an addiction right right and so it's not just the rewarding value but it's the relative rewarding value and in the other major asp again from behavioral economics the the the thing that makes addiction is something called delayed discounting um so in economics sometimes it's called time preference it's this is it's what compound interest rates are based upon it's the idea that delaying a good access to a good or a reward comes with a certain decrement to its value so we'd all rather have things now than later and we can study this at the individual level of you know would you rather have nine dollars today or or ten dollars tomorrow um and you get when you do that you get huge differences between addicted populations and non-addicted not just heroin and cocaine but like just cigarette smokers like normal everyday cigarette smokers and even when you look at something like monetary rewards and and so you can go into the rabbit hole with with this delay discounting model so it's not only those huge differences that seem to have a face valid aspect to it like the cigarette smoker is choosing this thing that's rewarding today but i know it comes with increased risk of having these horrible consequences down the line so it's this competition between what's good for me now and what's good for me later and the other aspect about delayed discounting is that if you quantitatively map out that that discounting curve over time so you don't just do the you know you know how much you know that ten dollars tomorrow how much is it worth to you today so you can say what about nine what about eight what about seven dollars and you can titrate it to find that indifference point and so we can say aha six dollars um you know ten dollars tomorrow is worth six dollars to you uh today so it's by the one day it's decreased by 40 percent we can do that also at one week and one month in one year and 10 years and map out that curve get a shape of that curve and one of the fascinating things about this is that whether you're talking about pigeons making these types of choices between a little bit of food now or a little bit of food a minute from now or rats or every like dozens of species of animals tested including humans the tendency is pretty consistently that we we discount hyperbolically rather than exponentially what exponentially means is that every unit of time is associated with the same proportional reduction every unit of delay is is associated with the same causes the same proportional reduction in value and that's the way the compound interest rate you know works you know you know that there's you know compound every day you know you get this sort of out of whatever values in there at the beginning of that day you get this you know um will give you this amount of extra money to compensate you for that delay but then the way that all animals tend to function is of this very different way where the reductions the initial that initial delay so like one day's worth of delay you see a much stronger um discounting rate or reduction in value than you do over those um so you see the super proportional then it changes to these lesser rates and so the implication of that i know i've gone like really into the weeds quantitatively but what that means is that there's these preference reversals when you have curves of that nature the the the decay that's hyperbolic it maps on to this phenomenon we see um both in terms of how people deal with future rewards but also how perception works um when two things are far away whether it's physical distance or whether in terms of perception or whether it's in terms of time when you're really far away the value the subjective value for that further that delayed reward is is larger so so for example like let's say we're talking about 360 um 364 days from now you can get nine dollars or 365 days a year now you get 10 and you're like dude it's like it's a year like no difference like i'll take why not get one more dollar yeah you bring that same exact set of choices closer nothing's changed other than the time to both rewards and it's like would you rather have nine dollars today or ten dollars tomorrow and plenty of people would say ah just about the sounds go ahead and take it today yeah so you see this preference reversal and so that is that's a model of of addiction in the sense that consistently with with true addiction i would argue you see this this competition between molar and molecular um utility um it's like inter intrapersonal like within the person competing agents someone sometimes has control of the bus that wants to do what's in good for you in the short term and someone's at other times that is in control of driving the bus and they're they want to do what's good for you and the long term so you tell the you know you're trying to quit and you see a doctor you see your you know 12-step therapist and say god i know this stuff is killing me like i'm really i'm on the path i'm like i'm done and that's when you're kind of in their office or wherever you're not you know it's not around you and then later on that day your buddy says that hey man i just scored i got it right here do you want it and that reward is right in front of you that's like bringing those two choices right in front of you and it's like hell yeah i want to use yes and then you can go through that cycle for like years of the person telling themselves i want to quit but then other times that same person is saying i don't want to you know functionally they're saying i don't want to because they're saying yeah yeah give me some so in the moment it's very difficult to quit and this isn't just something this is something that has has huge clinical ramifications with addiction but it's like all humans do it anyone who's had hit the snooze alarm in the morning like yeah the night before they realize oh i got to get up extra early tomorrow that's what's ultimately better for me so i'm going to set the alarm for you know 5 a.m um and they they it goes off at 5 00 a.m you know and then so now those two consequences have come sooner and it's like what the hell and they hit the snooze alarm and something's not just once but then five minutes later and then five minutes later you know and so and it's why it's easier to exercise self-control at the grocery store compared to in your fridge like if that snack is like 30 seconds away in your fridge you're gonna more likely yield to temptation than if it is further away so then just take a step back to something you brought up earlier the inelasticity of pricing is it uh from a perspective of the dealers whether we're talking about cigarettes or maybe venturing slightly into the illegal realm you know of people who sell drugs illegally they also have an economics to them that they set prices and all those kinds of things does addiction allow you to mess with the nature of pricing like so i i kind of assume that you meant that there's a correlation between things you're addicted to and the inelasticity of the price so you can jack up the price is there something interesting to be said both for legal drugs and illegal drugs about the kind of price games you can play because the consumers of the product are addicted right i mean i think you just described it yeah you can jack up the price and you know some people are going to drop off but the people you know and it's not dichotomous because you could just consume less but some people are going to consume less and the people that are most addicted are going to keep you know um i mean you see this they're going to keep you know purchasing so you see this with cigarettes and so it's interesting when you interface this with policy like in one respect heavily taxing cigarettes is a good thing we know it keeps you know um adolescents particularly price sensitive so you definitely people smoke less and especially kids smoke less when you keep cigarette prices high and you tax the hell out of them um but one of the downsides you've got to balance and keep in mind is that you disproportionately have working class poor people and then you get into a point where someone's spending you know order their paycheck on so they're gonna smoke no matter what and uh basically because they're addicted they're gonna smoke no matter what and you're just yeah you're taxing their existence right so you're making it worse for if if they don't if they are completely inelastic you're actually making that person's life worse yeah because we know that that by by interfering with the amount of money they have you're interfering with the other um pro-social the potential competitors to smoking you know um and we know that when someone's in more impoverished environments and they have less sort of non-drug alternatives you know the more likely they're gonna stay addicted so you know is there data this is interesting from a scientific perspective of those same kind of games in illegal drugs sort of uh because that's where most drug i was i mean i don't know maybe you can correct me but it seems like most drugs are currently illegal and so but they're still in economics to them obviously right that's the drug war and so on is there data on the setting of prices or like how good are the business people running the selling of drugs uh that are illegal are they all the same kind of rules apply from a behavioral economics perspective i think so i mean they're basically that whether they're crunching the numbers or not they're basically sensitive to that demand curve and they're doing the the the same thing that businesses do in in a legal market and you know you want to sell as much of a product to get as much money you're looking more at the total income so if you jack the price a little bit you're going to get some reduction in consumption but it may be that the total amount of money that you rake in is going to be more than then it's gonna overcompensate for that so you're willing to take okay i'm gonna lose 10 of my customers but i'm getting more perce you know more than enough to compensate from that from the extra money from the people who still are buying so i think they're more you know and especially when we get to the lower i wouldn't be surprised if people are crunching those numbers and looking at demand curves maybe at the you know at the really high levels of the you know up the chain where the cartels and one i don't know i that wouldn't surprise me at all but i think it's probably more implicit at the lower levels where um something he brought up drug policy i will say that i for for years now it's been this kind of unquestioned goal um by for example the the drug czar's office um in the u.s to make the price of illegal drugs as high as possible without this kind of nuanced approach that um yeah if you make you know for some people if you you know if you make the price so high you're actually making things worse i mean i'm all about reducing the problems associated with drugs and drug addictions and part of that is the are more direct consequences of those drugs themselves and but a whole lot is what you get from indirectly and and you know sort of the inc both for the individual and for society society so like making a poor person who doesn't have enough money for their kids making them even poorer so now you've made their their chil children's future worse because they're growing up in deeper poverty because you've essentially levied a tax on to this person who's heavily uh addicted um but then it's at the societal level you know so everything we know about the drug war in terms of the the heavy criminalization and filling up prisons and reducing employment and educational opportunities which in the big picture we know are the things that in a free market compete against some of the worst problems of addiction is actually having educational and employment opportunities but when you get give someone a felony for example um you're pretty much guaranteeing they're never going to go very high on the economic ladder and so you're making drugs a better reward for that person's future so this is a quick step into the policy realm and i think for both you and i i'm not sure you can correct me but i'm more comfortable into studying the effects of drugs on the um human behavior in human psychology versus like policy it seems like a whole giant mess but yeah there's some libertarian candidates for president and just libertarian thinkers that had a nice thought experiment of possibly legalizing i was spoken about possibly legalizing basically all drugs in your intuition do you think a world where all drugs are legal is a safer world or a less safe world for the users of those drugs it really depends on what we mean by legalization so this is one of my beefs with this you know how these things are talked about i mean we have very few completely laissez-faire you know legal drugs so even caffeine is one of the few examples so for example caffeine and tea and coffee is in that realm like there's no limits no one's testing there's no laws regulation at any level of how much caffeine you're allowed to buy or how much in the price but even like with this um starbucks like nitro there are rules with soda and with canned products you can only put so much in there yeah yeah so there's this is fda regulated and it's kind of weird because there's a limit to sodas that's not there for energy drinks and other things so but you know so even caffeine it depends on what product we're talking about like if you're like nodos and other caffeine products over the counter like you can't just put 800 milligrams in there the pills are like one or 200 milligrams and so it's fda regulated as an overcounter drug some of the most dangerous drugs in society i would say arguably one of the most dangerous classes of drugs is the volatile anesthetics huffing people huffing gasoline and you know airplane glue toluene whatnot severely damaging to the nervous system pretty much legal but there's some regulation in the sense that there's a warning label like it's illegal to do it for not that it neces people they're busting people for this but you know it's against federal law to use this in a way other than intended type basically saying like yeah don't huff this you know um your paint thinner whatnot at least keeps people from selling it for that like no because they're gonna they're gonna go after that person they're not gonna be able to find the 12 year old who's huffing yeah so anyway just as some extreme examples at at the end and then you know even the the so-called illegal like schedule one drug psilocybin we do plenty and in terms of schedule two which is ironically less restrictive than psilocybin but methamphetamine and cocaine i've done human research with my research has been legal so they're scheduled compounds but they're not completely illegal like you can do research with them with the appropriate licensees and um uh approval so there really is no such thing and like alcohol well it's illegal if you're 12 years old or 18 years old or 20 years old and for anyone it's illegal to to be drinking it while you're driving so there's always a nuance there's rules not dichotomy and i actually should admit it's been on my to-do list for a while to buy in massachusetts some like edible or buy weed legally i um yeah haven't done that messages let's put it this way and i i wonder what that experience is like because i get i think it's fully legal in massachusetts and so i wonder what legal drugs look like to me you know i grew up with even weed being like you know not it's like this forbidden thing you know not not forbidden but it's illegal you know most people of course i never partook but most people i knew would attain it illegally and so that big swish that's been happening across the country there's like federal stuff going on to make a marijuana legal federation i'm half paying attention there's some movement there i mean the house passed bill that's not going to be passed by the by the senate but yeah it's it's but there's clearly a change in right it's moving in a trend so that's the example of a drug that used to be illegal and now becoming more and more and more legal um so like i wonder what like uh cocaine being legal looks like right what a society with cocaine being legal looks like the rules around it the you know the processes in which you can consume it in a safer way and be more educated about its consequences be able to control dose and like purity much better be able to get help for overdose i don't know all those kinds of things i it does in a utopian sense feel like legalizing drugs at least should be talked about and considered versus uh keeping them in the dark i agree but yeah so that in your sense it's possible that in 50 years uh we legalize all drugs and uh it makes for a better world the way i like to talk about it is that i would say that we it's possible and it would probably be a good thing if we regulate all drugs how would you regulate uh like cocaine for example is there is there ideas there so yeah and you were already you know going you know where i was going with that kind of first i described how there's always new ones and even like the cannabis in massachusetts federally illegal so for example if i was like and i you know colleagues that do cannabis research where they get people high in the lab like you're a federal funded researcher with nih funds you can't get that that stuff from the dispensary because you're breaking a federal law even though the feds don't have the resources to go after they don't want the controversy at this point to go after the individual users or even the the sellers in those legal states so there's always this nuance but it's it's about right the right regulation so i think we already know enough that for example like i think safe injection sites for hard drugs um makes a lot of sense like i wouldn't want um heroin and cocaine at the convenience stores and i don't think maybe there's some extreme libertarians that want that i think even the folks that identify as libertarians probably most of them don't well i don't know like not all of them want that you know um i think you know that as a form of regulation like look if you're using these hard drugs on a on a regular basis you're putting yourself at risk for lethal overdose you're putting yourself at risk for catching um hiv and and hepatitis um if you're gonna do it if you're doing it anyway come to this place where at least you're not like you know like pulling the the water out of like you know the puddle on the side of the street yeah so it's done by professionals and those professionals are able to educate you also so like a 7-eleven clerk may not be both capable of of helping you to uh to inject the drug properly but also it won't be equipped to educate you at but the negative consequences all those kinds of things that's a huge part of it the education but then i i think with the opioids like the big part of it is just like with naloxone which is an antagonist it goes into the um the receptor it's called narcan that's the trade name but it's what they revive people on an opioid overdose that's almost completely effective like if there's a medical professional there and someone's odin on an opioid they're virtually guaranteed to live like that's remarkable that if a hundred percent at the opioid crisis you know if all of those people right now that are dying we're doing that in the presence of a medical professional like even like a nurse with narcan there'd be basic almost no deaths there's always some exceptions but you know almost no deaths like that's staggering to me so the idea that people are doing this you know that we could have that level of positive effect without encouraging the drug and this is where like you get into this like terrain of like sending the wrong message and it's like no you can do that you can say like we're not encouraging this in fact probably one of the greatest advertisements for not getting hooked on heroin is like visiting a methadone clinic visiting a safe injection site like like this is not like an advertisement for getting hooked on this drug but knowing that we can save people now you have a landscape here because a lot of times it's just like supervised injection but you bring your own stuff you know you bring your own heroin which could still be you know dirty and and filled with fentanyl and fentanyl derivatives which because of the incredible potency and the more difficulty measuring it it's and some differences at the receptor like you may be more likely you are more likely on average to lethally overdose on it you know so you you could the the level that's been more explored in switzerland is uh in some places is is you actually provide the drug itself and you supervise the injection so i don't like that idea yeah i the public health data are completely on the side of there's really no credible evidence to this if we allow that we're sending the wrong message and everyone's going to be i mean i'm not showing up like you know and it's different by drug like yeah you you legalize you set up cannabis shops and some people are going to say so you come and go there i don't think a whole lot of people are going to go to one of these places and say i'm going to shoot up heroin for the first time because and even if like you know it's a country of 300 million people like even if someone does that you have to compare this to the everyday people are dying from opioid overdoses like people's kids people's uncles peoples like these are real lives that are being shattered so you just look at that and then the other thing and i know this from having done residential even like non-treatment research where we just have a cocaine user or something stay on our inpatient word for a month and you really get to know them and sometimes you see like oftentimes that's the first time this person has had a discussion with a medical professional any type of professional in their entire life around their drug use yeah even if they're not looking to quit and it's like i i you know you could imagine that in in these safe injection settings where it's like it might be a year into treatment and they're like you know doc i know you're not the cops like you really care for me like i think i'm ready to try that methadone thing i think i'm really i think i want to be conversation about it yeah yeah they get to trust the people and and realize that they're they're there because they truly like they have a compassion a love for for this community like as human beings and they don't want people to die and you get real human connections and that and again like those are the conditions where people are going to ultimately seek treatment and not everyone always will but you're go you're going to get that and then you're you know you're going to get people like looking into treatment options sometimes you know maybe it's years into to the treatment so it's like they're just all of these indirect benefits that i think at that level i don't know if you'd call that legalizing you know i think again ra at least well regulated right whatever that word is yeah well regulated but uh out in the open right minimizing as many harms as we can um while not encouraging i mean we don't encourage people to drink all the i mean people die every year from caffeine overdose like you know there's different ways to like you know just by allowing something doesn't mean we're sending the message that you know by saying we're not going to give you a felony which is actually often the the the the the penalty for for psychedelics i just actually testified for the judiciary committee the the senate the assembly in in new jersey and um just to move psilocybin from a felony to misdemeanor they use different language in new jersey it's weird but like the equivalent of felony missed me and that was like two people didn't vote for that on the on this committee because it was might one of them said it might be sending the wrong message and it's like a felony i mean there's real harms like that's the scarlet letter the rest of your life you're stuck at the lower ends of the employment ladder you're not going to get you know loans for education all of this maybe because of a stupid mistake you made once as a 19 year old yeah doing something that like you know a presidential candidate could have done and admitted to and had no problem you know yeah what drug is the most addictive the most dangerous in your view not maybe spec like not technically like specifically which drug but more like in our society today what is a highly problematic drug we talked about psychedelics not being that addictive on the other flip side of that you mentioned cocaine is that is that the top one is there something else that's a concern to you it depends and you've already alluded to this nuance it depends on how you define it if we're talking about on the ground today yes in you know modern society i'd i'd say nicotine tobacco oh i should think um i mean in terms of mortality it kills it kills far more than any other drug known to humankind four times more than alcohol like a half million deaths in the us every year and about five to six million worldwide due to tobacco that's four times more in the us than alcohol and if you graph all of the the drugs legal and illegal like you know um put all of the illegal drugs in like one category on that figure and you put alcohol and tobacco on that figure all the illegal drugs combined barely they're a barely visible blip to this incredible like it's there's no even all of the opioid epidemic rolled up along with cocaine and everything else the meth barely shows up compared to tobacco that's one of those uncomfortable truths that's that i don't know what to do with it's like uh where everybody's freaking out about coronavirus right [Laughter] and nobody's relative it's all relative if you look at the relative thing it's like well why aren't we freaking out about now cigarettes which which we are increasingly so over the historically speaking right right it's like terrorism versus swimming pools i remember that being back in the after the war on terror started i was like yeah there's not even comparison okay so you know that's a little sobering truth there because i was thinking like cocaine i was thinking about all these hard drugs but the reality is relatively nicotine is the is the big one and you didn't ask about mortality or deaths you asked about um addiction but that's that really is hard to hard to evaluate it gets into those nuances i spoke of before about there's not a uni-dimensional way to measure reinforcement it kind of depends on the situation and and what measure we're looking at but you know more people have access to tobacco and i'm not i'm not advocating that we make it an illegal drug i think that was a heart would be a horrible mistake although there is a very credible push to to mandate the reduction of nicotine in cigarettes which i have most scientists that study it are for it i think there's some real dangers there because i see that in the broader history of drug use it's like when has drug prohibition worked broadly speaking and and it's it's uh to me that would that that path would only make sense in very good conjunction with e-cigarettes which once they're fully regulated can be a safer not safe but much safer alternative and if we don't if we tax the hell out of e-cigarettes and ban every attractive feature like like flavors and everything then that's gonna push people to a black market if they can't get the real thing from real sick like some people would just quit straight out but i think with the regulators and what a lot of scientists that study tobacco like myself it's a big part still what i study um they're not used to thinking about the like tobacco really as a drug largely speaking in terms of you know for example the history of prohibition and i think of like we already know there's an illicit market a black market for tobacco to get around um you know taxes i mean and for selling even loose cigarettes that's what initially caused in staten island the police to approach uh was it eric garland who was selling loose cigarettes and he got choked out i mean the thing that caused that police contact was he was selling well i think report it to sell individual cigarettes for like you know you can sell them for court it happens in baltimore and it's like that's technically illegal it's but you know are you not going to have massive boats of you know supplies coming over from china and elsewhere of real deal cigarettes if you ban you know the sale nicotine like it's obviously going to happen and you have to weigh that against you know you're going to create a black market one size or another and your intuition that really hasn't worked throughout the history when we've tried it right but i see a potential path forward but only if it's well if it's not in conjunction with e-cigarettes if there's a clear alternative that's a positive alternative that you it kind of stares the population that right towards an alternative yeah the difference here the the unique thing that could be taken advantage of here is nicotine is by and large not what causes the harm it's the the aromatic hydrocarbons it's the the carcinogens in in in tobacco it's burning tobacco smoke it's not the nicotine so um that it's not like alcohol prohibition where like you know you couldn't create the adults the the near beer is not going to have the alcohol and so people like like here you do have the possibility of giving an another medium the ability to deliver the drug which still aren't to a lot of people isn't preferred to the tobacco but nonetheless again if you over regulate those and make them less attractive like if you aren't thoughtful about the nicotine limits and thoughtful about whether you're allowing flavors and everything and if you over tax them you're actually decreasing the ability to compete with the more dangerous um products so i feel that like there is a potential path forward but i don't have a lot of confidence that that's going to be done in a thoughtful analytical way and i'm afraid that it could decrease the increase of black market cause all of the harms like every other drug we're moving away from the heavy from the prohibition model slowly but the big barge ship is like making a a very slow turn and like okay we really had to step back and question if we went with nicotine tobacco are we moving into that direction like yeah the picture it doesn't quite make sense you uh you've done a study on cocaine and sexual decision making uh can you explain can you explain the findings i mean in a broad sense how do you do a study that involves cocaine and the other how do you do a study involving this sexual decision making and then how do you do a study that combines both yeah sex and drugs too i'm just missing the rock and roll the two controversial rock and roll isn't very controversial anymore yeah so the cocaine you know lots of hoops to jump through you got to have a lot of medical support you got to be at a basically an institution a research unit like i'm at that has a long history and the ability to to do that and get ethics approval get fda approval but it's possible and whenever you're dealing with something like cocaine you would never want to give that to a not someone who hasn't already used cocaine and you want to make sure you're not giving it to someone who's an active user who wants to quit so the idea is like okay if you're if you're using this type of drug anyway and you're we're really sure you're not looking to quit hey use use a couple times in the lab with us so we can at least learn something and part of what we learn is maybe to help people not use and it'll reduce the harms of of cocaine so there's hoops to jump through with the sexual um decision making i looked at the main thing i looked at was this model of i applied delayed discounting to what we talked about earlier than now versus later that kind of decision-making that goes along with addiction i applied that to condom use decisions um and and i've done probably published about 20 or so papers with this and different drugs and and uh so the the primary metric is whether you do or don't use a condom that's the most right oh hypothetical so this is using hypothetical decision making but i published some studies looking at um showing a tight correspondence to self-report it um in correlational studies to self-reported behavior so this is like so like how do you did you do a questionnaire kind of thing right so it's a it's not quite a questionnaire but but it's a it's it's a it's a behavioral task requiring them to to respond to so you show pictures of a bunch of individuals and it's it's kind of like one of these fun behavioral like a lot of them you get like numbers are born but it's like okay hot or not like which of these 60 people would you have a one night stand with men women so pick whatever you like yeah a little bit of this a little bit of that whatever you're into it's all variety there out of that group you pick some subsets of people who you think is the you know the one you most want to have sex with the least he thinks most likely have an sti or at least likely a sexually transmitted disease by sti and then you could do certain decision making questions so what i've done is asked say this percy read a vignette this person wants to have sex with you now you've met them to get along um casual sex scenario like a one-night stand with a condom's available just rate your likelihood from 1-100 on this kind of scale would you use it but then you can change your your scenario to say okay now imagine you have to wait five minutes to use a condom so the the choice is now instead of using condom versus not in terms of your likelihood scale it now it ranges from um have sex now without a condom versus on the other end of the scale is wait five minutes to have sex with a condom so you rate your likelihood of where your behavior would be along that continuum and then you could say okay well what about an hour what about three hours what about you know what about 24 hours i'm misunderstanding uh now without a condom or five minutes later with a condom right isn't the so what what's supposed to be the preference for the person like is like what like there's a lot of factors coming into play right there's like uh like there's like pleasure and personal preference and then there's also the safety those are two like are those competing objectives right and so we do get at that through some individual measures and and this task is more of a face valid task where there's a lot underneath the hood so for most people sex with the condom is the better reward but underneath the hood of that is just at the purely physical level they'd rather have sex with without the condom it's going to feel bad what do you mean by reward like when they calculate their trajectory through life and try to optimize it then sex with the condom is a good idea well it's it's it's it's really based on i mean yeah yeah presumably that's the case that that that there's but it's measured by like what would really that first question where there is no delay most people say they would be at the higher net scale a lot of times 100 percent they said they would definitely use use economy a condom not everybody and that we know that's the case see it's like that that some people don't like com some people say yeah i i want to use a condom but you know a quarter of the time ended up not because i guess getting lost in the passion of the moment so for the people i mean the only reason that people so behaviorally speaking at least for a large number of people in many circumstances condom use is a reinforcer just because people do it like you know why are they doing it they're not because it makes the sex feel better but because it makes that it allows for at least the same general reward even if actually even if it feels a little bit not as good yeah you know with the condom nonetheless they get most of the benefit without the concurrent oh my gosh there's this risk of either unwanted pregnancy or getting hiv or way more likely than hiv you know herpes you know in general awards etcetera all the all the lovely ones um and we've actually done research saying like where we gauge the probability of these individual s different sdi's and it's like what's the heavy hitter in terms of what people are using to judge you know to evaluate they're going to use a condom so that's why the condom use is the delayed thing five minutes or more and then uh yeah because it would normally be the larger later reward like the ten dollars versus the nine it's like the ten dollar which is counterintuitive if you just think about the physical pleasure so that's a good that's a good thing to measure so condom use is a really good concrete quantity quantitative quantifiable thing that you can use in a study and then you can add a lot of different elements like the presence of cocaine and so on yeah you can get people loaded on like any number of drugs like cocaine alcohol and methamphetamine are the three that i've done and published on and it's interesting that these are fun studies man right i love to get people loaded in in a safe context and like but to really it started like there was some early research alcohol i mean the psychedelics are the most interesting but it's like all of these drugs are fascinating the fact that all these are keys that unlock a certain like psychological experience in in the head and so there was this work with alcohol that showed that it didn't affect those monetary delay discounting decisions you know nine dollars now versus ten dollars later and i'm like getting people drunk and i thought to myself are you telling me that that you know getting someone that people being drunk is does not cause people at least sometimes to make to choose what's good for them in the short term at the expense of what's good for them to uh yeah in the long term it's like you know bullshit you know like yeah we see it like but in what context does that happen so that's what that's something that inspired me to go in this direction of like aha risky sexual decisions is something they do when they're drunk they don't necessarily go home and and even though some people have gambling problems and alcohol interacts with that the most typical thing is not for people to go home and log on and change their their allocation in their retirement account or something like that you know like but but they're more likely risky sexual decisions they're more likely to not wait the five minutes for the condom right instead go no condom no right that's a big effect and we see that and interestingly we do not see with those different drugs we don't see an effect if we just look at that zero delay condition in other words the condoms right there waiting to be used would you how likely are to use it you don't see it i mean people people are by and large gonna use the condom yeah so and that's the way most of this research outside of behavioral economics that just looked at condom use decisions um very little of which has ever actually administered the drugs which is another unique aspect but they usually just look at like assuming the condom is there but this is more using behavioral economics to delve in and model something that and i've done survey research on this modeling what actually happens like you meet someone at a laundromat like you weren't planning on like you know one thing leads to another they live around the corner yeah these things you know and like we did one um survey with with men who have sex with men and found that uh 25 of them 24 about a quarter reported in the last six months that they had unprotected anal intercourse which is the most risky in terms of uh sexually transmitted infection um uh in the last six months in a situation where they would have used a condom but they simply didn't use one just because they didn't have one on them so this to me it's like if unless we delve into this and understand this these sub-optimal conditions we're not going to fully address the problem there's plenty of people that say yep condom use is good i use it a lot of the time you know it's like where is that failing and it's under these sub-optimal conditions which in frank if you think about it it's like most of the case action is unfolding things are getting hot and heavy someone's like you got a condom ah no it's like do they break the action and take 10 minutes to go to the convenience store or whatever maybe everything's closed maybe they got to wait till tomorrow and though there's something to be uh studied there on the that just seems like an unfortunate set of circumstances like what's the solution to that is uh i mean um what's the psychology that needs to be uh like taken apart there because it just seems like that's the way of life we don't expect the things that right to happen are we supposed to expect them better to be like be self-aware enough about our calculations or you see the 10-minute detour to a convenience store as a kind of thing that uh we need to understand um how we humans evaluate the cost of that i think in terms of like how we use this to help people yes it's mostly on the environment side rather on the on the individual side yeah although those those interact so it's like you know in one sense if you're especially if you're going to be drinking or using another substance that that is associated with you know a stimulant um alcohol and stimulants go along with risky sex you know good to be aware that you might make decisions just to tell yourself you might make a decision that that is gonna that you wouldn't have made in your sober state and so hey throwing a condom in the in the purse and in the pocket you know might be you know a good idea i think at the environmental level just more condom of it i mean it highlights what we know about just making condoms widely available something that i'd i'd like to do is like you know reinforcing condom use and you know so um you know just getting people uh used to carrying a condom everywhere they go because it's such once um it's in someone's habit if they are saying like a young single person and you know it's you know they occasionally have unprotected sex like training those people like what if you got a text message you know once every few days saying ah if you show me a send back a photo of a condom within a minute you get a reward of five dollars you could shape that up like that it's a process called contingency management it's basically just straight up operant reinforcement you could shape that up with no problem and and um i mean those procedures of contingency management giving people systematic rewards is like for example the most powerful way to to to reduce cocaine use in addicted people and um uh but but by is saying if you show me a negative urine for cocaine i'm gonna give you a monetary reward and like that has huge effects in terms of decreasing cocaine use if that can be that powerful for something like stopping cocaine use how powerful for that could that be for shaping up just carrying a condom because the primary unlike cocaine use here we're not saying you can't have the the main reward like you could still have sex and you can even have sex in the way that you tell yourself you'd rather do it you know if the condom is available you know so you know like you're not you know it's relatively speaking it's way easier than like not using cocaine if you like using cocaine it's just basically getting in the habit of carrying a condom so that's just one idea of like well there could be also the capitalistic solutions of like there could be a business opportunity for like a door dash for condoms oh yeah like delivery i thought about this within five minute delivery of a condom in any location like uber for condoms i thought about it not with condoms but a very similar line of thinking in a line that you're going into in terms of of uber and people getting drunk when they intend they into the bar playing to have one or two they end up having five or six and it's like okay yeah you can take the the cab the uber home yeah but you've left your car there it might get towed you might like there's also the hassle of just you know you want to wake up tomorrow with your hangover and forget about it and move on yeah like and i think a lot of people in their situation and they're like screw it i'm gonna take the risk just get it you know what if you had an uber service where two um you know you have uh two so some a car come out with two drivers and um one of them two sober drivers obviously and they and and the person they the one driver drops off the other that then drives you home in their car in your car yeah so that you can i mean i think a lot of people would pay 50 bucks it's gonna be more than a regular uber yeah but it's like it's gonna be done i got the money i already i already spent 60 bucks at the bar tonight like just get the damn thing done tomorrow i'm done with it my car i wake up my car's in front of my house i think that would be i think someone could i'm not going to open that business so like if anyone hears this and wants to take off with that like i think it could help a lot of people yeah definitely an uber itself i would say helped a huge amount of people just making it easy to make the decision of going home uh not driving yourself i read about in austin where they i don't know where it's at now where they outlawed uber for a while you know because of the whole taxi cab union type thing and and how just yeah there were like hordes of drunk people that were uh used to uber that now didn't have a cheap alternative uh so just uh we didn't exactly mention you've done a lot of studies in sexual decision making with different drugs is there some interesting insights or findings on the difference between the different drugs so i think you said meth as well so cocaine is there some interesting characteristics about decision making that these drugs alter versus like alcohol all those kinds of things i think and there's much more to study with this but i think the biggie there is that the stimulants they create risky sex by really increasing the rewarding value of sex like if you talk to people that are real especially that have are hooked on stimulants one of the biggies is like sex on coke or meth is like so much better than sex without and that's a big part of what why they have trouble quitting because it's so tied to their sex life so it's not that your decision making is broken it's just that you well you allocate it's a different aspect of their decision yeah on the reward side i think on the alcohol it works more through disinhibition it's like alcohol is really good at reducing the ability of a delayed punisher to have an effect on current behavior in other words there's this bad thing that's going to happen tomorrow or a week from now or 20 years from now um being drunk is a really good way and you see this in like rats making decisions you know a high dose of alcohol makes someone less sensitive to those consequences so i think that's the lever that's being hit with alcohol and it's the more the just the increasing the rewarding value of sex um by the psycho stimulants on that side we actually found that it and it was amazing because like hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by nih to study the connection between cocaine and hiv like we ran the first study on my grant that like actually just gave people cocaine under double blind conditions and showed that like yeah when people are on coke like their ratings of sexual desire even though they're not in a sexual situation yeah you show them some pictures but you're just saying they're horny like you get subjective ratings about like how sex how much sexual desire are you feeling right now people get horny when they're on stimulants and um do you have a lot of people say duh if they really know these drugs but that's a rigorous study that's in the lab just shows like there's a plot right the dose effects of that the time course of that yeah it's not just please tell me there's a paper with the plot that shows dose versus uh uh evaluation of like horniness yeah we didn't say horniness we said sexual arousal yeah basically yeah there's a plot i'm gonna find this plot right i'll send it to you there was one headline from uh some publicity on the work that said horny cocaine users don't use condoms or something like that like something like journalists i wouldn't have put it that way but like yeah that's right i guess that's what it finds so you've published a bunch of studies on uh psychedelics is there some especially favorite insightful findings from some of these they you could talk about maybe favorite studies or just something that pops to mind in terms of uh both the goals and the like the major insights gained and maybe the side little curiosities that you discovered along the way yeah i think of the work with like using psilocybin to help people quit smoking and we've talked about smoking being such a a serious addiction and so that what inspired me to get into that was just kind of having like behavioral psychology is my primary lens sort of a a this sort of like being a kind of radical empirical basis of i'm really interested in the mystical experience and the all of these reports very interested and but at the same time i'm like okay let's let's get down to some behavior change and something that we can record like quantitatively verify um biologically so to find all kinds of negative behaviors that people practice and see if we can turn those into positive right like really change it not just people saying which again is interesting i'm not dismissing it but folks say that say my life has turned around i feel this has completely changed me it's like yep that's good all right let's see if we can harness that and test that into something that it's that's real behavior change you know what i mean it's quantifiable it's like okay you've been smoking for 30 years you know like that's a real thing and you've tried a dozen times like seriously to quit and you haven't been able to long term like okay and if you quit like we'll ask you and i'll believe you but i don't trust everyone reading the paper to believe you so we're going to have you you pee in a cup and we'll test that and we'll have you blow into this little machine that measures carbon monoxide and we'll test that so multiple levels of biological verification like now we're getting like to me that's where the rubber meets the road in terms of like therapeutics it's like can we really shift behavior and since and so much as we talked about my other scientific work outside psychedelics is about understanding addiction and drug use so it's like you know looking at addiction it's a no-brainer and smoking is just a great example and so back to your question like we've had really high success rates i mean it really it rivals anything that's been published in the scientific literature um the caveat is that you know that's based on our initial trial of only 15 people but extremely high long-term success rates um 80 at six months per smoke free so can we uh discuss the details so first of all which psychedelic are we talking about and maybe can you talk about the 15 people and how the study ran and what you found yeah yeah so the the drug we're using is psilocybin and we're using um a moderately high and high doses of psilocybin and i should say this about most of our work these are not kind of museum level doses in other words nothing even big fans of psychedelics want to take and go to a go to a concert or go to the museum if someone's at burning man on this type of dose like they're probably going to want to find their way back to their tent and zip up and hunker down for you know not be around strangers yeah and by the way uh the the delivery method so psilocybin is mushrooms i guess uh what's the usual is it edible is there some other way like how people are supposed to think about uh the the correct dosing of these things because i've heard that it's hard to dose correctly uh that's right that's right so in our studies we use the the pure compound psilocybin so it's a single molecule you know a bunch of molecules and we and we give them a capsule with that in it um uh and so it's just you know a little capsule they swallow what people when psilocybin is used outside of research it's always in the context of mushrooms um because they're so easy to grow there's no market for synthetic psilocybin there's no reason for that to pop up um that the the the the high dose that we use in research is 30 milligrams body weight adjusted so if you're a heavier person it might be like 40 or even 50 milligrams um we have some data based on that data we're actually moving into like getting away from the body weight adjusting of the dose and just giving an absolute dose it seems like there's no justification for the body weight based dosing but i i digress um generally 30 40 milligrams it's a high dose and based on average even though as you alluded to there's variability which gets people into some trouble in terms of mushrooms like silas b cubensis which is the most common for species in the illicit market in the u.s this is about equivalent to five dried grams which is right at about where right where mckenna and others they call it a a heroic dose you know this is not hanging out with your friends going to the concert again so this is a real deal dose even to people that like really you know just even to psychonauts and even we've even had numbers yeah yeah people that yeah that's a great term cosmonaut you know like for psychedelics yeah going as far out as possible but even for them even for even for those who've flown to space before right right they're like holy shit i didn't know the orbit would be that yeah far out you know like or i i escaped the orbit i was in interplanetary space there so these folks in the the 15 folks in the study they're not there's not a question of uh dose being too low to truly have an impact right right very out of hundreds of volunteers over the years we've only seen a couple of people where there was a mild effect of the of the 30 milligrams and who knows that person's their serotonin they might have lesser density of serotonin 2a receptors or something we don't know but it's extremely rare for most people this is like like something interesting is going to happen put it that way you know joe rogan i think that jamie his producer is uh immune to uh uh psyched so maybe he's he's a good recruit for the study to test so that's interesting now i'm not the caveat i'm not encouraging anything illicit but just theoretically my first question as a far behavioral pharmacologist is like you know increase the dose you know like really nobody i'm not telling him jamie to do that but like okay like you know you're taking the same amount that friends might be taking but yeah but he was also referring to the psychedelic effects of edible marijuana which is is there is there uh rules on uh dosage for um uh like marijuana is there limits like what places where it's this is this all goes it probably is state by state right it is but most they've gone that direction and states that didn't initially have these rules have not now have them so it's like you'll get i think you know five ten mil i think ten five or ten milligrams of thc yeah being a common and and like and this is an important thing like where they've moved from not being allowed to say like have a whole candy bar and have each of the eight or ten squares on the counter bar being 10 milligrams but it's like no the whole thing because like you know someone gets a candy bar they they're eating the freaking candy bar yeah and it's like if you unless you're a daily cannabis user if you if you take you know 100 milligrams it's like that's what could lead to a bad trip yeah for someone and it's like you know a lot of these people it's like oh you used to smoke a little weed in college they might say they're visiting denver for a business trip and they're like why not let's give it a shot you know and they're like oh i don't want to smoke something because it's going to so i'm going to be safer with this edible consume this massive you know but there's huge tolerance so a regular like for someone who's smoking weed every day they might take five milligrams and kind of hardly feel anything and they might not make it they may really need something like 30 40 50 milligrams to have a strong effect but yeah so that's they've evolved in terms of the rules about like okay what constitutes a dose you know which is why you see less big candy bars and more or if there is you're if it is a whole candy bar you're only getting a smaller dose like 10 milligrams or yeah because that's is where people get in trouble more often with edibles yeah uh except joey diaz which i've heard this that's definitely something i want to talk to out of the crazy comedians i want to talk about anyway uh so yeah 15 the study of the 15 and uh the dose not being a question so like what was the recruitment based on what was the uh like how did the study get conducted yeah so the recruitment and i really liked this fact it wasn't people that you know largely were you know we were honest about what we were studying but for most people it was they were in the category of like you know not particularly interested in psychedelics but more of like they want to quit smoking they've tried everything but the kitchen sink yeah and this sounds like the kitchen sink you know and it's like well it's hopkins so yeah you know thinking that sounds like it's safe enough so like what the hell let's give it a shot like most of them were in that category which i really you know i appreciate because it's more of a of a test you know of of of yeah just like a better model of what if these are approved as medicines like what you're going to have the average participant you know um be like and so the the the therapy involves a good amount of non psilocybin sessions so preparatory sessions like eight hours of of getting to know the person like the two people who are going to be their guides or the person in the room with them during the experience um uh having these discussions with them where you're both kind of rapport building just kind of discussing their life getting to know them but then also telling them preparing them about the the the psilocybin experience oh it could be scary in this sense but here's how to handle it trust let go be open um and also during that preparation time preparing them to quit smoking using really standard bread and butter techniques that can all fall under the label typically of the cognitive behavioral therapy just stuff like before you quit we assign a target quit date ahead of time you're not just quitting on the fly and that happens to be the target quit date and our study was the day where they got the first psilocybin dose but doing things like keeping a smoking diary like okay during the three weeks until you quit every time you smoke a cigarette just like jot down what you're doing what you're feeling what situation that type of thing and then having some discussion around that and then going over the pluses and minuses in their life that smoking kind of comes with and being honest about the this is what it does for me this is why i like it this is why i don't like it preparing for like what if you what if you do slip how to handle it like don't dwell on guilt because that leads to more full-on relapse you know just kind of treat it as a learning experience that type of thing then you have the real the session day where they come in they they um five minutes of questionnaires but pretty much they jump into the we we touch base with them and they we we give them the capsule it's a serious setting but you know a comfortable one they're in a room that looks more like a living room than like a research lab we measure their blood pressure they experience but kind of minimal kind of medical vibe to it and um they lay down on a couch and it's a it's a purposefully an introspective experience so they're laying on a couch during most of the five to six hour experience and they're wearing eye shades which is a better connotation as a name than blindfold but like you know so they're wearing eye shades but that's a and and they're wearing headphones through which music is played um mostly classical although we've done some variation of that i have a paper that was recently accepted kind of comparing it to more like gongs and and and harmonic bowls and and that type of thing kind of like sound you know kind of um yo you've uh you've also added this to the science and have a paper on the musical accompaniment to the psychedelic experiences right and we found basically that the about the same effect even by a trend not significant but a little bit better of an effect both in terms of um subjective experience and long term whether it helped people quit smoking just a little tiny non-significant trend even favoring the the the the novel playlist with the the tibetan singing bowls and and the gongs and didgeridoo and all of that and um so anyway just saying okay we can deviate a little bit from this like what goes back to the 1950s of this method of using classical music as part of this psychedelic therapy but they're listening to the music and they're not playing dj in real time you know it's like you know they're just be the baby you're not the decision maker for today go inward trust let go be open and pretty much the only interaction like that we're there for is to deal with any anxiety that comes up so guide is kind of a misnomer in a sense it's we're more of a safety net and so like tell us if you feel some butterflies that we can provide reassurance a hold of their hand can be very powerful i've had people tell me that that was like the thing that really just grounded them can you break apart trust let go be open what uh what so in a sense how would you describe the experience the uh intellectual and the emotional approach that people are supposed to take to really let go into the experience yeah so trust is trust the context you know trust the guides trust the overall in institutional context i see it as layers of like safety even though it's everything i told you about the relative bodily safety of silicone nonetheless we're still getting blood pressure throughout the session just in case we have a physician on hand who can respond just in case we're literally across the street from the emergency department just in case you know all of that you know privacy is another thing you've talked about just trusting that you're and whatever happens is just between you and and the people in the study right and hopefully they've really gotten that by that point deep into the study that like they realize we take that seriously and everything else you know so it's really kind of like a very special role you're playing as a as a researcher or guide and and hopefully they have your your trust and so you know and trust that they could be as emotional everything from laughter to tears like that's going to be welcomed we're not judging them it's like it's a therapeutic relationship where you know this is a safe container it's a safe space there's a lot of baggage but it truly is it's a safe space for that for this type of experience and to to like go so trust let's see let go so that relates to the emotional like you feel like crying cry you feel like laughing your ass off laugh your ass ass off you know it's like all the things actually that sometimes it's more challenging with a recreation someone has a large recreational use sometimes it's harder for them because people in that context and understandably so it's more about holding your shit yeah someone's had a bunch of mushrooms at a party maybe they don't want to go into the back room and start crying about this these thoughts about the relationship with their mother and they don't want to be the drama queen or king that bring their friends down because their friends are having an experience too and so they want to like compose you know and also just the appearance in social settings versus the so like prioritizing how you appear to others versus the prioritizing the depth of the experience and here within the study you can prioritize the experience right and it's all about like you're the astronaut and we're there's only one astronaut yeah we're ground control and i use this often with um that's good i have a photo of the space shuttle on a plaque in my in my office and i kind of use often use that as example it's like we're here for you like we're a team but we have different roles it's like you don't have to like compose yourself like you don't have to like be concerned about our safety like we're playing these roles today and like yeah your job is to go as deep as possible or as far out whatever your analogy is like as possible and and we're keeping you you safe and so yeah and you really the emotional side is a hard one you know because you really want people to like if they go into realms of subjectively of despair and sorrow like yeah like cry you know like it's okay you know and especially if someone's you know more macho and you know you want this to be the place where they they can let go and and again something that they wouldn't or shouldn't do if someone were to theoretically use it in a in a social setting and like and also these other things like even that you get in those social settings of like yeah you don't have to like worry about your wallet or being for a woman sexually assaulted by some creep at a concert or something because they're you know they're laying down millions of sources of anxiety that are external uh versus internal so you just focus on your own like right the beautiful thing that's going on in your mind and even the cops at that layer even though it's extremely unlikely yeah for most people that cops would come in and bust them right when like even at that theoretical like that one in a billion chance like that might be a real thing psychologically in this context we even got that covered this is we've got dea approval yeah like you are this is okay by every level of society yeah that counts you know that has the authority so it's so go deep trust the you know trust the setting trust yourself um you know let go and be open so in the experience and this is all subjective and by analogy but like if there's a door open it go into it if there's a stair well go down it or stairway go up it if there's a monster in the mind's eye you know don't run approach it look in the eye and say you know let's talk about it yeah what's up what are you doing here let's talk turkey you know the chat okay right right it really is that it that really is a heart a heart of it is this radical courage like courage people are often struck by that coming out like this is heavy lifting this is hard work people come out of this exhausted and it's it can be extremely some people say it's the most difficult thing they've done in their life like choosing to let go on a moment a microsecond by microsecond basis everything in their inclination is to is to say stop sometimes stop this i don't like this i didn't know it was going to be like this this is too much and terence mckenna put it this way it's like comparing to meditation and other techniques it's like spending years push trying to press the accelerator to make something happen high-dose psychedelics is like you're speeding down the the mountain in a fully loaded semi truck and you're you're charged with not slamming the brake it's like you know let it happen you know so it's very difficult and to engage always you know go further into it and take that radical you know radical courage you know throughout what do they say um in self-report if you can put general words to it what is their experience like what do they say it's like because these are many people like you said that haven't probably read much about psychedelics or they don't have like with joe rogan um like language or stories to put on it so this is very raw self-report of experiences is what do they say the experience is like yeah and some more so than others because everyone has been exposed at some level or another but some of it is pretty superficial as you as you're saying um one of the hallmarks of psychedelics is just their variability so i'm more stressed it's like not the mean but the standard deviation right it's so wide that it's like it could be like hellish experiences and and you know um just absolutely beautiful and loving experiences everything in between and and both of those like those could be two minutes apart from each other yeah and sometimes kind of at the same at the same time concurrently so um let's see there's different ways to there were some jungian psychologists back in the 60s um masters in houston that wrote a really good book the varieties of psychedelic experience kind of which is a play on varieties of religious experience by william james uh that they described this a perceptual level so most people have that you know when you know whether they're looking at the room without the eye shades on or inside their their minds eye with the eye shades on colors you know um sounds like this as a much richer um censorium you know which can be very interesting and then at another level a master's in houston called the psychodynamic level and i think you could think about it more broadly than you know that's kind of jungian but um just the personal psychological levels how i think of it like this is about your life there's a whole life review oftentimes people have thoughts about their childhood about their relationships their their spouse or partner their children their parents their family of origin their current family like you know that stuff comes up a lot including every like like the love just people just like pouring with tears about like like how much like it hits them so hard how much they love people yeah like in a way that you know for people that like they love their family but like it just hits them so hard that like how important this is yeah and like the magnitude of that love and like what that means in their life so that's those are some of the most moving experiences to be present for is where people like it hits home like what really matters in their life and and then you have this sort of what masters in houston called the archetypal realm which again is sort of viewing him with the focus on archetypes which is interesting but i think of that more generally is like symbolic level so just really deep experiences where you have you do have experiences that seem symbolic of you know very much in like you know what we know about dreaming and what most people think about dreaming like there's this randomness of things but sometimes it's pretty clear in retrospect oh like this came up because this thing has been on my mind you know recently so it seems to be there there seems to be this symbolic level and then they have this the last level that they describe as the mystical integral level which and this is where there's lots of terms for it but transcendental experiences experiences of unity mystical type effects we often measure um europeans use a scale that will refer to oceanic boundlessness this is all pretty much the same thing yeah this is like at some sense the deepest level of the very sense of self seems to be dissolved minimize or expand it such that the boundaries of the self go into and here i think some of this is just semantics but whether the self is expanding such that there's no boundary between the self and the rest of the universe or whether there's no sense of self again might be just semantics but this radical shift or sense of loss of sense of self or self boundaries and that's like the most typically when people have that experience they'll often report that as being the most remarkable thing and this is what you don't typically get with mdma these deepest levels of the the nature of reality itself the subjectivity and objectivity just like the the the seer and the scene become one and and it's a process and yeah and they're able to bring that experience back uh and be able to describe it yeah but but one of the to a degree but one of the hallmarks going back to william james of describing a mystical experience as the inf ability and so even though it's ineffable you know people try as far as they can to describe it but when you get the real deal they'll say and even say that they say a lot of helpful things to help you describe the landscape they'll say no matter what i say i'm still not even coming anywhere close to what this was like the language is completely failing and i like to joke that even though it's it's ineffable and we're researchers so we try to eff it up by asking them to describe the experience i love it but to bring it back a little bit so for that particular study on tobacco what was the results what was the conclusions in terms of the uh impact of uh psilocybin on their addiction so when that pilot study was very it was very small and it wasn't a randomized study so it was limited the only question we could really answer was is this worthy enough of follow-up yes and the answer to that was absolutely freaking lutely because the success rates were so high eighty percent biologically confirmed successful at six months that held up to sixty percent biologically confirmed abstinent at two at an average of two and a half years a very long time yeah and so i mean the best that's been reported in the literature for smoking cessation is in the upper 50 and that's with not one but two medications for a couple of months followed by regular cognitive behavioral therapy where you're coming in once a week or once every few weeks for an entire year and and so but this is what very heavy this is just like a few uses of uh psilocybin so this was three doses of psilocybin over a total course including preparation everything a 15-week period where there's mainly like um for most part one one meeting a week and then the three sessions are within that and so it's and we scale that back in the more the the study we're doing right now which i can tell you about which is a randomized um controlled trial um but but it's uh the yeah the original um you know pilot study was you know these 15 people so given the like the positive signal from the first study telling us that it was a worthy pursuit we hustled up some money to actually be able to afford a larger trial so it's randomizing 80 people to to get either one psilocybin session when we've narrowed we we've scaled that down from three to one mainly because we're doing fmri neuro imaging before and after and it made it more experimentally complex to have multiple sessions um but one psilocybin session versus uh the nicotine patch using the the fda approved label like standard use of the nicotine patch so it's randomized 40 people get randomized to psilocybin one session 40 people get nicotine patch and they all get the same cognitive behavioral therapy for the standard talk therapy and we've scaled it down somewhat so there's less a weekly meetings but it's within the same ballpark and right now we're still um uh uh uh uh the study's still ongoing and in fact we just recently started recruiting again we paused for covet now we're starting back up with some protections like masks and whatnot but um uh right now for the 44 people who have gotten through the one-year follow-up and so that includes 22 from each of the two groups the success rates are extremely high for the psilocybin group it's 59 have been biologically confirmed as smoke-free at one year after their quit date and that compares to 27 percent for the nicotine patch which by the way is extremely good for the nicotine patch compared to previous research so the results could change because it's ongoing but we're mostly done and it's still looking extremely positive so if anyone's interested they have to be sort of be in commuting distance to the baltimore area but you know to participate right right to participate this is uh this is a good moment to bring up something i think a lot of what you talked about is super interesting and i think a lot of people listening to this so now it's anywhere from 300 to 600 000 people for just a regular podcast i know a lot of them will be very interested what you're saying and they're going to look you up they're going to find your email and they're going to write you a long email about some of the interesting things that found in any of your papers how should people contact you what is the best way for that would you recommend your super busy guy you have a million things going on what how should people communicate with you thanks for bringing this up this is a i'm glad to get the opportunity to address this if someone's interested in participating in a study the best thing to do is go to the website of the study or of uh uh like yeah which website so we have all of our psilocybin studies so everything we have is up in on one website and then we link to the different study websites but hopkins psychedelic.org so everything we do or if you don't remember that just you know go to your favorite search engine look up johns hopkins psychedelic and you're going to find one of the first hits is going to be our is this website and there's going to be links to the smoking study and all of our other studies if there's no link to it there we don't have a study on it now and if you're interested in psychedelic research more broadly you can look up you know like at another university that might be closer to you and there's a handful of them now across the country and there's some in europe that that um have studies going on but you can at least in the us you can look at clinicaltrials.gov and and look up the term psilocybin and in fact optionally people even in europe can register their trial on there so that's a good way to find studies but for our research rather than emailing me like a more efficient way is to go straight and you can do that first the first phase of screening there's some questions online and then someone will get back in touch with you um but i do already start you know and i i you know i expect it's like going to increase but i'm already at the level where my simple limited mind and limited capacity is already i i sometimes fail to get back to emails i mean i'm trying to respond to my colleagues my mentees all these things my responsibilities and as many of the people just inquiring about i want to go to graduate school i'm interested in this i had this i have a daughter that took a psychoduck and she's having trouble it's like so i i try to respond to those but sometimes i just simply can't get to all of it already to be honest like from my perspective uh it's been quite heartbreaking because i basically don't respond to any emails anymore and um especially as you mentioned mentees and so on like outside of that circle it's heartbreaking to me how many brilliant people there are thoughtful people like loving people and they write long emails that are really i by the way i do read them very often it's just that i don't the response is then you're starting a conversation and there's the heartbreaking aspect is you only have so many hours in the day to have deep meaningful conversations with human beings on this earth and so you have to select who they are and usually it's your family it's people like you're directly working with and even i guarantee you with this conversation people will write you long really thoughtful emails like there'll be brilliant people faculty from all over phd students from all over and it's heartbreaking because you can't really get back to them but you're saying like many of them if you do respond it's more like here go to this website if you're in for when you're interested into the study it's just it makes sense to directly go to the site if there's applications open just apply for the study right right right you know but you know as a either a volunteer or if we're looking for you know somebody um you know we're going to be you know posting um including on the hopkins university like website we're going to be posting if we're looking for a position i am right now actually looking through and it's mainly been through email and contacts but should i say it because i think i'd rather cast my network but i'm looking for a postdoc right now oh great um so i've mentored postdocs for i don't know like a dozen years or so and more and more of their time is being spent on psychedelics so someone's free to contact me that's more of a that's sort of so close to home that's a personal you know that like emailing me about that but i i come to appreciate more the advice that folks like tim ferriss have of like i think it's him like five sends emails you know like you know a a subject that gets to the point that tells you what it's about so that like you break through the signal to the noise but i really appreciate what you're saying because part of the equation for me is like i have a three-year-old and like my time on the ground on the floor playing blocks or cars with him is part of that equation and even if the day is ending and i know some of those emails are slipping by and i'll never get back to them and i have i'm struggling with it i'm already and i get what you're saying is like i haven't seen anything yet if with the type of exposure that like your podcast this will bring in exposure and then i think in terms of post docs this is a really good podcast in the sense that there's a lot of brilliant phd students out there that are looking for posts from all over from mit probably from hopkins this is just all over the place so this is and i we have different preferences but my preference would also be to have like a form that they could fill out proposed because you know it's very difficult through email to tell who's are really going to be a strong collaborator for you like a strong postdoc strong student because you want a bunch of details but at the same time you don't want a million pages worth of email so you want a little bit of an application process so usually you set up a form that helps me indicate how passionate the person is how willing they are to do hard work like i i often ask a question people of what do you think it's more important to work hard or to work smart and i use that those types of questions to indicate who i would like to work with because it's it's counter-intuitive but uh anyway i'll leave i'll leave that question unanswered for people to figure out themselves but maybe if you know my love for david goggins you will understand so anyway those are good thoughts about the forms and everything it's difficult and that's something that evolves email email is such a messy thing this uh speaking of baltimore cal newport if you know who that is um he wrote a book called deep work he's a computer science professor and he's currently working on a book about email about all the ways that email's broken so this is going to be a fascinating read this is a little bit of a general question but uh almost a bigger picture question that we touched on a little bit but let's just touch it in a full way which is uh what have all the psychedelic studies you've conducted taught you about the human mind about the human brain and the human mind is there something if you look at the human scientists you were before this work and the scientists you are now how is your understanding of the human mind changed i'm thinking of that in two categories one kind of more more scientific and they're both scientific but um one more about you know more about the the brain and behavior and the mind so to speak and and as a behaviorist always see sort of the mind as a metaphor for behavior so but anyway that gets philosophical but it's really increasing the the so the one category is increasing the appreciation for the magnitude of depth i mean so these are all metaphors of of human experience that might be a good way to because you use certain words like consciousness and what it's like we're using constructs that aren't well defined and unless we kind of dig in but in human experience like that the experiences on these compounds can be so far out there or so deep and that like and they're doing that by tinkering with the same machinery that's going on up there i mean i'm my assumption and i think it's a good assumption is that all experiences you know there's a there's a biological side to all phenomenal experience you know so there is not you know the divide between biology you know and and um and experience or psychology is is it's you know it's not one or the other these are just two you know two sides of the same coin i mean you're avoiding the the word the use of the word consciousness for example but the experience is referring to the subjective experience so it's it's the actual technical use of the word consciousness of of yeah subjective experience and even that word there are certain ways that like like sort of like we're talking about access consciousness or narrative self-awareness which is an aspect of like you can wrap a definition around that we can talk meaningfully about it but so often around psychedelics it's used in this much more in terms of ultimately explaining phenomenal consciousness itself the so-called hard problem and you know uh relating to that question and psychedelics really haven't spoken to that and that's why it's hard because like it's hard to imagine anything but i think what i was getting is that psychedelics have done this by the reason i was getting into the biology versus mind psychology divide is that that just to kind of set up the fact that i think all of our experience is related to these biological events so whether they be naturally occurring neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine etc and and a whole other sort of biological activity and kind of another layer up that we could talk about network activity communication amongst brain areas like this is always going on even if i just prompt you to think about a loved one you know like there's something happening biologically okay so that's always another side of the coin so and another way to put that is all of our subjective experience outside of drugs it's it's all a controlled hallucination in a sense it like this is completely constructed our our experience of reality is completely a simulation so i i think we're on on solid ground to say that that's our best guess and that's a pretty reasonable thing to to to say scientifically like all the rich complexity of the world emerges from just some biology and some chemicals so in that you know in that that definition implied a causation it comes from and so that's right that's we know at least there's a solid correlation there and so then we don't dig we delve deep into the philosophy of like idealism or materialism and things like this which i'm not an expert in but i know we're getting into that territory you don't even necessarily have to go there like you you at least go to the level of like okay we know there's there seems to be this one-on-one correspondence and that seems pretty silent like you can't prove a negative and you can't you know it's like in that category of like yeah me you could come up with an experience that maybe doesn't have a biological correlate but then you're talking about there's also the limits of the science so is it a false negative but i think our best guess and a very decent assumption is that every psychological event has a biological correlate so with that said you know the idea that you can throw alter that biology in a pretty trivial manner i mean you could take like a relatively small number of these molecules throw them into the nervous system and then have a a 60 year old person who has you name it i mean that has hiked to the top of everest and that speaks five languages and that has been married and has kids and grandkids and has you name you know like been at the top and say this fundamentally changed who i am as a person and and the and what i think life is about like that's that's the thing about psychedelics that just floors me and it it never fails i mean sometimes you get bogged down by the paperwork and running studies and all the i don't know all of the the bs that can come with being in academia and everything and then you and sometimes you get some dud sessions where it's not the fullness all the magic isn't happening and it's you know more or less it's or it's either a dud or somewhere in the i don't mean to dismiss them but you know it's it's not like these magnificent sort of reports but sometimes you get the full monty report from one of these people and you're like oh yeah that's why we're doing this whether it's like therapeutically or just to understand the mind and you're like you're still floored like how is that possible how did we slightly alter serotonergic neurotransmission and say and this person is now saying that they're they're they're making fundamental differences in the in the priorities of their life after 60 years it also just fills you with uh all of the possibility of experiences were yet to have uncovered if if just a few chemicals can change so much it's like man what if this could be up i mean like ha because we're just like took a little like it's like lighting a match or something in the darkness and you can see there's a lot more there but you don't know how much more and that's right and then like where's that gonna go with like i mean i'm always like aware of the fact that like we always as humans and as scientists think that we figured out 99 and we're working on that first one and we got to keep reminding ourselves it's hard to do like we figured out like not even one percent like we know nothing yeah and so like i can't i can speculate and i might sound like a fool but like what are drugs even the concept of drugs like 10 years 50 years 100 years a thousand years if we if we're surviving like you know molecules that go to a specific area of the brain in combination with technology in combination with the magnetic stimulation in combination with the you know like targeted pharmacology of like oh like this subset of serotonin 2a receptors in the colostrum you know at this time in this particular sequence in combination with this other thing like this baseball cap you wear that like has you know you know has has one of the is doing some of these things that we can only do with these like giant like pieces of equipment now like where it's going to go is going to be endless and it becomes easy to you know combined within virtual reality where the virtuality is going to move from being something out here to being more in there and then we're getting like we talked about before we're already in a virtual reality in terms of human perception and and cognition models of the of the universe being all representations and you know sort of you know color not existing and just you know our representations of em um wavelengths etc etc you know sound being vibrations and all of this and so as the the external vr and the internal vr come closer to each other like this is what i think about in terms of the future of drugs like all of this stuff sort of combines and and like where that goes is just it's it's unthinkable like we we're probably gonna you know again i might sound like a fool and this may not happen but i think it's possible you know to go completely offline like where most of people's experiences may be going into these internal worlds and i mean maybe you through through some through a combination of these techniques you create experiences where someone could live a thousand years in terms of maybe they're living a regular lifespan but in over the next two seconds you're living a thousand years worth of experience inside inside your mind through yeah through this manipulation of the like is that possible like just based on on like first principles i suppose yes i think so yeah like give us another 50 hundred 500 like who knows but like how could it not go there and a small tangent what are your thoughts in this broader definition of drugs of psychedelics of mind altering things what are your thoughts about neural link and brain computer interfaces sort of being able to electrically stimulate and read and neuronal activity in the brain and then connect that to the the computer which is another way uh from a computational perspective for me is kind of appealing but it's another way of altering subtly the behavior of the brain that's kind of if you zoom out reminiscent of the way psychedelics do as well right so what do you have like what are your thoughts about neurolink what are your hopes as a researcher of mind altering devices systems chemicals i guess broadly speaking i'm all for it i mean for the same reason i am with psycheducks but it comes with all the caveats you know you're going into a brave new world where it's like all of a sudden there's going to be a dark side there's going to be you know that serious ethical considerations but that that should not stop us from from moving there i mean particularly the stuff from an unknown expert but on the short list in the short term it's like yeah can we help these serious neurological disorders like hell yeah like and and i'm also sensitive to something being someone that has lots of you know neuroscience colleagues um you know with some of the stuff and i can't talk about particulars i'm not recalling but you know in terms of you know stuff getting out there and then kind of a mocking of of of uh you know gosh they're they're saying this is unique we we know this or sort of like this belittling of like oh you know this sounds like it's just a i don't know a commercialization or like an oversimply i forget what the example was but something like something that came off to some of my neuroscientific colleagues as an oversimplification or at least the way they said it oh from a kneeling perspective right oh we've known that for years yes and like but i'm very sympathetic to like maybe it's because of my very limited but relatively speaking the amount of exposure the psychedelic work has had so my limited experience of being out there and then you think about someone like mike musk who's like like really really out there and you just get all these arrows that like and it's hard to be like when you're plowing new ground like you're gonna get you're gonna criticize like every little word that you like this balance between speaking to like people to make it meaningful something scientists aren't very good at yes having people understand what you're saying and then being belittled by oversimplifying something in in terms of the public message so i'm extremely sympathetic and i'm a big fan of like what that you know what elon musk does like tunnels through the ground and spacex and all this is like hell yeah like this guy is has some he has some great ideas and there's something to be said it's not just the the communication to the public i i think his first principles thinking it's like because i get this in the artificial intelligence world it's probably similar to neuroscience world where elon will say something like or i worked at mit i worked on autonomous vehicles and he's sort of i could sense how much he pisses off like every roboticist at mit and everybody who works on like the human factor side of safety of autonomous vehicles and saying like we need we don't need to consider human beings in the car like the ill car will drive itself it's obvious that neural networks is all you need like it's obvious that like we should be able to uh systems that should be able to learn constantly and they don't really need lidar they just need uh cameras because we humans just use our eyes and that's the same as cameras so like it doesn't why would we need anything else you just have to make a system that learns faster and faster and faster and neural networks can do that and so that's pissing off every single community it's pissing off human factors communities saying you don't need to consider the human driver in the picture you can just focus on the robotics problem it's pissing off every robotics pers person for saying lidar can be just ignored it can be camera every robotics person knows that camera is really noisy that's really difficult to deal with but he's uh and then uh every ai person who says who hears neural networks and and says like neural networks can learn everything like almost presuming that it's kind of going to achieve general intelligence the problem with all those haters in the three communities is that they're looking one year ahead five years ahead the hilarious thing about the quote-unquote ridiculous things that elon musk is saying is they have a pretty good shot at being true in 20 years and so like when you just look at the you know uh when you look at the progression of these kinds of predictions and sometimes first principles thinking thinking can allow you to do that is you see that it's kind of obvious that things are going to progress this way and if you just remove your the prejudice you hold about the particular battles of the current academic environment and just look at the big picture of the progression of the technology you can usually you can usually see the world in the same kind of way and so in that same way looking at psychedelics you could see like there is so many exciting possibilities here if we fully engage in the research same thing with neurolink if we fully engage so we go from a thousand channels of communication to the brain to billions of channels of communication of the brain and we figure out many of the details of how to do that safely with neurosurgery and so on that the world would just change completely in the same kind of way that elon is it's so ridiculous to hear him talk about uh symbiotic relationship between ai and uh the the human brain but it's like is it though like it's is it because it's i could see in 50 years that's going to be an obvious like everyone will have like obviously you have like why are we typing stuff in the computer doesn't make any sense that's stupid people used to type on a keyboard with a mouse what is that it seems pretty clear like we're gonna be there yeah like the only question is like what's the time frame is that gonna be 20 or is it 250 or 100 like how could we not and and the thing that i guess upsets with elon and others uh is the timeline he tends to do i think a lot of people tend to do that kind of thing i'd definitely do it which is like it'll be done this year right versus like it'll be done in 10 years the timeline is a little bit too rushed but from our leadership perspective it inspires the engineers to uh to do the best work of their life to really kind of believe because to do the impossible you have to first believe it which is a really important aspect of innovation and there's the delayed discounting aspect i talked about before it's like saying oh this is going to be a thing 20 50 years from now it's like what motivates anybody if you can and even if you're fudging it or like wishful thinking a little bit or let's just say airing on one side of the probability distribution like there's value in saying like yeah like there's a chance we could get this done in a year and you know what and if you set a goal for a year and you're not successful hey you might get it done in three years whereas if you had aimed at 20 years well you either would have never done it at all or you would have aimed at 20 years and then would have taken you 10. so there the other thing i think about this like in terms of his work and and i guess we've seen with psychedelics it's like there's a lack of appreciation for like sort of the variability you need in natural selection sort of extrapolating from biological you know from evolution like hey maybe he's wrong about focusing only on the cameras and not these other things be empirically driven it's like yeah you need to like when he's you know when you need to get the regulation is it safe enough to get this thing on the road those are real questions and be empirically driven and if he can meet the whatever standard is is relevant that's the standard and be driven by that so don't let it affect your ethics but if he's on the wrong path how wonderful someone's exploring that wrong path he's going to figure out it's the wrong path and like other people he's damn it he's doing something yeah like he's you know and and so appreciating that variability yeah you know that like it's it's valuable even if he's not on i mean this is all over the place in in science it's like a good theory one standard definition is that it generates testable hypotheses and like the ultimate model is never going to be the same as reality some models are going to work better than others like you know newtonian physics got us a long ways even if there was a better model like waiting and some models weren't as good as you know were never that successful but just even like putting them out there and testing we wouldn't know something is a bad model until someone puts it out anyway so yeah uh diversity of ideas is essential for progress yeah so we brought up consciousness a few times there's several things i want to kind of disentangle there so one you've recently wrote a paper titled consciousness religion and gurus pitfalls of psychedelic medicine so that's one side of it you've kind of already mentioned that these terms can be a little bit misused or are used in a variety of ways that they can they can be confusing but in a specific way as much as we can be specific about these things about the actual heart problem of consciousness or understanding what is consciousness this weird thing that it feels like it feels like something to experience things have psychedelics giving you some kind of insight on what is consciousness you've mentioned that it feels like psychedelics allows you to kind of dismantle your sense of self like step outside of yourself so that feels like somehow playing with this mechanism of consciousness and if it is in fact playing with a mechanism of consciousness using just a few chemicals it feels like we're very much in the neighborhood of being able to maybe understand the actual biological mechanisms of how consciousness can emerge from the brain so yeah there's there's a bunch there i think my preface is that i certainly have opinions that are outside that i can say here are my best speculations as a as a as just a person and an armchair philosopher and it's that philosophy is certainly not my my training and my expertise um so i have thoughts there but that that i recognize are completely in the realm of speculation that are like things that i would love to wrap empirical science around but that are you know there's no data and getting to the hard problem like no conceivable way even though i'm i'm very open like i'm hoping that that problem can be cracked and i do i as an armchair philosopher i do think that is a problem i don't think it can be dismissed as some people argue it's not even really a problem it strikes me that explaining just the existence of phenomenal consciousness is a problem so anyway i very much keep that divide in mind when i talk about these things what we can really say about what we've learned through science including by psychedelics versus like what i can speculate on in in terms of you know the nature of reality and consciousness but in terms of by and large skeptically i have to say psychedelics have not really taught us anything about the nature of consciousness i'm hopeful that they will they they have been used around certain i don't even know if features is the right term but things that are called consciousness so consciousness can refer to not only just phenomenal consciousness which is like you know the the source of the hard problem and what it is to be like nagel's um description but um the sense of self or so which can be a sort of like the the experiential self momentum or it can be like the narrative self the stringing together of story so those are things that i think can be and a little bit's been done with with psychedelics regarding that but i i think there's far more potential like but so like one story that unfolded is that psychedelics acutely having effects on the default mode network a certain a pattern of activation amongst a subset of brain areas that is associated with self-referential processing seems to be more active more communication between these um uh areas like uh the posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex for example being parts of this that are and and others that are um tied with sort of thinking about yourself remembering yourself in the past projecting yourself into the future and so that it's an interesting story emerged when it was found that when psilocybin is on board you know in the person system that there's a d there's less communication amongst these these areas so with resting state fmri imaging that there's there's less synchronization or presumably communication between these areas and so i think it was it has been overstated into ah we see this is like this is the dissolving of the ego this is it the story made a whole lot of sense but there's several i think that story is really being challenged like one we see increasing number of drugs that are that that decouple that network including ones like that aren't psychedelic so this may just be a property frankly of being like you know screwed up you know like you know being out of your head being like like you know anytime you mess with the perception system maybe it screws up some some uh just our ability to just function in the holistically like we do in order yeah for the brain to perceive stuff to be able to map it to memory to connect things together to their their whole recur mechanism that that could just be messed with right and it couldn't i'm speculating it could be tied to more if you had to download a language everyday language like not feeling like yourself like so whether that be like really drunk or really hopped up on amphetamine or you know on like we found it like decoupling of the default mode network on salvan ornay which is a smokeable psychedelic which is a non-classic psychedelic but another one where like dmt where people are often talking to entities and that type of thing that was a really fun study to run but nonetheless most people say it's not a classic psychedelic and doesn't have some some of those phenomenal features that people report from classic psychedelics and not sort of the clear sort of ego loss type not at least not in the way that people report it with classic psychedelics so you get it with all these different drugs and so and then you also see just broad broad changes in network activity with other networks and so i think that story took off a little too soon although so i think in the story that the dmn the default mode network relating to the self and i know some neuroscientists it drives them crazy if you say that it's the ego and that's just like but self-referential processing if you go that far like that was already known before psychedelic psychedelics didn't really contribute to that the idea that this type of brain network activity was related to a sense of self but it is absolutely striking that psychedelics that people report with pretty high reliability these unity experiences that where people subjectively like like they report losing or again like the boundaries of the however you want to say it like like these these unity experiences i think we can do a lot with that in terms of figuring out the nature of the sense of self now i don't think that's the same as the hard problem or or the existence of phenomenal consciousness because you can build an ai system and you correct me if i'm wrong that like we'll pass a turing test in terms of demonstrating the qualities of like uh a sense of self it will talk as if there's a self and there's probably a certain like algorithm or whatever like computational like you know scaling up of computations that results and somehow and i think this is the argument with with humans but some have speculated this why do we have this illusion of the self that's that's evolved that and we might find this with a.i that like it works you know having a sense of self or and that stated wrong incorrectly like acting as if there is a an agent at play and behaviorally acting like you know there is a there is a self that might kind of work and so you can program a computer or a robot um to basically demonstrate have an algorithm like that and demonstrate that type of behavior and i think that's completely silent on whether there's an actual experience inside there i've been um struggling to find the right words and how i feel about that whole thing but because i've said it poorly before i've before said that there's no difference between the appearance and the actual existence of consciousness or intelligence or any of that what i really mean is the the more the appearance starts to be look like the thing the more there's this area where it's like i don't think i don't our whole idea of what is real and what is just an illusion is um not the right way to think about it so the whole idea is like if you create a system that looks like it's having fun the more it's realistically able to portray itself as having fun like there's a certain gray area which it's the system is having fun uh and same with intelligence same with consciousness and we humans want to simplify like it feels like the way we simplify the existence and the illusion of something uh is is uh missing the whole truth of the nature of reality which we're not yet able to understand like it's the one percent we only understand one percent currently so we don't have the right uh physics to talk about things we don't have the right science to talk about things but to me like the um uh faking it and actually it being true is um the the difference is much smaller than what humans would like to imagine that's my intuition but philosophers hate that because and uh guess what it's philosophers what have you actually built uh so like to me is that's the difference between philosophy and engineering it feels like if we push the creation the engineering like fake it until you make it all the way which is like fake consciousness until you realize holy crap this thing is conscious fake intelligence until you realize holy crap this is intelligence and from the my curiosity with psychedelics and just neurobiology neuroscience is like it feels i'm i love the armchair i love sitting in that armchair because it feels like at a certain point you're going to think about this problem and there's going to be an aha moment like that's what the armchair does sometimes science prevents you from really thinking right wait like it's really simple there's something really simple like there's some that could be some dance of chemicals that we're totally unaware of not from not from aspects of like which chemicals to combine with which biological architectures but more like we were thinking of it completely wrong that uh just just out of the blue like maybe the human mind is just like a radio that tunes into some other medium where consciousness actually exists like those uh weird sort of hypothetical like maybe we're just thinking about the human mind totally wrong maybe there's no such thing as individual intelligence maybe it is all collective intelligence between humans like maybe the intelligence is possessed in the communication of language between minds and then in fact consciousness is a property of that language uh versus a property of the individual minds and somehow the neurotransmitters will be able to connect to that so uh then ai systems can join that common collective intelligence that common language you know like just thinking completely outside of the box i just said how much a crazy thing i don't know but but thinking outside the box uh and there's something about subtle manipulation of the chemicals of the brain which feels like the best or one of the great chances of the scientific process leading us to an actual understanding of the hard problem so i am very hopeful that and so i i mean i'm a radical empiricist which i'm i'm very strong with with that like that's what you know so you know science isn't about ultimately being a materialist it's like it's about being an empiricist in my view and so for example i'm very fascinated by the so-called psi phenomenon you know like stuff that people just kind of reject out of hand um you know i kind of orient towards that stuff with with an idea of um you know hey look you know what we consider like anything exist is natural and so but the boundary of what what what we observe in nature like what we recognize as in nature moves like what we do today and what we know today would only be described as magic 500 years ago or even 100 years ago some of it so there will surely be things that like you explain these phenomena that just sound like completely they're supernatural now where there may be for some of it like some of it might turn out to be a complete bunk and some of it might turn out to be um it's just another layer of nature whether we're talking about multiple dimensions that are invoked or something we have don't even have the language towards and what you're saying about the moving together the model and the real thing of conscious like i'm very sympathetic to that so that's that part of like on the arm share side where i i want to be clear i can't say this as a scientist but just terms of speculating i i find myself attracted to these um more of the the sort of the the pan psychism ideas and that kind of makes sense to me i don't know if that's what you meant there but it seemed like related the sense that ultimately if if if you were completely modeling like it's like if you completely modeling unless you dismiss like the the idea that there is a phenomenal consciousness which i think is hard given that we all i seem like i have one that's really all i i know but if that's so compelling i can't just dismiss that like if you're if if you take that as a given then the only way for the model and the and the real thing to merge is if there is something baked into the nature of reality you know sort of like in the history of like there are certain just like fundamental forces or fundamental like and that and that's been useful for us and sometimes we find out that that's pointing towards something else or sometimes it's still seems like it's a fundamental and sometimes it's a placeholder for someone to figure out but there's something like this is just a given you know this is just you know and sometimes something like gravity seems like a very good place holder and there's something better that comes to replace it so so you know i kind of think about like consciousness and i didn't i kind of had this inclination before i knew there was a term for it um resalient monetism the idea that which is a a form of pain again i'm not i'm an armchair philosopher not a very good one broadly pansexism by the way is the idea that sort of consciousness permeates all matter in or it's a fundamental part of physics of the universe kind of thing so right and there's a lot of different flavors of it as as you're as you're alluding to and something that struck me as like consistent with some just you know inclinations of mine just total speculation is is this idea of um everything we know in science and with most of the stuff we think of physics you know really describes it's all interactions it's not the thing itself like there's a there there is something to this and this sounds very new agey which is why it's it's very difficult and i have a high bullshit like meter and everything but like in is-ness i mean i think about like huxley aldous huxley with his mescaline experience and doors of procession like there's an is-ness there in know alan watson like there is a a nature of being again very new age sounding but maybe there is something to in and when we say consciousness we think of like this human experience but maybe that's just that's so processed and so that's so far so it's so derivative of this kind of basic thing that we wouldn't even recognize the basic thing but the basic thing might just be this is not about the interaction between particles this is what it is like to exist as a particle and maybe it's not even particles maybe it's like space-time itself i mean again totally in the speculation and something out very space-time so it's funny because we don't have this neither the science nor the proper language to talk about it all we have is kind of uh little intuitions about there might be something in that direction of the darkness right to pursue and that that that in that sense i find pan psychism uh interesting in that like it does feel like there's something fundamental here that consciousness is it's not just like okay so the flip side consciousness could be just a very basic and trivial symptom like like a little hack of nature that's useful uh for like survival of an organism it's not something fundamental it's it's just very basic boring chemical thing that somehow has convinced us humans because we're very human-centric we're very self-centric that this is somehow really important but it's actually pretty obvious but or it could be something really fundamental to the nature of the universe so both of those are to me pretty compelling and i think eventually scientifically testable it is so frustrating that it's hard to design a scientific experiment currently but i think it's that's how noble prizes are won nobody did it right right until they do it and the reason i lean towards and again armchair speaking if i had to bet like a thousand dollars on which one of these ultimately be pro i would i would head i would lean towards i'd put my bets on on something like pan psychism rather than the the emergence of phenomenal con consciousness through complexity or computational complexity because although certainly what if there is some underlying fundamental consciousness it's clearly being processed and you know in this way through computation um in terms of resulting in our experience and the experience presumably of other animals but the reason i would blend on pansysm is to me occam's razor it just in terms of truly the hard problem like this at some point you have an inside looking out and even looking refers to vision and it doesn't that's just an example but just there's an inside experiencing something at some point of complexity all of a sudden you know you start from this objective universe and all we know about is interactions between things and things happen and at this certain level of complexity magically there's an inside that to me doesn't pass occam's razor as easily as maybe there is a fundamental property of the universe of you know there's both subjective and objective there's both interactions amongst things and there is the thing itself yes but but yeah so i i'm of two minds i agree with you totally on half my mind and the other half as i've seen looking at cellular automata a lot which is complete it sure does seem that we don't understand anything about complexity like the emergence the just the property in fact that could be a fundamental property of reality is something within the emergence from simple things interacting somehow miraculous things happen and like that i don't understand that that could be that could be fundamental that like something about the uh layers of abstraction uh like layers of reality like really small things interacting and then on another layer emerges actual complicated behavior even the underlying thing is super simple like that process we don't really don't understand either and that could be bigger than any of the things we're talking about that that's the the basic force behind everything that's happening in the universe is from simple things complex phenomena can happen and the thing that gives me pause is is that i'm concerned about a threshold there like how is it likely that now there may be and there may be some qualitative shift that in the realm of like we don't even we don't even understand complexity yet like you're saying like so maybe there is but i do think like if it if it is a result of the complexity well you know just having helium versus hydrogen is a form of complexity having the existence of stars versus clouds of gas is a complexity the the the entire universe has been this increasing complexity and so that kind of brings me back to then the other of like okay if there's if it's about complexity then we should then it exists at a certain level in these simple systems like a star or or uh you know they all have more complex psychism that's right but we humans uh the qualitative shift we might have evolved to appreciate certain kinds of thresholds right yeah i do think it's likely that this idea that whether or not there's an inner experience which is phenomenal it's the hard problem that acting like an agent like having an algorithm that basically like operates as if there is an agent that's clearly a thing that i think has worked and that there is a whole lot to figure out there that that um and i think psychedelics will be extremely helpful in figuring more out about that because they do seem to a lot of times eliminate that or whatever radically shift that sense of of self let me ask the craziest question indulge me for a second oh uh this is a joke look at what we've been talking about like okay no all the seatbelt on all of this is assigned all of that despite the the caveats about armchair i think is within the reach of science uh let me let me ask one that's kind of um also with the nursing science but as joe likes to say uh it's entirely possible right uh is it possible that uh with these dmt trips when you meet entities is it possible that these entities are extraterrestrial life forms like our understanding of little green men with aliens that show up is totally off i often think about this like what would actual extraterrestrial intelligence look like and my sense is it will look like very different from anything we can even begin to comprehend and how would it communicate and how would it communicate would it be necessarily spaceships right travel or could it be communicating through chemicals through if there's the pan psychism situation if there's something not if i almost for sure no we don't understand you know a lot about the function of our mind in connection to the fabric of uh the physics of the universe a lot of people seem to think we have theoretical physics pretty figured out i have my doubts because i'm pretty sure it always feels like we have everything figured out until we don't right but i mean there's no grand unifying theory yet right but even widely recognized we could be missing out like the concept of the universe just can be completely off like how many other universes are there all those all those kinds of things i mean just the the basic nature of information the uh time time all of those things yeah well yeah what yeah whether that's just like a thing we assign value to or that whether it's fundamental or not that's whole shank i could talk to chunkier forever about whether time is emergent or fundamental to the reality but is it possible that the entities we meet are actual alien life forms do you ever think about that yeah yeah yeah yeah i do and and i've to somebody relayed my cards out with by identifying as a radical empiricist you know it's like so the answer is it possible and i think you know ultimately if if you're a good scientist you got to say now that's at the extremes it's a like yes yes you know and it might get more interesting when you had to you you're asked to guess about the probability of that is that a one in a one in a million one in a trillion one in a one in uh more than the number of atoms in the universe uh probability and this one empiricist is like what what is a good testable like how would you know the answer to that question well how would you be able to validate it i mean well can you get some information that's verifiable like like um information that about some other planet that that or some aspect some and gosh it would be an interesting range but what range of discovery that we can anticipate we're gonna know within um you know whatever a few years next five ten twenty years um and seeing if you can get that predict that information now and then over time it might be verified you know the type of thing like you know part of einstein's work was ultimately verified not until decades and decades later at least certain aspects through the um through empirical observations um but but it's also possible that the the alien beings have a very different value system and perception of the world where all of this little capitalistic improvements that we're all after like predicting the concept of predicting the future too is like totally useless to to other life forms uh that have that perhaps think in a much different way maybe a more transcendent way i don't know but so they wouldn't even sign the consent form to be a participant in our and they wouldn't understand the nature of these experiments i mean that um maybe it's purely in the realm of uh the the consciousness the thing that we uh talked about so communicating in in a way that is totally different than the kinds of communication that we think of as on earth like what's the purpose of communication for us for us humans the purpose of communication is sharing ideas it feels like like converging like it's the dawkins like memes it's like we're sharing ideas in order to figure out how to uh collaborate together to get food into our systems and procreate and then like murder everybody in the neighboring tribe because they they'll steal our food like we are all about sharing ideas maybe uh it's possible to to have another alien life form that's more about sharing experiences you know like it's less about ideas i don't know and maybe that'll be us in a few years yeah how could it not like instead of explaining something laboriously to you like having people describe the ineffable psychedelic experience like if we could record that and then get the near a link of 50 years from now like oh just plug this into your just transferring these yeah it's like oh now you feel what it's what it's like and like in one sense like how could we not go there and then you get into the realm of especially when you throw time into it are the aliens us yeah in the future or even like a transcendental temporal like the us beyond time like i don't know like you get into this world there's a lot of possibilities yeah but i think you know there's one psychedelic researcher that's who did high-dose dmt um research in the 90s who speculated that um that and there was a lot of alien encounter experiences like maybe these are like entities from some other dimension or he labeled it as speculation but you know do you remember the name oh rick straussman who did yeah yeah the the dmt work he labeled it as speculation but you know i think that yeah i think we'd be wise to kind of you know find it's always that balance between being empirically grounded and skeptical but also not being and i think in science well often we are too closed yeah which relates to like you're talking about elon like in academia it's like often like i think you're punished for thinking or even talking about 20 years from now because it's just so far removed from your next grant or for your next paper that you're it's easy pickings yeah and you know that you're not allowed to speculate so i think though i'm a huge fan of i think the the best way to me at least to practice like science or to practice good engineering is to like do two things and just bounce off like spend most of the time doing the rigor of the day-to-day of what can be accomplished now in the engineering space or in the science like what can actually what can you construct an experiment around do like that the usual rigor of the scientific process but then every once in a while on a regular basis to step outside and talk about aliens and consciousness and uh we just walk along the line of things that are outside the reach of science currently uh free will the the illusion the illusion or the perception or the experience of free will of anything just just the the entirety of it being able to travel in time through warm holes it's like it's really useful to do that especially as a scientist like if that's all you do you go into a land where you're not actually able to think rigorously there's something at least to me that if you just hop back and forth you're able to i think do exactly the kind of injection of out of the box thinking to your regular day-to-day science that will ultimately lead to breakthroughs but you have to be the good scientist most of the time and that's consistent with what i think the great scientists of history like like in most of the the history you know the greats you know the newtons and uh you know einsteins i mean they were there was less of an in this change i think as time marched on but less of a separation between those realms it's like there's the inclination alpha it's like as a scientist and this is like you know this is science this is my work and then this like my inclination to say oh lex don't take me too seriously because this is my arm chair i'm not speaking as a scientist i'm bending over backwards you say you know to divide that self and maybe there's been less of there's been that evolution and and that's and like the greats like didn't see that i mean newton and you go back in time and it's like that obviously like connects to than religion especially that is the predominant world where newton like how much you know like how much time did he spend trying to like decode the bible and whatnot you know maybe that was a dead end but it's like if if you really believe in that in that particular religion and you're this mastermind and you're trying to figure things out it's not like oh this is what my job description is and this is what the grant wants it's like no i've got this limited time on the planet i'm going to figure out as much stuff as possible nothing is off the table and you're just putting it all together so this is kind of the trajectories maybe related to this the siloing in science like again related to my like oh i'm not a philosopher you know going whether you consider science or not not empirical science but like going to these different disciplines like you know the greats you know didn't yeah observe the yeah uh so speaking of uh the finiteness of our existence on on in this world uh so on the front of psychedelics and teaching you lessons as a researcher as a human being what have you learned about death about mortality about the finiteness of our existence are you yourself afraid of death and how has your view do you ponder it and has your view of your mortality changed with the research you've done yeah yeah so i do ponder it and uh are you afraid of death probably on a daily basis i ponder it i would i'd have to pick it apart more and say yeah i am afraid of dying like the the process of dying um i'm not afraid of being dead i mean i'm not afraid of i think it was penn jillet that said uh and he may have gotten it from someone else but like i'm not afraid of the year you know 1862 before i existed i'm not afraid of the year 2262 after i'm gone like it's gonna be fine but yeah you know dying like i'd i'd be lying if i said i wasn't afraid of you know dying and so there's both like the process of dying like yeah it's usually not good it'd be nice if it was after many many years and just sort of you know i'd rather not fall you know die in my sleep i'd rather kind of be conscious but sort of just die fade out with old age maybe but but like you know just being in an accident and like you know horrible diseases i've seen enough loved ones it's like yeah this is not good this is enough to be you know i'd like to say that i'm i'm peaceful and sort of balanced enough that i'm not concerned all but no like yeah i'm afraid of dying um but i'm also concerned about um i think about family like i i'm really i'm afraid or at least con you know concerned about like not being there like with a three-year-old not being there not being there for for him and my wife and my mom the rest the rest of her life i'm concerned about not i'm concerned more about like the harm that it would cause if i left prematurely and then kind of even bigger along the lines of some of the stuff that ford thinking we've been talking about i i think maybe way too much about just like and i'll never know the answer so even if i live to you know 120 like but like i want to know as much as i can but like how is this gonna work out like as humans are we and a big one i think is are we gonna and i don't think unfortunately i'm gonna learn it in my lifetime even if i lived to a ripe old age but well i don't know is this gonna work out like are we gonna escape the planet i think that's one of the biggies like are we gonna like the survival of the speed like i think the next like the time we're in now it's like with the nuclear weapons with pandemics and with um uh i mean we're gonna get to the point where anyone can can build a hydrogen bomb like you know it's like you just like the exact or engineer like the you know something that's a million times worse than covet and then you spread it it's like yeah we're getting to this period of and then not to mention climate change you know it's like although i think that's not there's probably going to be surviving humans with that regard you know but it could be really bad but these existential threats i think the only real guarantee that we're going to get another you name it thousand million whatever years is like diversity diver diversify our portfolio get get off the planet you know um don't leave this one hopefully we keep you know but like and i you know it's like either we're gonna get snuffed out like really quickly or we're gonna like if we if we reach that point and it's gonna be over the next like 100 200 years like like we're probably going to survive like like until like i mean you know like our sun like and even beyond that like like we're probably going to be talking about millions and millions of years it's like and we're we're i don't know in terms of the planet 4 billion years into this and depending on how you count our species you know we're you know we're millions of years into this and it's like it's this is like the point of the relay race where we can really screw up so that would make you feel pretty good when you're on your death bed 120 years old and there's something hopeful about there's a colony starting up on mars and it's like yeah titan like whatever you know like yeah like that we have these colonies out there that would tell me like yeah then at least we'd be good until like the you know hopefully probably until the the the sun goes red giant you know what i mean yeah rather than oh like 20 years from now when there's some someone with their finger on the nuclear button that just you know misperceives a you know the radar you know like the signal they they think russia's attacking they're really not or china and like that's probably how a nuclear accident war is going to start rather than eating or the like i said these other horrible things does it not make you sad that uh you won't be there if uh we are successful uh proliferating throughout the observable universe that you won't be there to experience any of it just yeah you go death right it's the death because you're still gonna die and it's still gonna be over right that's uh you know ernest becker and those folks really emphasize the the terror of death that if we're honest we'll discover if we search within ourselves which is like this thing is going to be over most of our existence is uh based on the illusion that is going to go forever and when you sort of realize it's actually going to be over like today like i might murder you at the end of this conversation uh it might be over today or like you go on going home this might be your last day in this earth and it's i mean uh like pondering that and i i suppose i suppose one thing to be me i i if i were to push back it's interesting is you actually i think you see comfort in the sadness of how unfortunate unfortunately would be for your family to not have you because the really even even the deepers yes but that's the simple fear even the deeper terror is like like this this thing doesn't last forever like i think uh i don't know they're like if it's hard to put the right words to it but it feels like that's not truly acknowledged by us by each of each of us yeah i think this is the i mean getting back to the psychedelics in terms of the people in our our work with cancer patients who um we had psilocybin sessions to help them and it did substantially help them um the vast majority um in terms of dealing with these existential issues and i think you know it's something we i could say that i really feel that i've come along in that both like being with folks who have died that are close to me and then also that work i think are the two biggies and sort of like you know i think i've come along and that that sort of acceptance of this like like it's not gonna last um any whether at the personal level or even at the species levels like at some point all the stars are going to fade out and it's going to be the realm of which is going to be the vast majority if it can unless there's a big crunch which apparently doesn't seem likely like most of the universe there's this blink of an eye that's happening right now that life is even possible like the era of stars so it's like we're going to fade out at some point like you know and you know then we get at this level of consciousness and like okay maybe there is life after death maybe there's maybe times an illusion maybe like that part i'm ready for like i'm i'm like you know like strap that that would be really great and i'm looking i'm not afraid of that at all it's like even if it's just strange like if i could push a button to enter that door i mean i'm not gonna you know die you're not gonna kill myself but it's like if i could take a peek at what that reality is or choose at the end of my life if i could choose of entering into a universe where there is an afterlife of something completely unknown versus one where there's none i think i'd say well let's see what's behind that that's a true scientist way of thinking if there's a door you're excited about opening and going in right but i am attracted to this idea like like you know it's and i recognize it's easier said than done to say i'm okay with not existing yeah it's like the real test is like okay check me on my deathbed you know it's like it's oh yes i'll be all right it is beautiful thing and the humility of surrendering and i really hope and i think i'd probably be more likely to be in that realm right now than i would like or check me when i get a terminal cancer diagnosis and i really hope i'm more in that realm but i i know enough about human nature to know that like i don't want to i can't really speak to that because i haven't been in that situation and i think there can be a beauty to that and the transcendence of like yeah and you know it was it was beautiful not just despite all that but because of that because ultimately there's going to be nothing and because we came from nothing and we dealt with all this shit the fact that there was still beauty and truth and connection like that you know like it just it's a beautiful thing but i i hope i'm in that it's easy to say that now like yeah do you think there's a a meaning to this thing we got going on uh life existence on earth to us individuals a psychedelic's researcher perspective or from just a human perspective those those merge together for me because it's it's just heart i've been doing this research for almost 17 years and and like not just the cancer study but so many times people like i remember a session in this in one of our studies someone who wasn't getting any treatment for anything but one of our healthy normal studies where he was contemplating the the suicide of his son um and just these i mean just like the most intense human experiences that you can have in the most vulnerable situations sometimes like people like you know and it's just like you have that have a and you just feel lucky to be part of that process that people trust you to let their guards down like that um like i don't know the meaning i think the meaning of life is is is to find meaning and i think i actually i think i just described it a minute ago it's like that transcendence of everything like the it's the beauty despite the the absolute ugliness it's the it's the and as a species and i think more about this like i think about this a lot it's the fact that we are i mean we're we come from filth i mean we're we're you know we're animals we come from like we're all descendant from murderers and rapists like we despite that background we are capable of this the self-sacrifice and the connection and and and figuring things out you know true science and other forms of truth you know seeking and and an artwork just the beauty of of of music and and other forms of art it's like the fact that that's possible is the meaning of of life i mean and ultimately that feels to be creating uh more and richer experiences the from a russian perspective uh both the dark the you mentioned the cancer diagnosis or losing a child to suicide or all those dark things is is still rich experiences and also the the beautiful creations the art the music the science that's also rich experience so somehow we're figuring out from just like psychedelics expand our mind to the possibility of experiences somehow we're able to figure out different ways as a society to expand the realm of experiences and from that would gain meaning somehow right and that's part of like this we're going across different levels here but like the idea that so-called bad trips or challenging experiences are so common in psychedelic experiences it's like that's a part of that like yeah it's tough and most of the important things in life are really really tough and scary and most of the things like like the death of a loved one like it told like the greatest learning experiences the things that make you who you are are are the horrors and you know it's like yeah we try to minimize them we try to avoid them but and i don't know i think we all need to get into the mode of like giving ourselves a break both personally and society societally i mean i went through like the the i think a lot of people do these days in my 20s like oh the humans are just kind of a disease on the planet and like and then in terms of our country in terms of the united states it's like oh we have all these horrible you know sins in our past and it's like i think about that like the i think about it like my my three-year-old it's like yeah you can construct a story where this is all just horrible you can look at that stuff and say this is all just horror you know where yard is like there's no logical answer to our you know rational answer to say we're not a disease on the planet from one lens we are you know you know and like there's you could just look at humanity as that like nothing but this horrible thing you can look at any you and you name the system you know you know modern medicine western medicine you know the university system and it's like you can dismiss everything so you know big farm like hopefully these vaccines work and then like yeah i'd like to you know like i'm kind of glad big pharma was a part of that like you know it's like the united states you can like point to the horrors like any other country that's been around a long time that has these legitimate horrors and kind of dismiss like these beautiful things like yeah we have this like modifiable constitutional republic that just like i still think is the best thing going you know um that that that as a model system of like how humans have to figure out how to work together it's like it's how there's no better system that i've come across yeah there's uh if we're willing to look for it there's a there's a beautiful court to a lot of things we've created uh yeah this country is a great example of that but most of the human experience has a beauty to it even the suffering right so the meaning is fine is is choosing to focus on that positivity and not forget it beautifully put yeah speaking of experiences this was one of uh my favorite experience on this podcast talking to you today matthew i hope we get a chance to talk again i hope to see you on joe rogan it's a huge honor to talk to you can't wait to read your papers uh thanks for talking today likewise i very much enjoyed it thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with matthew johnson and thank you to our sponsors brave a fast browser that feels like chrome but has more privacy preserving features neuro the maker of functional sugar-free gum and mints that i use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost for sigmatic the maker of delicious mushroom coffee and cash app the app i use to send money to friends please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from terence mckenna nature loves courage you make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under it will lift you up this is the trick this is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted who really touched the alchemical gold this is what they understood this is the shamanic dance in the waterfall this is how magic is done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you