Dr. Matthew Johnson and guests dissect the Johns Hopkins study on clergy psychedelics, exposing ethical flaws like undisclosed funding and mission-driven bias while contrasting historical CIA MKUltra horrors with modern DARPA military trials. They analyze nicotine's unique non-associative reinforcement, debate the reality of DMT entities versus placebo effects, and examine Sid Barrett's schizophrenia as a cautionary tale against unregulated use. Ultimately, the conversation argues for science-based regulation over prohibition to mitigate cartel harms while exploring how future brain technologies might eventually render crude pharmacology obsolete. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Funding Religious Psychedelic Studies00:06:46
Yeah, I want to get to a lot of that stuff.
The stories of like taking the, I know there's a huge DARPA grant to take the stuff out of the psychedelics for soldiers and stuff like this.
Yeah, Brian Roth's work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I want to talk also about the cocaine stuff.
But this morning, I read that article by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker.
Right.
Yeah.
About the spiritual professionals study at Johns Hopkins.
The clergy study religious professionals.
Yeah.
Can you?
So I'm an author on it.
Yeah.
Can you lay out this whole story for us and like how it started, who was behind it, and then what ended up happening with the whole thing?
Yeah.
So the idea is so we had a history of doing this work that was first published in 2006, 2008, a series of studies looking at in spiritually interested people, what are the basic effects?
So this isn't treating disorders, but what are the effects from just people interested in taking these things spiritually?
And this is sort of a follow up to that work.
It's also a follow up.
Basically, to the old Good Friday study from 1962 that was conducted at Harvard by Wally Pankey, who was a student of Tim Leary, who was his PhD advisor.
And they were, it's called the Good Friday study because they were in the basement of the Marsh Chapel in the Boston area.
And there was a very charismatic preacher delivering the Good Friday service.
And they were the people who were on psilocybin or a An active placebo niacin.
They were in the basement listening to the service.
And yeah, they found that the people who received psilocybin largely had what we call mystical experiences.
They were very spiritual, had the sense of unity and these other aspects of the mystical experience.
And some follow up work that Rick Doblin, the head of MAPS, did 25 years later, he did a lot of digging to find most of these people who were in that study.
And these were seminary students, I should say.
So that's a key there.
Those were religious leaders in training.
And these people largely said, yes, they still valued that experience.
Many of them said that it had informed their life in the priesthood or what have you.
And so this study had threads from all of that work our work with spiritually interested non clergy, threads to the Good Friday study that found those subjectively positive effects from those folks.
And so it was set up like that, you know, like, you know, getting people from different religious faiths.
It ended up being, what was it, 21 Christians and five rabbis and one Muslim iman and one Buddhist.
I think that's what it, yeah, it turned out to be in terms of, so mostly Christian.
So, who was behind the initial idea to get this study done and get it funded and start?
Like, who was behind the start of it?
So, the initial idea was really a convergence of a number of people who had interest.
Bill Richards at Hopkins, Tony Bosses at NYU, Roland Griffiths, myself.
I thought it was a very interesting study.
So, really, I think all of the investigators had an interest in it, and there were funders that were interested in the effects.
Now, a lot of stuff ended up happening over the course of the conduct of the study that sort of became controversial, and I wasn't aware of all of it.
I was aware of some of it during the course of the study, but that's kind of what the Some of the, some of what Michael Pollan wrote about.
Yeah.
That's what it was all about.
Things like funders working on the studies.
I knew that.
I advised against it, but I wasn't the so called PI, the principal investigator.
Funders, people that were funding the study were coming in and participating in some of the.
Yeah, not as patients, but as a therapeutic like role, a so called session guide, and in doing interviews with people at the end of the study, doing qualitative analysis for interviews.
And so what I didn't know is that some of this wasn't even reported to the review board.
That you know, there was someone on there who was functioning as a study team member who wasn't listed on the IRB protocol, a funder, and the funding relationship hadn't been revealed to the IRB.
And this was in the context of that individual who I don't think did anything wrong, it's not their job to scope out these rules as a non academic and you know, not a faculty at the medical schools.
Um, but NYU did the right thing and asked their review, well, you know, can they participate in helping to run the study?
And they said no.
Well, she ended up doing that at Hopkins.
And apparently, as we know now, it wasn't, not only was that relationship not reported, but they weren't included, even listed as someone working on the study.
Oh, wow.
And then there were other things.
So there was in Travis, I know you've talked to him about this, I forget the degree that, You focus on this in your interview, but Travis has written about and others.
The relationship some of the funders subsequently funded some of the participants in the study to start organizations to focus on psychedelics in religion to sort of kindle interest in this area of psychedelics and in their various faiths.
And then there was a retreat that.
Some of the scientists had a role in, but I was completely unaware of after the study to get the participants together to presumably look at paths forward about the implications going forward.
So there were some, I mean, so some of the concern was related to it ended up appearing looking more like a mission with the goal in mind to introduce.
Psychedelics to kindle this interest in religious practice, um, sort of more explicitly rather than having just you know this scientific question.
The Kaczynski Cautionary Tale00:14:44
And so, I think there's good science there, and that's why I remained an author on the paper.
And that's you know, I don't like being in these situations where I mean, if it reaches a certain level where I think, well, we can't trust the science, I wouldn't want to be an author, sure, on the paper.
And other situations like that came up with, for example, the cancer study where I Caught wind and then investigated.
For example, a participant who, in an interview with the principal investigator, they described their experience, but then on the questionnaire ranking how meaningful this was in your life, they gave a certain rating and then a discussion with the principal investigator.
Oh, well, it sounded like your description was more impressive than that.
Are you sure you don't want to change your rating?
Oh, interesting.
And they changed.
And I prompted, you know, hey, like, Concerned about that because have we ever done the opposite?
If we ever said, Your rating looks more impressive than what I heard, like probably not.
And so that was, in that say, that was the one case I was aware of and was told, well, it would be reassessed with the participant, which I never got confirmation of.
But again, if it had reached a certain threshold, you know, I would have, you know, made a formal, you know, issue out of it, but it didn't rise to that level.
And the reason that some of this is disappointing is this is something you don't need to fluff up.
You know, in the right context, I mean, I'm convinced from not just data, but from the now hundreds of participants that I've talked to, you know, a good number of which I've been in the room with them in this so called guide role.
But what was the drug administered?
That was psilocybin.
Psilocybin, okay.
And all everything I've mentioned so far.
And so, you know, why risk, you know, muddying the waters with this type of thing?
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When there's a, to me, it looks like there's a real effect there.
In other words, that yes, many people have what they claim to be very meaningful experiences that they hold in a spiritual light and that they report, you know, positive long term effects on their life and well being.
But, you know, I'm also concerned that, you know, in some of the studies, like, have we really looked at the negative?
So there was sort of like an explicit rejection of things like, Assessing the credibility of the blind, or which is to say, simply asking the person afterwards, Do you think you got the drug or the placebo?
You know, in the sense that you're going to get an answer that could be used as ammunition because most people do correctly identify it.
But, you know, we want more data than not.
And you could do things statistically to at least imperfectly to, you know, once you have the data, you could look at in regressions, for example, how much that might have accounted for some of the positive results.
But then other things like simply asking people at their long term follow ups, Have you used psychedelics again?
And, you know, sometimes it's certainly not normative, but sometimes someone's introduced to a psychedelic in one of these studies and they get really into it.
I've even seen cases where, like, they become a neo shaman and are doing these things more on a regular basis.
And, you know, again, with the concern that, oh, this could be used as ammunition against this research.
But I just think one, that's not right.
But even strategically, Look, if these things are approved by the FDA, we want to know what the outcomes are going to be.
Something could be on the market and it could get plenty of drugs pulled from the market after they're approved.
So it's not just like, you know, once one of these things like psilocybin or MDMA were approved, then, oh, you know, we've achieved the result.
You know, the world's going to be a better place.
You know, you're going to get some of these effects.
Like you're going to, you know, you are going to kindle some interest.
My impression is that it's not.
You know, that it's a small minority, but you're going to introduce psychedelics to people who are using in whatever you want to call it, unsupervised, whatever.
Yeah.
Someone scores some mushrooms, they go hiking with it, this type of thing, you know, and then there's questions about that.
Not all, most of that is not going to be harmful as we know.
You know, most people that use psychedelics aren't harmed by it, but some are.
But we just have to understand the full landscape the good, the bad, the ugly.
And we shouldn't be afraid to kind of, we shouldn't be operating under a context in which we are.
Just had this mission in mind to kind of mainstream psychedelics no matter what.
Right.
Because one, it's not right.
And two, just even if that was your goal, to make sure you say, like, it's going to backfire.
Like, the best policy is transparency and, you know, learning as much you can, including about the dark side.
There's plenty of dark side with these compounds, which, you know.
What is the dark side?
Well, I mean, more at the superficial level.
Yeah, the bad trip is a very real thing.
I've been in the room with plenty of people, like, having a real existential, you know, I'm sure I'm not.
You know, telling anything you don't know about, like, your soul's being shredded, you've gone permanently insane, you're never going to come out.
And in a safe environment, when you've prepared the person as much as possible and you're at, you know, when need be holding their hand through the experience and keeping them safe, yeah, the effects subside and you can keep them safe.
But, you know, out in the wild, sometimes that leads to dangerous effects.
I mean, pretty rare, but sometimes people freak out and, you know, they run across the street, get hit by a car, or, and even though there's, it was definitely overplayed in the 60s with some of the propaganda, but, There have been cases where people have been so far out there, it really appears that they thought they could fly.
You know, and we don't know how common that is, but it has happened.
And anyone with enough experience or who's been around enough people with psychedelics, they should know that at least sometimes some crazy stuff like that can happen.
That's how powerful these drugs are.
And I always kind of think people should take Bill Hicks'.
Rule.
I don't know if you remember it.
Like, if you think you can fly in psychedelics, just test that on the ground, not on the fifth floor.
But there are some interesting cases in the popular press where that looks pretty, you know, you never, of course, know what's going exactly through someone's mind.
But someone takes one of the colleges in Boston.
I remember a story, might have been in Rolling Stone years and years ago, but some kid that just goes to this big university library with this, you know, I don't know how many floors it was, but this big kind of atrium where you could.
And just sort of took a swan dive, right?
Seemingly.
Jesus.
And there was a case at Hopkins where someone, and I saw the video, I wasn't in the room, but I saw the video where someone tried to jump through the painting on the wall.
And my kind of take from that, and it looked like from the video that this person, again, you don't know what's in their head, but it looked pretty credible that it seemed like this person was expecting to go through the painting.
Mm hmm.
Into another dimension, I don't know.
And they were fine.
They had a little bump in their head.
It was reported.
But even that, I've conveyed that before on the Huberman podcast and got some pushback from a colleague.
Oh, that's going to scare people.
It's the truth.
If you treat a few hundred people with this, every once in a while you're going to get something like that.
Sure.
And thankfully that wasn't.
And who knows?
Maybe they wouldn't had it been a window.
But it is, you know, a cautionary tale.
It's like, oh, that's a good reason not to do this on the A floor with a wide open window.
You know, that's kind of a bad idea.
And I've even heard.
Yeah, it's like if it's your first time surfing, you shouldn't go surf pipeline the first time.
Right.
It's just like, it's not linked up with anything.
Right, right.
And I've heard stories in, like, say, Oregon, and I went to college in Eastern Oregon.
My first thought with the Oregon psilocybin program was, oh, that's some of the natural beauty out there.
That must be incredible.
And then the second thought is, like, Oh, there's some mountains there.
And I hope folks are right, right.
But a story of someone just being kind of too close to the.
It wasn't that they thought they could fly or anything, but the story I heard was that they kind of almost fell off the edge because they were just intoxicated, which happens all the time with any intoxicating drug.
Right.
You just got to be careful if you're impaired on something.
Yeah.
So when it comes to that John Hopkins study, what was the ultimate question of what was the connection that you hope to find between all of these different people of different faiths?
So the real question, and there's really a number, it wasn't one singular question, but generally the, the, The primary questions related to were Are they going to have experiences like have been seen in these other, either the healthy, normal, spiritually interested populations, or in the people seeking treatment for depression or addiction, cancer distress?
Are you going to have the same type of spiritual experiences, including mystical experiences?
Are those experiences going to be similar even in these religious professionals?
And then, again, like those other populations, are there going to be long term positive attributions?
And for this population, that takes on an additional flavor of, oh, what kind of impact did that have on your work as a priest, rabbi, et cetera?
And so to me, now, those are very interesting questions.
I always thought that it seemed very likely.
It would be one thing we had to keep in mind is that you can't randomly plug people off the street.
So, a religious professional willing.
To be in an experimental study of a psychedelic, they have to be somewhat open minded to that.
Right.
With a focus on explicitly, even in the advertisement, referring to sacred experiences.
And so this is not a random sample.
So a religious professional willing to do this, it'd probably be different if it was a random sample, which is not ethically possible.
Again, you can't force someone to do this, but.
It'd be funny if you could force them to do it.
Yeah, it would be an interesting experiment.
My guess would be you'd get much lower rates of people.
Anecdotally, there are some stories from the 60s where there were skeptical religious professors who tried it, and some of which said, No, this is a false, like, what?
And there's people, I mean, Buddhists and Christians and stories of this nature.
I wonder if there's any Catholic priests who've been locked up that we can do it tested on, like prisoners against their will.
You know?
I wouldn't want to, you know, I wouldn't want to dose anyone without their own will.
It wouldn't hurt them, you know?
They'd be safe, they'd be in a safe environment.
But it would be really interesting to see, like, I'm not saying, like, whatever your ethics and morals are, to do it again.
To somebody against their will, you know, knowing they're not going to be harmed.
And there were some studies done like that at the beginning.
I mean, call them studies, whatever, but the CIA did plenty of those.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you tend to get people thinking they're going crazy, having extremely dysphoric experiences, in other words, people hating it, experiences not highly valuing it.
Was it Ted Kaczynski, one of those at Harvard?
Or was it, did he know about it?
I don't know.
I don't remember what he was given.
I don't know that story in depth.
But I believe you're right that one, and I don't think this was Leary, but someone else, another project, but that he, yeah, was.
So you find out who drugged Ted Kaczynski and what drugs he was given.
But there were certainly plenty that the CIA was doing, both through money funded into universities, but also just, I mean, in one classic example, I think it was called Project Midnight Climax, where they take a, yeah, sex worker and then the client, yeah, would.
He was dosed, and then they're watching behind a mirror.
Yeah.
Like, just imagine these freaks watching, you know.
The Johns.
They gave the Johns drugs and then they would put them in a room behind a glass mirror and see how they would, you know, what kind of secrets they would tell them, right?
Ted Kaczynski expressed concerns about the use of drugs like LSD in psychological experiments.
Specifically, it was noted that Kaczynski was a subject of a psychological experiment involving LSD at Harvard under supervision of Henry Murray.
Right.
I knew it wasn't yet.
Okay.
It wasn't Leary.
Interesting.
Imagine a society the subject subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy and even gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.
What?
And so there's, I mean, I'm really interested in the Charles Manson case, and psychedelics played what appeared to me a big role there.
And you're probably familiar with the book Chaos.
Yeah.
And it seems highly suggestive that there was a whole lot of connections with the CIA there, whether they were allowing him or whether he was a direct.
I'm guessing probably not, but that he was, they were kind of letting him do his thing and sort of kind of using him as a naturalist experiment to see how a charismatic figure could use this.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting that Haight Ashbery Clinic, they were doing research on LSD and amphetamines both simultaneously.
I know amphetamines really did that whole scene.
It shifted from LSD to amphetamines, methamphetamine, and that just kind of.
Just kind of ruined the whole scene.
Yeah.
And Jolly West was a huge part of that.
And he's a fascinating figure.
I don't know how much you've looked into Jolly West.
Yeah.
I have.
But yeah, he's been had his hands in so much during the Cold War, you know, especially like if you want to talk about like Jack Ruby when he went to prison, was visited by Jolly West and then went insane like that.
Went insane automatic.
And then there's a crazy in Errol Morris's documentary on the Chaos book.
Jolly West and Dirty CIA Secrets00:04:40
He has a clip of Jolly West walking out of his prison cell after and basically talking to the press.
We've determined that he is unfit for whatever, for like undergoing a trial or anything like that.
Like he was, he said basically he was clinically insane.
And it makes, I'm always mindful that what that stuff, that the FOIA released MKUltra information, which was released in, it was the mid 70s, might have been 75, but it was really outlined in the classic Leon Schlane's Acid Dreams book, which was the first kind of like public dumping.
Of that information and making the details known.
What I'm always mindful of is that there was a lot that disappeared.
Oh, yeah.
Files, and even amongst what was released, a lot of blacked out.
And you're like, okay, the stuff we learned about is the lightweight stuff.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, there was nothing that was beyond like 1960s and 50s, like CIA.
I mean, they were at, Basically, at war with Kennedy, completely trying to subvert his policy in Vietnam and Laos, and then the stuff with Cuba, where his brother was basically the CIA was funding the mafia and the Justice Department under his brother.
They were basically at war, you know, with like they were trying to stop these attacks by the Cuban exile, mafia funded folks attacking.
Cuba and then, yeah, the Bay of Pigs, and just, you know, whether it's with psychedelics or with Kennedy's policy, and just it's humbling what the, you know, a lot of that's in the realm of like people just think like that's not possible.
Like that's so beyond the pale.
It's so unspeakable that it's just hard to believe that you don't want to believe it.
I think in just.
And, you know, like, did the CIA have a hand in killing Kennedy?
I think, and I don't think we're ever going to have the smoking gun.
I think there's a lot of very interesting suggestive evidence pointing in that direction.
But, you know, I think that is for a lot of people, it's just hard to come to that point to think, like, my God, a part of the government may have actually killed our president.
Mm hmm.
Like, that's just, I think that there's something very, very deep and psychological where it's hard to come to grips with that, even when there's some evidence pointing to it.
Yeah.
And it, once you kind of like, for certain things like the MKUltra program, include it, you start to have a more open mind.
No, I'm like, can you imagine being teleported back to 1959?
And being a chemist contracted by the CIA with a blank check and being allowed to do whatever the fuck you want, or even being told to do things that you might think are not moral or maybe against your ideals, but you know, this is for national security.
You can, we're gonna do this crazy shit, and there's no consequences for any of it, and you have unlimited money.
I could speak as a professional scientist for decades that just the funding alone, like you know.
Everyone's desperate for funding to do the work.
And then, I mean, back then, I mean, this human subjects protections just were in their infancy anyway.
But nonetheless, the idea that like you could just, it was a Wild West.
You could do whatever.
Oh, you're interested in like brainwashing people?
Yeah.
Like, oh, you get to try that.
And if you don't have a moral compass, and if you add to that, hey, this is actually for the country.
As part of this fight against global communism, like the fate of humanity is literally at stake here.
So you add that as the backdrop and you get this really strong ends justifies the means mentality that could, I'm sure, nudge people.
I'm sure if you, well, my strong guess is if you ask someone like Charlie West if you resurrected him and, you know, they'd say, yeah, well, yeah, this is dirty stuff, but like, welcome to the dirty world where it's like, did you want the Soviets taking over the planet?
Sinister Experiments on Children00:03:23
Right.
And the CIA knows how to contract people or recruit people who are on that sociopathic spectrum.
And I think they look for those people.
Of course they do.
Yeah.
Right.
That's why they do all those extensive interviews, that huge, extensive interview process with those people.
And with certain people, I think they pick wacky people that they could just easily discredit afterwards if they're already into whatever, any number of things.
And then they could.
I think you're totally right about that.
Yeah.
I think you're totally right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a thread that we could go down a deep rabbit hole, but I don't want to get lost in the weeds.
There was even in, I think it was the early 90s, I don't know if you've heard about this, but the most sinister aspect of this experimentation that we've been known to do is on the stuff that we did on kids.
There was a program, Steve.
We've talked about this before, but there was a program they had where there was a hospital for mentally disabled children and we were injecting them with plutonium.
I'm not familiar with this.
And they were trying to understand the effects on these nuclear materials on human beings.
And I think Clinton is the one who shut it down.
But this really happened, Steve.
I don't know if you can find the name of it or when it was shut down, but we pulled this up many times before.
And it was only recently shut, like during Clinton's presidency, I think it was shut down.
Yeah, it's the recent, see, as you're describing it, that's shocking to me.
Because, of course, we know about Tuskegee and.
Yeah.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Between 46 and 56, no, that's too early.
Massachusetts were subject to radioactive nutrition experiments sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and conducted by researchers from Harvard University and MIT.
The children were fed Quaker Oats breakfast cereal containing radioactive traces and absorption.
Of plant material and calcium, parents were not informed that radioactive elements were involved in these tests.
Additionally, in a separate experiment, 73 children at the Fernald State School were spoon fed oatmeal that contained radioactive isotopes over several years.
The children were, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The parents were never talked about.
But there was one that was recently shut down.
Could it have been the follow up of this?
Because, for example, Tuskegee, the plan was to just follow these guys for the next 50 years, for the rest of their life.
And so maybe it was the following.
Up of these people that Clinton finally shot.
I'm just hearing about this.
That's just speculation.
It could have been.
The one that I read about was shut down in the late 80s or early 90s, I think.
Wow.
But again, it gives you humility about there are some dark forces in the world.
And when you get into things like psychedelics, you've got to keep that in mind.
Well, we're talking about MKUltra and just the declassified stuff that's been confirmed, which is likely just 1% of what was really going on because it's a They're obviously going to get rid of all of the evidence of the serious, sinister stuff that they were working on.
And it always makes me wonder what are they doing now?
What kind of stuff is DARPA doing now?
You know, they're publicly funding $40 million to, what's the guy's name again?
That's doing the psychedelic research.
Oh, Brian Roth.
Brian Roth.
So they're giving him, what is it, like $40 million to take the psychedelic research?
Dark Forces in Cold War Warfare00:10:52
Yeah, it was huge.
That's public, above board.
What are they doing now?
And he's a legit, very respected, nice guy.
Yeah, good scientist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wonder what they're doing that's still black and not, not, Revealed to the public.
It's, I can only fathom.
Well, you look at other areas, like, for example, the UFO, you think, and there's this whole history of, like, oh, we shut down all the, you know, Blue Book and, you know, like, it's done.
And then you find out later, oh, no, well, we had this other program that then that was revealed, like, like the more recent arrow, you know, and so, regardless, not to take us down that rabbit hole, but just as a demonstration that often there's this, oh, we've shut it down.
Yeah.
No, you haven't.
And I remember a guy that, um, What was his name?
Jim Ketchum, who had an interesting book released about 20 years ago.
And he had been a leader at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Department or agency.
I forget the exact name, but they're basically testing a lot of it under the guise of like we need to test things to know what we're dealing with in defense of the Soviets doing it to us.
So you see, I mean, it's the same kind of thing with the COVID, what do you call it?
Gain of function.
So same rationale.
It's like we need to do, and there is a rationale there.
You know, we need to do the thing that we think the enemy is going to do to us, even in the context of knowing how to defend against it.
But then, of course, you can also play offense.
I mean, it was the same thing with like the Reagan Star Wars program.
Oh, nukes in space to knock out the other nukes, but oh, you could also use those nukes in a first try, you know.
So, this, you know, these types of like the logic, you know, plays out.
So he was doing this.
And they were doing stuff as far as I've seen, like ethical work, you know, giving soldiers LSD and all kinds of interesting things.
This wasn't, as far as I know, part of the CIA, but this is under the Department of the Army.
And again, that I know of, nothing nefarious.
But he gave a tour and giving some talks when that book came out.
I forget the name of the book about 15, 20 years ago.
But I remember in the conversation him saying that.
Leave that up, Steve.
I want to go back to that eventually.
He wouldn't be surprised if the.
What was it?
Russians and the Chechnyan rebels back in the late 90s.
I might have the dates wrong.
That he thought that when they had a bunch of kids hostage in a big school or something, but they finally ended it and they came in and there was a siege.
And he was, remember, speculating that there were some of these exotic drugs that they used as part of that.
And of course, the Russians are kind of known for in toxicology, like, you know, like.
You know, all these like exotic, you know, like people have been done in with these kind of, yeah, poisons.
And but, but that, that some of this stuff might have been used.
Like, for example, the US Army tested on its own soldiers a BZ cloud.
So BZ is short for a super long, like, I don't know, like a word that's like has like 25 characters.
I can't remember the full name, but it's BZ is a super potent.
Kind of on the level of LSD, but super potent analog of the class of drugs like scopolamine and atropine.
So the anticholinergics, which Sasha Shulgin, I remember saying, he's the psychedelic chemist that developed hundreds of psychedelic compounds, but he said those anticholinergics were the true hallucinogens.
The classic psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin aren't really hallucinogens because people rarely truly hallucinate.
But on the anticholinergics, they do.
So the U.S. Army was testing and had an aerosolized bomb.
So you drop this on the battlefield.
This is the idea.
And there's a rationale here, like rubber bullets.
Instead of killing everybody, can we just make them into delirious?
Make everybody trip their balls off.
Right.
And especially with that drug class, where it's not like people are having mystical insights, they're just like zombies out of it.
Like scopolamine in Colombia, the people call it the zombie drug because there's this.
Take American tourists, drop it in their drink, and actually met one of these guys, a Danish guy.
I don't know about that.
He had his laptop stolen.
They apparently spiked his drink and they approached him outside of the bar or whatever.
And they said, Oh, is your hotel here?
Yeah, that's right.
You know, go get your laptop.
Okay.
And he goes, he got his laptop and just like handed it off to these guys.
He was just in this zombie like state.
So that's the side, you know, he was a good friend of a good friend of mine and it was a very credible story.
Consistent with what we know about the drug class.
So, anyway, another type of wild thing.
But the reason I brought that up is because Kitchum believes some of this, a lot of this work continued, at least in other countries.
Who knows about the United States?
States, probably.
You know, this experimental warfare stuff with these drugs, you know, probably hasn't stopped.
No, no.
Especially with a government like ours who has unlimited amounts of money that they're spending on warfare stuff and technology for warfare.
Like, that's the biggest bucket of money.
I mean, there's $21 million missing from the freaking Pentagon, from the DOD.
Like, they're going to spend their money on, we've been spending money on drugs since the beginning, since After the World War II, figuring out how to win wars and how to maintain dominance in the world.
Yeah.
So the idea that we're not doing that now is naive.
And, you know, just, you know, going back to that DARPA stuff, I wonder, you know, where that could possibly go or where it's going.
And if we're, we probably will never find out.
But the idea of, the idea, which I think Travis alluded to, of creating not just psychedelics that can.
Treat things like PTSD or get people back in the state where they can actually get back out in the battlefield.
But making more badass soldiers with psychedelics is a crazy idea.
Like making people that can have better edge detection or kill more people or make them more productive in combat.
That's a crazy idea to me.
Yeah.
Well, and we already know that we use drugs all the time for these things like amphetamine.
Right.
Drugs like amphetamine itself, deamphetamine is used, the go pills.
Like, and it makes sense.
And they can kind of hand them out, like, you know, and I'm not disagreeing with it, but like, you know, you need the pilots to go up on a sortie and they need to be on and they haven't slept in 20 hours.
And it's like, yeah, like these are performing, it works.
There's a drug that Joe Rogan used to talk about on his podcast that I think he said that he used to take that was a drug that fighter pilots ate.
God, what was it?
Medafinil?
No, it wasn't that.
It was something, I forget what it was, but it was a stimulant.
It was a stimulant pill that he would take that he said that fighter pilots took it.
And he's talked about it.
He used to talk about it years ago.
I haven't heard him talk about it.
I'd be interested.
Yeah, I'd have to find out what that was.
Steve, maybe you can do some searching.
Oh, by the way, here is Steve found what I was talking about with Clinton.
It was in 1996, the US federal government agreed to pay $4.8 million as compensation for injecting 12 people with radioactive materials.
In a recent Cold War experiment.
So it was a settlement to make amends for the unethical experiments conducted by the government doctors and scientists.
So there's two sides of this story.
There's that, and yes, those experiments were between 1944 and 1974.
And then I got more information here specifically on what you were talking about, which includes these experiments directing plutonium and other radioactive elements directly into patients.
Some of these were kids that didn't know about it.
Right.
A five year old, Jesus Christ.
God.
I mean, levels of depravity that I guess it's hard to wrap your head around.
But history tells us time and time again like, there's kind of no bottom to the pit of hell.
I mean, you know, the human animal is capable of anything.
Yes.
The way they think about it, though, which is the way every country has to think about this kind of stuff, is what's worse?
Are we willing to do this terrible thing to save something way worse from happening?
Right, right, which I get.
I'm not saying I agree.
And a lot of this is going to depend on, like, I'm glad we have an intelligence, you know, the intelligence aid.
You know, a country needs to.
I mean, the original mission was like collect intelligence to inform the president and before it kind of devolved into its own thing.
Their own agenda that the president sometimes doesn't even know about.
But, you know, it's going to come down to these.
And yeah, we need secrecy.
You can't have everything being public, but the government obviously way overdoes secrecy and confidentiality.
And they have every incentive to do that.
So it comes down to the nuances of like ultimately it took human beings to do this.
And just like the.
I mean, the torture stuff in Abu Ghraib and enhanced interrogation.
I think we're still coming out of this amnesia where it's like we didn't want to admit at the.
It's hard for the average American.
We were involved with straight up torture, stuff that we had executed people for, like waterboarding.
Right.
And we tortured also innocent people.
Yeah.
Because with anything, there's going to be false positives.
Right.
And.
One of any number of reasons why you shouldn't torture people.
Even if you were 100% accurate, you shouldn't do it.
It's like not right.
It's not, it doesn't work.
But also, like, yeah, you're going to have some poor dudes that are just caught up and, I mean, worse than death.
I mean, people being tortured.
But yeah, we're capable of all of this.
Rewarding Effects of Cocaine00:15:21
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Provigil is the name of that drug.
Oh, that is modafinil.
Oh, that's the trade name for modafinil.
Oh, really?
Which is an amphetamine like stimulant.
So it's in the general, it's chemically not.
Not the same as the amphetamine structure, but it's in the broader class of dopaminergic stimulants like cocaine and amphetamine and methamphetamine.
He said it was.
He said he used it for its incredible effectiveness for focus and mental clarity, but eventually stopped because he didn't like the idea of depending on it.
So it's sort of, and I think it was Michael Bauman at NIDA Intramural that put it this way one time, you know, sort of amphetamine in the amphetamine class in general is sort of like.
You know, pounding your cocaine and, you know, or I'm sorry, your dopamine, you know, and really pushing it strong.
Modafinil is like you're massaging your dopamine system.
So it's a pretty mild stimulant with dopaminergic effects like cocaine and amphetamine, but much milder.
And it's approved for what's it approved for?
So, like certain things like shift work and jet lag.
So, it's the term there is like it's a wakefulness enhancer.
Do you know I could score some of it?
It's so it's very common for people to order that.
I'm not making any recommendations, but it is very common.
I'm making a menu over here.
It's schedule four, so it's not, so it's illegal to have without a prescription, number one.
But a lot of people get it without prescription.
They order it from these Indian pharmacies.
Really?
So it's way easier to get.
Again, I'm not telling anyone there's definitely a legal risk to that, but lots of people, and just you shouldn't do illegal things.
But a lot of people do that, order it because it's relatively.
Low on the sketch, so there's not as many controls, and they're just how are you going to stop it?
How similar is it to Adderall?
It's similar, it's milder.
Okay.
A lot of people prefer modafinil or provigil to Adderall and similar drugs like Ritalin, which is methylphenyldate, but they prefer it because they don't, they say it gives you that kind of focus and that wakefulness of being in the flow on task without the jitters.
So it's.
It's not as forceful.
Okay.
But it's with some of the same effects.
In fact, with some of the, there's some data that was collected in the military suggesting that it's even better than amphetamine at reversing the cognitive detriments that you get from keeping people awake.
So, from insomnia, because you get a lot of cognitive detriments, very measurable, and stimulants in general, caffeine, The amphetamine compounds, modafinil, will to some degree reverse that or attenuate that, make it not as bad or get it back to normal state or something at least closer to normal state.
But modafinil, as I recall, looked even better than amphetamine.
So its mechanism of action is totally separate, it's totally different from Adderall.
It has an overlap.
So it has that similar effect on increasing extracellular dopamine, which is the same general effect that in different ways cocaine and amphetamine.
Cocaine more so blocks the reuptake.
Amphetamine is more so a release.
So, all of these drugs, the important thing is they all ultimately kind of increase dopaminergic function, which means that you're going to pay for the transmission.
Yes.
And I always like to quote Terrence McKenna.
I quote him on several things.
It's like amphetamine, it's like it just leaves your axles flopping.
Yeah.
Sort of like they're very hard on the body.
And especially people with chronically used stimulants, it just.
They are rough on people.
And so it can deplete your dopamine reserves, basically.
And so, an answer to that is well, taking it the next day.
And then, of course, you know, where that, like, yeah.
The thing I hate about Adderall, I've taken Adderall before.
Very rarely do I take it.
If I really need to get something done and I haven't slept, I'll take one, like a little bit, like a quarter of one.
But I hate the fact that it sucks every drop of creativity out of me.
Really?
I can't be creative.
I can't carry a conversation.
I just turn into a robot, like a mechanical robot that can complete tasks.
That's it.
Right.
So it's like a trade off.
Now, some people will say these drugs can enhance their creativity.
Really?
But I've heard plenty of people say what you're saying.
Wow.
So if you have something to do, everything is defined.
And yet, as I think of it, there's some experimental evidence for this.
If you have your task before you and you know what you need, especially if it's a more mundane task, like, yeah, that's where this is really effective.
But I spent one when I had to clean out my garage a few months ago, and it was perfect.
Well, which is a classic stimulant thing, like people cleaning.
Yeah.
And the way I think about it, and this goes beyond the research, but people tend to go into, are both in conversation and with tasks like cleaning more on stimulants, more likely to go into and complete subroutines.
In other words, you clean in the sink, you know, whatever.
And normally, you know, you do kind of a decent job, 90%, but, you know, there's that grime that's kind of like you could, oh, you could get a toothpick and like start getting that extra thing, you know, and you could.
Well, I can't really get under.
Oh, I'm going to go get a screwdriver and, like, you know, take the faucet off so that I can clean that thing underneath.
Go into those subroutines, complete the task, and then go back to the main task of cleaning the thing.
Oh, wow.
It's in conversation, too.
So people will, you know, go into a subparagraph and talk about something without forgetting.
And so this is where, like, very different than cannabis, where you're more likely to, you know, go into those subroutines, but then you just don't find your way back.
You're like, then you go off and do another subroutine, another.
Amphetamines are sort of like, no, you know.
Wow.
Interesting.
They give that energy and that.
And really, it's more so of a motivation.
Dopamine is very much about motivation.
I mean, it's very much tied to reward, but I think the evidence suggests it's really about defining what is rewarding.
So making things interesting.
And nicotine is very interesting, like that, too.
Yeah.
Because the amphetamine type in cocaine has this, too, but they.
They kind of have this primary reinforcing effect that just they just make you feel good, it's euphoric.
But then there's also what's called conditioned reinforcing effect, like the things that are associated with it become you know, the things you do under it become more rewarding.
But then there's also this sorry, this might be too technical, but non associative, non contingent reinforcement.
In other words, these drugs, and this is where nicotine has its strongest rewarding effects, is making everything else in the environment.
Not just through a Pavlov's dog bell and whistle through association, but through a direct effect in making everything else in the environment rewarding, which is why nicotine is just this powerful psychoactive in terms of its addiction potential, in terms of people like really enjoy using it.
But you ask someone, and I remember when I was young, I was like, what's the feel about tobacco?
It's like, you know, people try different things and they understand, you know, they use cannabis.
They're intoxicated.
They feel the effect.
You know, tobacco is like this very subtle thing.
People aren't really high.
People don't usually use that language.
It's a psychoactive effect, but you kind of think about it.
You know, what did people talk about with, you know, smoking?
You know, you know, oh, it's great after a meal or before a meal and the classic like a cigarette after sex and like it.
And then like with work, you know, making things like writing paper, the great writers, you know, smoking away, skipping lunch and just smoking.
And so it has this sort of, it's, And research with rats suggests this that even, like, say, putting a rat on nicotine will make just this random, like, house light, like a red light coming on, more rewarding.
They'll press a bar to get that red light to come on more so after nicotine.
Not because the light signals the delivery of nicotine, just because just seeing a red light is cooler when you're on nicotine.
So, which kind of explains why this drug is so addictive, but it doesn't make you high.
Right.
Because it kind of makes just subtly every, the world becomes more rewarding.
You know, people are kind of open, it opens aperture a little bit.
Yes.
And everything else becomes a little tuned in.
And it's working through that acetylcholine system, which has a, A big role in focus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The nicotine stuff is interesting because I've heard that, I've heard multiple things that, you know, A, it's not necessarily bad for you other than the fact it's vaso restrictive, it's very addictive.
But are there any, are you aware of any other negative effects or downsides of using it other than, obviously, the smoking?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the, the, the, there's downsides to everything.
Mm hmm.
And people might disagree with me on this because there's no, you're kind of weighing like all kinds of evidence here, you know.
But to me, nicotine outside of smoking or even vaping, which is still probably going to be much safer than smoking, but nonetheless, you know, you're inhaling something, there's going to be downsides.
But like, say, in like, you know, nicotine pouches, any concern, including cardiovascular concern, is in the same general category as caffeine.
So some people shouldn't use caffeine, especially.
A lot of caffeine, like if you're at severe risk of heart disease or if you have anxiety, like the first thing your doctor should ask you before prescribing Xanax should be, like, let's talk about how much coffee and soda you drink.
And insomnia, if some, again, before you get a script of Ambien or what have you, first question be, like, let's talk about your caffeine use because you maybe just need to cut out your caffeine.
So, yeah, yeah, the nicotine is sort of in that same category where there's downside, you know, but the cardiovascular effects are.
Relatively, they're there, but more in the caffeine range.
I mean, a good amount of the cardiovascular downside from tobacco smoking comes from the carbon monoxide that you get from smoking, which is nothing to do with the nicotine and something that you don't get with vaping either.
You don't get the, you know.
Yeah, it's the delivery mechanism, right?
Especially with those pouches, the nicotine pouches, those things will eat your gums away, from what I understand, pretty bad.
There's a lot of people who've had serious issues with their gums, like having too many gums.
Having a pouch in their lip all day long.
Yeah, and some of that is going to be, we're going to have, it's such a new thing that we're going to have to wait to see.
I mean, to what degree is it related to the classic, you know, like cocaine burning out the inside of the nose, another alkaloid, which I think someone has to do a lot of cocaine to get that, you know, like, what was it?
Stevie Nicks, I think, was reported to have that.
Fleetwood, you know, they were doing a lot of Coke.
Yeah.
You have to have a lot of money to do that much Coke.
That's one of the things about Coke.
Like, most people don't have the money to go that far.
Right.
The way a rock star does.
But yeah, like we'll see.
And I would say, though, in general, like there's a risk to everything.
But like if someone's trying to quit smoking, like, I mean, these pouches are basically the same thing as FDA approved, like nicotine gum, nicotine patch, nicotine lozenge.
Yeah.
It's basically, I would say it's probably better technology than the nicotine gum and nicotine, uh, uh, Lozenges.
And because of the pouch, it can give you a little more of a quick transdermal administration.
Orders of magnitude less risk than smoking cigarettes.
Yes.
And, you know, vaping is still going to be, again, we're not going to know the final answer for a few decades, you know, but there's a lot of reason to think that vaping is substantially less risky, not without risk, but compared to smoking.
Basically, if someone's smoking cigarettes, any of these things are better options.
Yeah.
And, you know, nicotine pouches would be the least risky of all of them.
Yeah.
Right.
Compared to vaping or smoking.
So I kind of think about this when you see some of the regulations in California or whatnot about can't have any flavors.
And it's like, honestly, you could have a discussion about should we be subsidizing that?
I mean, the classic thing is, and I'm not saying we should, but I'm saying that would be a reasonable argument to the degree that it's helping people quit smoking.
The classic concern, though, is like this balance of, yeah, we don't want kids to use it.
We don't want it to be attractive for kids.
But we also got to keep in mind those same properties are things that can make it more attractive to a 63 year old smoker that's been trying to quit.
Maybe they like that.
Unintended Consequences of Policy00:05:01
Whatever menthol flavor that cherry flavor, and you can't buy fucking menthol cigarettes in California.
That's what I heard.
I'm that's probably true.
I think that's true.
That's so crazy.
Yeah, and so you gotta like, yeah, that's a I heard a clip of I think it was Cat Williams talking about it.
That's that's uh, that's racist because black people love menthols, black people love Newports.
Now you're denying them their newports.
There's big differences there.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they're very popular.
It's ridiculous.
Like, what are we, babies?
Jimmy's not allowed to have a Newport because it's too flavorful, or you're not allowed to have a coffee flavored Zen because you know that's going to be too dangerous.
Meanwhile, you have people literally doing heroin on the streets, unregulated, shitting themselves, right?
But right, it's like California is so over regulation.
We just, me and him, we're too signaling.
Me and him went to San Francisco and we were visiting somebody to do a podcast a couple years ago.
I wasn't, you couldn't buy nicotine pouches that weren't flavored, they were all just unflavored nicotine pouches.
Yeah, I know.
I didn't bring my own, unfortunately.
So I was like stuck with these unflavored nicotine pouches.
Yet we were walking down the street, and the guy we were there to meet was like, Where's your car?
Where's your car parked?
Or whatever.
Like, make sure you lock your car because every car gets broken into here, and there's no repercussions for the people that break into cars.
And we were walking down the street right in front of his apartment, and there was literally a purse emptied out on the ground, like in front of a car.
And the laws there are they allow people to do that.
They can't get arrested for fucking breaking into somebody's car.
Same thing with the, and I seem to hear that they're.
They'd reversed it or were going to, but like with shoplifting, oh, yeah, like they're basically.
I mean, um, now what I've heard from folks in the bay area is that their rule is don't lock your car because you can get your window broken out.
Like, one, don't keep valuables in there, but keep it unlocked that way.
Like, yeah, I'd rather the person open the door, check for change, and oh, there's nothing here, and you're good, you don't have a broken window.
Yes, yeah, you're right about that.
Maybe that's maybe I got the story wrong.
Maybe he told us to just leave it unlocked and make sure nothing was left in there.
Well, I'm sure there's all kinds of strategies when you're dealing with that type of environment where people just, I mean, it's so.
Pervasive, my understanding that just you know, and you get this with drug policy in general.
I realize not all of that is related to drugs, but it's a general principle that there are unintended consequences everywhere, and you have to be really, really careful about things that like this looks good on the surface, you know.
Okay, let's play it out, let's get as much evidence as we can, like for example, you know, having really high taxes on other nicotine products and eliminating completely all other attractive qualities, like you know, you can't get.
You know, coffee flavor.
It's like, okay, yeah, you're trying to make them less attractive to kids, but also we have to weigh that against, yeah, the smoker who might have done that as a substitute.
Yeah.
And therefore is, you know, maybe not now going to die from lung cancer or heart disease.
So there's, you know, if you go all out on any one side or the other, just with sort of virtue signaling as the goal, there's going to be harms there.
Yeah.
I mean, sort of like COVID, it's like, yeah, lockdown, like if you really only look at the, You know, transmission itself, there's an argument there.
But then, as people were warning and they got thrown under the bus, it's like if we keep kids out of school, there's going to be, you know, developmental delays.
Yes.
If we shut down all these businesses, suicide's going to go up.
And there's suicide alcoholism is going to go up.
Drug overdoses were hit an all time high, I think, during the end of the pandemic.
And substance use across the board went up, and anxiety disorders and depression.
And so, And now, some of those people, and like the new NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, he got completely demonized for being one of those kind of voices as part of this great Barrington Declaration that said, hey, hold on, maybe we should consider more of this Swedish model of shutting down society itself is going to have consequences.
Maybe we should encourage people that are particularly at risk to isolate and take precautions.
But those people, and just the argument that they're more concerned about the economy and this is hard, you know.
When the economy goes down, people kill themselves.
More so men.
Male suicides go up when, and female too, but it's strongly a male effect.
You can't provide for your family.
It's the most demoralizing, one of the most demoralizing things in the world.
That's one of the things you don't really, that's one of the things that I didn't really understand until we watched it play out.
Because at first I was like, oh, wow, like the way the media painted it, as if, like, oh, Everyone's so worried about the economy, not people's lives, but like play it out.
Religious Rights vs Economic Bans00:03:01
How does that actually end up?
It's just people's lives.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Which is what we learned during that whole process.
So with drugs, the same principle there's, you know, the immediate thing that protect the kids.
Yeah.
We want to protect the kids, but there's usually a balance to be had there.
And we just want those decisions to be as much informed by science as possible.
And I would say, even beyond science, you know, informed by human rights.
There's some things you just shouldn't.
Do right, like ban people from attending church, like it's kind of in our first amendment, like right, you know, right.
Um, you know, despite the data, you know, which is kind of how I feel about psychedelics and religious use.
I think it's very clear these drugs, many, you know, they're a number of religious groups, including some that have religious protection or constitutional protection, the Native American Church, you know, the UDV, the Santo Daime, um, for using psychedelics, but you know, there's.
Genuine spiritual and religious use of these compounds by people that aren't part of those, you know, communities.
And the Constitution doesn't say anything about drugs.
In fact, there was this whole evolution of when we first started to tinker with drugs.
I mean, we had to have a constitutional amendment to really fully ban alcohol.
But then when the whole cannabis prohibition came up, it was first justified under the Marijuana Tax Act.
The reason it was a tax act, it was like the justification under, I believe, the Ninth Amendment that the federal government can't do things that are reserved, certain rights, unless they've been outlined in the Constitution, they're reserved for the states or the people.
So the Constitution doesn't say we can regulate drugs, but the justification was, oh, this is involving interstate commerce.
So we can put a tax on it that no one's allowed to actually functionally get the tax act, to get the actual stamp that you need to engage in that interstate commerce.
Right.
But now, and it's sort of like the president going to war without Congress.
Now, at some point, it just became such a precedent that no one even worries about these things.
Of course, the federal government can ban drugs.
But the Constitution doesn't say anything about drugs, it says a whole lot about religion.
It's amongst the very first rights that are outlined in that First Amendment.
As well as the separation of church and state.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, I think about these things with the psychedelics in particular because, yeah, people have, by all measures, legitimate, you know, religious and spiritual beliefs surrounding their use of them.
And that's not to say that most psychedelic use is just for fun.
Perennialism Across Spiritual Traditions00:09:50
That's true, too.
They're also recreational drugs, but, you know, there's a spectrum there.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Do you so so during that study, did you find that the psychedelic experience that these religious folks were having were amplifying the beliefs they already had?
Yes, there was, yeah, there was some of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so and then where they would people re kind of saying it, they they saw the lessons of their faith in a deeper way, as well as folks saying that they were more open to other.
Less judgmental of other religions, this type of thing.
Yeah.
Now, Travis, when he was on here, he was talking about this idea of perennialism, this common core of all religions.
So, yeah, so that's where the study has been, even years before it was published.
There were already folks sort of touting the study as like, oh, this is a, probably not using that word because no one knows what it means, like, you know, a test of perennialism.
We're showing that there's a common truth to all religions.
So, perennialism is this kind of tradition dating back to William James, who was very interested to.
Essentially, the father of American psychology, who's interested in both mystical experiences.
But this idea that the world's major religions have, and it can be viewed in two ways.
One is that they actually stem from core human truths, and sort of by analogy, the classic, you know, the blind men all describing different parts of the elephant, the elephant being God, but they don't, oh no, God is a whatever, a trunk, and one, no, it's a big kind of, they're grabbing the foot, you know.
Along those lines, but some people, there's different flavors.
One is more of a metaphysical flavor, saying that they're pointing to a metaphysical, all pointing to the same metaphysical truth.
Another, saying that the nature of mystical, of subjective experience, like mystical experience, is a common element that's seated, that mystical experience is sort of more innate to the human, and that has seated all of the different religions.
Now, these are ultimately.
Probably impossible questions to really address empirically.
It's probably more philosophical.
It's sort of, you know, maybe like the stoned ape theory.
It's hard to like get, you know, evidence for.
I mean, all of evolutionary psychology is like that, and evolutionary or a good chunk of evolutionary biology and psychology.
But this study can't test perennialism.
I mean, so, you know, 22 Christians, five rabbis, one Muslim, one Buddhist.
You know, even if it did include 100 of each of those groups, I mean, then you'd actually have the ability, or even 30 in each of the groups, you'd have more of the ability to compare.
So we didn't even have the numbers to compare the experiences of those people.
But even if you had 100 in each group and they had very similar experiences, That's very different than saying, I mean, that's very different than concluding that therefore the origins of Buddhism and Christianity, Judaism, et cetera, all have this experience at the core.
I mean, after all, it was psilocybin that prompted these experiences.
And that's a whole philosophical rabbit hole about, you know, is this a legitimate religious experience or spiritual experience, or is this sort of mimicking a spiritual experience?
But it's.
Again, to me, it's ultimately philosophical.
It's like the hard problem of consciousness.
It doesn't appear to be something you could really provide any evidence over to say whether all these religions are pointing to the same core truth simply because the experience with psilocybin is similar across these different religions.
I mean, there have been studies, and the whole, a lot of the excitement or interest in perennialism and the, which has been called the perennial philosophy.
Aldous Huxley wrote a, Or had an interesting anthology called The Perennial Philosophy, which kind of really explored these ideas in the 1950s.
And, you know, the interest mainly lies outside of drug effects, you know, just the fact that spiritual experiences across these different traditions do share some similarity.
So, in some sense, you don't need drugs to show that.
Yeah.
In fact, it's more compelling if the experiences don't come from drugs.
Sure.
You know, because that's sort of like, well, of course they were similar because they all had the same dose of the same drug.
So, you know, that's not to say that I'm coming down strong for or against perennialism.
I think it's very interesting philosophically, but as a scientist, like this study can't, certainly can't address it.
Right.
And then there's also questions about, oh, is it a good thing that psychedelics get incorporated into religion?
And you could certainly see a downside to that.
You can argue for upsides.
Yeah.
It seems like there's a movement.
To incorporate psychedelics into religion, to sort of like revive these religions right these uh, these monotheist religions like Judaism or Christianity or whatever it is yeah, and you know um, there would probably be both good and bad that comes from that, I mean, I I think about as an example, with the Roman Catholic church, with the, with the, the child of sexual abuse,
what you know epidemic, whatever you want to call it.
Would that have been better or worse Had some powerful mind altering drugs been thrown into the mix?
There's a decent argument for worse, right?
Yeah.
You know, so, you know, and I've known people of, including former and current members of these various, you know, the UDV or the Santo Dime.
I mean, there's plenty of critiques of those religions, including folks saying they're very, I'm not saying this, I'm just saying some people say this, that, you know, misogynistic.
Yeah.
You know, people are people.
Yes.
And that's also some of my critique against some of the psychedelic enthusiasts.
Like the extreme version of psychedelic enthusiasm.
Like, I've never met an enlightened person.
I'm not saying theoretically they don't exist, but I see the same spectrum of humanity amongst people that have used lots of psychedelics and people who have never.
Now, can they nudge people?
Yeah, I've seen plenty in terms of actually just being a better person.
I think given someone's existing tendencies, it definitely seems like someone can, with that kind of plasticity infused into the system by the experience, One could be nudged in that better direction.
I think that seems clear, but overall, I mean, I think like Terrence McKenna again, he, I mean, he was very good about like laying out, I think, the reality of, and the contradictions and all that.
Yeah.
And he would say, like, look, he's like, with these like gurus, like, keep one hand over your wallet, one hand over your asshole.
Like, I mean, it's the classic, you know, power corrupts.
Like, and, and he's like, psychedelics don't, I'm paraphrasing here, but one of his lectures, like, psychedelics don't make you a better person.
He said, I just went through a bitter divorce.
Ask my ex wife what a wonderful person I am.
Like, I keep this stuff in mind when it comes to some, you know, the sort of saving the human species type talk.
Yes.
Yeah.
There's definitely, no matter how many of these ego dissolving experiences you have, some of the people that have done most psychedelics still have huge egos.
You can tell.
And it would appear that, at least to me, that in many cases, not all, it's worse.
They had big egos not just despite having used psychedelics, but they had big egos because of the psychedelics.
Wow.
Well, the whole ego inflation effect that, and sometimes you see this, like, I've seen, I have the answers.
And most of these normal folks don't know.
It's the Messiah complex.
It's interesting.
Ram Das in his book Be Here Now had something like this like, the difference between an enlightened person, I'm paraphrasing, it's been many years since I read it, but an enlightened person and a crazy person is that the.
And this is what Ram Dass said.
You know, the enlightened person, yes, or they're crazy.
They both realize that they're Jesus.
But the enlightened person realizes that everyone else is Jesus too.
The crazy person thinks only they are Jesus.
Oh my God.
That's hilarious.
Interesting way to look at it, right?
That is a really interesting way.
The humility is hard with some of these experiences.
And a lot of people do a good job with it, I think.
You know, I've met a lot of like really good people that have been deep into psychedelics, like solid, solid.
Good human beings, and I've also met some wild egomaniacs that are just yeah, yeah, it probably makes you more.
I think Hamilton was explaining this to me.
He was saying, number one, it's a placebo, and number two, it makes you more of who you already are.
That makes sense to me because of that general plasticity, which is, I think, the main thing, which is why it can be used to brainwash Charles Manson's you know cult followers.
And it was probably successful and to some degree with the CIA's you know brainwashing experiments.
With the right intent and with the right preparation and guidance, it could be incredibly helpful for helping someone change the way they view themselves with depression and with addiction, et cetera.
Neuroplasticity and Openness Experiences00:15:10
Now, what about you talk about plasticity?
Like, what specifically can psychedelics do as far as plasticity or rewiring your brain?
Are there any sort of measurable results?
Yes.
Unfortunately, most of those, or nearly all of those, are going to be in.
Uh huh.
So, because you can cut off brains, and we don't want to do that.
The IRBs don't let us do that, thankfully.
I wonder if you could do like an IQ test on somebody before and after, like a ton of psychedelics.
So, that's been looked at.
We don't see a general increase in intelligence.
Although, who's to say that, you know, there's, it could be that it wasn't done in the right way, or maybe there's some very narrow, like more particular aspect of intelligence that could be enhanced.
But it seems to be more of a personality than an intelligence thing.
Interesting.
But the neuroplasticity, first of all, that's a general term.
It can mean different things in the brain.
So, what's been shown in rodents is what's called dendritic branching.
So, these, the neuron with the branches, like a tree that comes off.
So, growing new branches, synaptogenesis, which is the connections between the different neurons, often with the branches.
So, forming new connections.
And then, probably the least amount of evidence, but some evidence for neurogenesis, which is the creation of new.
Neurons.
And so there's evidence, at least some evidence for all of those from multiple labs, at least the synaptogenesis and dendritic branching.
But I also remind people that drugs like, plenty of drugs like cocaine have shown neuroplastic effects.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the same branch building stuff too?
Yeah.
Now, research needs to figure out the potential differences.
So it may be that this doesn't, and this is where part of my background comes in handy because I'm.
From one lens, I had to say I'm a comparative behavioral pharmacologist.
So I always think, okay, it's the same thing with the thought of the default mode network, the decoupling of the default mode network being the embodiment of the ego, and that the decoupling of that under psychedelics is a key mechanism for psychedelics.
Well, alcohol does that, amphetamine does that, cocaine does that, THC does that.
So that's not a, you would have to explain, maybe that's more of a signature of just not feeling like yourself, like feeling intoxicated.
Right.
So.
You got to watch out for some of these stories and you got to like ask, like, what do other drugs do?
Is this truly unique?
Now, it may be.
Um, there's a guy that, um, Alex Kwan, I think I saw a presentation where he looks like he's figuring out some downstream effects that might distinguish psychedelics from some of these other um substances in terms of uh the network activity that that neuroplasticity results in, but it's very much an active one.
We're gonna have to figure out a lot more to know for sure whether the neuroplasticity.
Seen in animals is part of what's happening in humans.
Well, one, is it happening in humans?
Probably is.
But two, how important is that for the therapeutic effects?
My guess is that it is, but it is just a guess.
I mean, there's also the experience that people learn from and has this impact on them.
And so there's a lot to unpack there.
And it's a very, so there's a lot of threads about how psychedelics work.
They make the brain communicate with itself very dramatically, acutely.
In other words, when you're tripping, there's a massive change in brain network dynamics, which are communication patterns across the brain.
A key question, and I have a study that's, we haven't analyzed the data, but it's looking at people long term who have quit smoking with psilocybin.
The million dollar question with that stuff is, in terms of the therapeutics, is there a change in brain network dynamics long term?
There may or may not be, you know, because of course the brain, And it's very important to know what the brain is doing when you're on the psychedelic.
But therapeutically, the most important thing is what's it doing six months later when you're still less depressed or you're still not drinking or whatever the therapeutic target of that study was.
So, there's that, the neuroplasticity, the brain network function, and then there's stuff at the psychological level.
And I don't think it's one or the other psychology or biology, unless you're a dualist, presumably.
These are just different levels of analysis.
You know, it's not one or the other, they're just two sides of the same coin.
And my presumption is that every psychological change or psychological phenomenon has a biological correlate.
Yes.
And we're probably just at the limits.
I mean, you remember what you had for breakfast this morning or whatever.
We don't have the technology now to go in and read exactly what those brain patterns are that pulls up that, that constitute that memory, but one day we might.
But presumably there is that biological side.
So, with that caveat aside, at the psychological level, I think that's where we have most traction and really understanding how psychedelics are working.
It seems that when it works, it's like good psychotherapy.
It's not like, oh, I just took this pill, like whether it's, you know, antidepressants or whatever, you know, you take the pill every day and it has, oh, no, I'm feeling better, you know.
People have a story to tell you.
Yeah.
Like a life experience, like psychotherapy, or probably more commonly, like a life experience.
Oh, let me tell you about, you know, the first time I visited another country and knew what it was like to be the only person of my race within a crowd of 10,000 people.
Let me tell you the first time was like to fall in love or what it was like to have my kid and how that changed everything.
Like it seems like it's an experience.
Yes.
It's a very reflective experience, especially like when you were talking about the bad trips earlier, because sometimes the bad trips can be the most, you get the most out of those.
You kind of like learn the most about yourself or figure out problems or find ways of looking at problems from a different perspective than you're used to.
You get off of the normal vibration of waking consciousness, you know?
And the research is consistent with that.
So, in different ways, so scales of mental flexibility afterwards are increased.
And then, more kind of molar temporal perspective is.
Personality.
So openness to experience, multiple labs, including work that I've done, have shown that openness to experience is one of the big five personality traits that increases.
Not all the studies have found that, which is to be expected.
I mean, personality is a tough thing to push around, but it strikes me as credible that, you know, so openness to experience refers to thinking of a tolerance for different points of view and even holding seemingly mutually exclusive points of view at the same time.
Yeah.
An appreciation for aesthetics.
That's openness to experience.
So that kind of this.
The perspective taking.
I mean, so people just countless stories of people having psychedelic experiences and they look at themselves in a different way.
And sometimes it's this aha effect like we're just like we're fish, like looking at the water.
It's like this is our life for someone who's depressed or addicted and like they zoom out and they're like, holy cow, like what in the world?
And with cancer, it's like, oh my God, I like this is dominating my life.
I'm not dead yet.
It's, I'm deciding to react like this and let this thing, my quality of life is zero because I'm choosing to view it this way.
And so much of the suffering isn't the direct effect, it's like how I'm choosing my life.
Like, I'm not going on vacations, I'm not getting out in the sun with my grandkids, this type of thing.
And so, even though people had told themselves that stuff before, it's just like with depression and addiction, you could tell yourself cognitively a million times, but people have this, when it works, people can have this deep sense of this.
Very visceral change in perspective taking.
And they're like, my God, I've been doing this for like cigarette smoking for decades.
And I've been telling myself, like, I don't want to do this.
Like, this isn't who I am.
I go to the gym, I do blah, blah, blah.
Try to eat healthy.
I'm trying to set an example for my kids, like, what the hell am I doing?
And it really can hit them like hard, like, this is like, doesn't fit.
Right.
And somehow, just when you're doing it every day, it's just habituation.
And same thing with like depression, like thinking about yourself as this failure.
And it's like, you just get so used to this and it's just the normal thing.
But somehow, psychedelics zoom people out where they could see it for what it is.
And they're like, yeah.
What in the world?
Right.
And it's so, because I think it can touch on ground truth.
Like, you know, it's, it's, and that's why it lasts the next day.
Yeah, they're not tripping anymore, but they're like, it was so compelling and it seemed so self validating, which is part of the mystical experience, the self validating aspect of the experience that the next day they're like, yeah, that wasn't just some drug effect.
Maybe it opened a window for me or whatever, but like the way I looked at it then, that was the right way to look at it.
Or people with PTSD who just like, I remember one Marine giving a talk about his treatment with MDMA and just saying, like, he just viewed himself as a monster.
Because he accidentally blew a little kid up and it just like shattered him.
And like, how he finally stepped outside of that.
Like he saw himself as something different and he was able to sleep for the first time in like years.
You know, like, and, you know, it's very, you know, like I think the real action is that stuff we just, we're nowhere close to understanding at the brain level.
Like, you know, in terms of like how that manifests, like how these dark, Pits that we fall into, like with PTSD and anxiety and depression and addiction, like how that's so distributed mentally and presumably like throughout the brain.
Right.
And physiologically, how it affects your body.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's such a top because the brain is tied to everything.
And just like they're the way they're existing in the world is just there's the tentacles are everywhere.
And how they can, when they go to the root of these things, like it can have these manifestations like that are broad.
Now, for someone, for example, like that soldier who accidentally blew up a kid and was viewing himself as a monster and couldn't sleep at night, how do you determine which type of psychedelic to use for somebody like that?
Whether it be MDMA or psilocybin or even, I don't know, DMT is ever used?
Like, how do you determine?
We don't really know.
And not a single study yet has looked at that.
Now, that guy was in the study that was MDMA for PTSD, one of the MAP studies.
Oh, okay.
The idea is that MDMA was viewed as sort of maybe for PTSD as maybe the right place to start because it's a gentler, you don't have the reality shattering effects, the full bad trip of just not even knowing one as a person anymore.
They got permanently insane.
Like that's the flavor of the bad trip on psilocybin or LSD.
Flavor of a bad trip with MDMA is like more emotional, going to those emotional dark places.
And And so I think that was the rationale.
But I've recently finished a survey study where we asked people Have you used psychedelics, any number of them, MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine, blah, blah?
Like, have you used it intentionally for therapeutic reasons?
Not in a clinical trial, but just like whatever, whether it's underground therapy or you just took it with a buddy or whatever.
And whether you took it to treat PTSD or depression or anxiety.
And we actually found similar rates.
Like, if you chalk it up to like how many say it helped.
And how many said, eh, didn't make it worse, didn't make it better.
And how many said it made them worse?
That distribution looked remarkably similar no matter what the psychedelic was and no matter what the disorder was.
Interesting.
So, you know, it's an open question, but that would suggest it's almost like you could play the old Mad Libs game like, give me a random adjective, give me a random noun, give me, it's like pick a random, like MDMA for cocaine addiction.
Like, probably could make it work.
I mean, we'd need to test all this, but that would be consistent with these very general mechanisms, though.
It's not like.
You know, the drugs that are treated, these, these, the typical drugs used to treat this disorder, these disorders, which are treating surface level symptoms, they're treating like these core psychological issues that are really all in common.
Like all of these disorders have one aspect of people being stuck in some suboptimal pattern.
Yeah.
And I kind of view it all as an addiction because therapeutically, most of my work has been within addiction, but even you can view depression and PTSD as a form of addiction.
Like you're addicted to.
This suboptimal pattern of thought.
So the pattern isn't like grabbing the cigarette, grabbing the drink, grabbing the coke.
The pattern is thinking about myself that way.
When I get some ambiguous data from the world, someone doesn't look happy.
Oh, it's about me.
Rather than, you know, there's this negative attribution.
It's like there's an addiction, there's a stuckness that's self reinforcing too.
Once you're in there, it's hard to get out, just like with a drug.
And I think the same thing with PTSD.
There's this kind of stuckness.
Robin Carhartt Harris calls it a canalization.
And so he very much focuses on the brain and the way the brain activity gets entrenched in certain patterns.
Yeah.
Psychedelics can unwind all of it.
Right.
Like shake up the snow globe.
Wow.
Or the way Mendel Kalen, a Dutch researcher, did work in London with Robin.
But so it's like you're sledding or skiing down.
A slope, and if it's a well worn track, like you fall into the grooves of the previous sleds or skis.
Yeah.
But like psychedelic experience is like a big blizzard that just blasts the mountain with fresh powder.
So now you're like, oh, yeah, I kept following those tracks like into the trees there and hit those moguls that like screwed me up.
Like, right.
I was like, oh, I could just kind of turn more easily and take that fresh powder into this area.
And you still have to make the decision yourself, but you're a little bit less stuck, a little more ability to get some traction.
And what so it's interesting to me that, like, one of the key this is obviously these therapeutic effects that we're discussing now are effects that you get from psychedelics that last a while, where you're like forced to be reflective.
DMT Entities and Aftermath Reflections00:14:19
Now, how do you contrast that with things like DMT, where it only lasts?
It's like it's not five methoxy DMT, yeah.
Or I've never had five methoxy DMT, but like DMT is so much different than those because it's like it's not you're not even in your body, you're just.
You're gone, your soul ejects.
And then when you come back, often people don't remember a lot of the things that happened.
Yeah.
So it's an open question.
Yeah.
But it does appear that there are plenty of therapeutic reports from DMT experiences.
So I think there's, it's such a complex thing, psychedelic treatments, in terms of like what's the mechanism.
I think there's a lot of mechanisms.
Part of it is that kind of deep reflection during the experience.
Where that's where something like even LSD can be better, perhaps, than psilocybin.
You just have more time.
Right.
Like hours and hours and hours, like to be in the thing.
Because sometimes in a psilocybin session, you're like, it's like three in the afternoon, and the person says, you know, like being in the room with the person as a guide, like, oh, I think the effect's starting to wear off.
I'm getting a little, oh, I just kind of like, it was rough at the beginning, and now I'm just starting to get into it.
And you say, oh, don't worry.
You know, there's plenty of time.
Just sink into it.
Just relax.
But you're thinking, like, oh, no, they're totally right, man.
It's like, I hope the magic keeps happening because, like, yeah, this drug's wearing off.
You got another half hour, maybe.
But with LSD, it'd be like, oh, man, it's.
Yeah, like, yeah, keep your seatbelt on, you know.
We got another five hours.
But so, yeah, on the other side, DMT, you know, to the degree that there's that conscious, and get all of this is speculation.
It's not that there hasn't been studies comparing DMT to LSD to psilocybin that's controlling for all the other variables.
But educated speculation.
So, yeah, DMT, it's like deep immersion.
Just if there's the conscious thought is like, how do I get through the next microsecond without.
Being shredded to bits, like just breathe, you know.
Just there's not the time to contemplate.
Oh, that thing I said to my wife or girlfriend last week was I too insensitive about that?
Like, but you know, like, yeah, maybe I should call my mom more often, you know.
That, like, yeah, but that stuff can happen in the aftermath of DMT, so we don't know how much the therapeutic impact, like a lot of that comes after psilocybin, too.
Like, what do you mean the aftermath?
Well, just the it was called afterglow, even the old LSD papers back in the 50s, but.
Like the next day, where someone feels, yeah, the drug effect is gone, but like someone's still like they're psychologically reeling.
They can be euphoric.
It's not necessarily euphoric, but it can be, but they're just still.
And there's some sense like if it is the plasticity that's unfolding, that's part of the therapeutic equation.
That's where a lot of the magic is happening.
And that might be why the so called integration seems to be important.
Like just the idea of like talking with the therapist, and we could probably do a lot more with that because that's all it's ever been done is talking.
What if you have homework during that time?
Oh, yeah.
And I think, like, what if the experience is one of empathy and how, okay, all right, now what if for the next month you volunteer at the nursing home or whatever?
You know, it's like, let's do like some homework during that time to actually concretize like those lessons.
But people, there is this sense of often there is an afterglow.
Sometimes it's fleeting.
Sometimes it lasts for several weeks, but the aftermath is more visceral.
And certainly people are contemplating the experience, you know, about what it means.
And so, I think that happens with any of these.
That can often happen with any of these drugs.
So, you know, how much is that actual thought process during the experience, the trip, and how much of it is that contemplation afterwards?
We don't know.
My sense is there's value in both.
And if DMT has therapeutic impact, which I believe it does, there's probably, it's probably weighted towards, you know, your integration after it.
Right.
But some of the lessons, like, okay, you don't have the time necessarily to have the deep, you know, contemplation about your relationship with your brother.
But at this just like mystical experience, unitive level, just this idea of having your self identity absolutely shredded and at least having some experience of just beyond words of existing beyond the story you've told yourself for a lifetime.
Yeah.
Like that can be there with DNT.
Yeah.
And so just in the aftermath of that, taking that as fuel for looking at things with a fresh lens.
Right.
And just the sense of the awe of like, oh, reality can be like, I thought reality was this.
Like, reality is like, I don't even know the edges.
Like, right.
Like, what in the world was that?
Like, I, some sense, again, there's a lot of speculation here.
I, to some degree, I think part of the value in psychedelics is that sort of existential shock, just sort of like panning out to be like, dude, like, your problems are here.
And like, like, you're alive and like, Just all reality is just this big miracle, and you're a part of it.
I'm feeling a lot of myself, this stuff personally.
It's like you can't explain, like, sometimes with these experiences, even with DMT, they're like, come out, it's like, this is weird.
Like, just this kind of like facing this idea of like, we don't even know why this is existing.
This is weird.
And how cool.
Like, God, thank God, thank whatever.
Yeah.
Like, and I don't want to mess it up.
Like, You know, like, you know, sometimes people are just so thankful for the miracle of existence.
So DMT can do that.
Yes.
Of just like, yeah.
There's also the other things that happen in DMT that seem to be consistent across people's experiences, right?
Like people see the Jaguars, they see shells.
Yeah, Jaguars or elves or code.
Some people say they see code specific.
Code, yeah, and that that I think there's a history of that with very a number of drugs of people seeing specific codes.
What do you make of that?
So, I think there's some potential for a reality there, but I'm also highly skeptical.
I'm sure that a bunch of it the question is how much that a bunch of it is placebo effect.
Like, if you hear you know McKenna's machine elves, that kind of nudges the dial up that if you're expecting machine elves, like, yeah, you may be more likely to see machine elves, yes.
Or, you know, self dribbling basketballs or whatever, or jaguars.
So, as a scientist, I always want to test this under double blind conditions and like test different drugs.
And because I've seen things, I remember one great participant that was in a couple of studies.
He was like in a dextromethorphan study, like what Travis was talking about, the robo tripping.
Oh, it's a ketamine relative.
So, it's nothing to, you know, dismiss.
I mean, it's a real hardcore drug experience, high dose dextromethorphan.
And he was saying, man, I've done like, Yopo down in Columbia, and I've taken ayahuasca and all these places, and I've taken like San Pedro and peyote.
It's like, and it's like, dude, like I've had my most far out psychedelic experience on a couch at a hospital in Baltimore on cough syrup.
But I remember some people in that study saying they thought, like, we actually kept them on their toes, said, oh, it could be one of these, I think it was 14 drugs, including like mescaline, it could be an amphetamine, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
And I think Travis talked about some about this.
I remember some people saying, Oh, I had Aztec imagery, like you know, so I think it was mescaline, you know.
So you see examples under double blind research that kind of makes you be a little bit skeptical of this stuff, but also I think about the entity thing, which does seem as distinct.
Like, I bet the flavoring of entities, like whether it's an elf or an alien or a basketball, that probably I'm guessing is shaped by you know what you've heard and what society you're in.
If your society talks a lot about.
Gnomes and whatever, if you're in Ireland or if you're in the modern world or like aliens and like whatever.
But it does strike me, and we did some survey work on that, that just entities themselves, no matter what flavor, are just so common with DMT.
Yeah.
That perhaps that's, and we have no idea how this would be working, but somehow the DMT is tapping into some basic mental, like brain structures or brain function of the self and the other.
Like the assignment, like theory of mind is a term for it in cognitive psychology, like the.
Our modeling of the other.
Like, I'm assuming there's a part of my brain that's like doing this kind of like modeling of like, you know, what you're thinking, how you're responding.
And they call this theory of mind.
So, my speculation is that DMT probably does something very powerful in terms of tweaking with this machinery we have for sensing the other and for defining the self and object, you know, the self and other.
Or maybe they are entities and we're open.
Like Rick Strassman has speculated, I'm open.
I want evidence, but I'm open.
Maybe there's other dimensions and there's other.
I don't see any evidence for that, but I'm just saying there's a lot of thought out there on this.
Have you ever heard of Joe Rogan's fart theory?
Maybe if you describe it, not off the top of my head.
He used to talk about this theory he had called the fart theory, where basically if we didn't have smell or a nose and someone farted, you would have no clue.
You would just be sitting there basking in someone's fart.
Yes.
Right.
And most of reality is like that.
We don't have senses for most of reality.
Right.
That's the theory.
Like, if we didn't have, like, how many other things are out there that we don't have, we haven't evolved senses or organs to detect?
Right.
And if it's not functional, we wouldn't have evolved it.
Right.
I think about this with the psi phenomenon, which I'm very interested in.
So, the very, you know, whether it's telepathy and whatnot, I'm intrigued by the research.
Yeah.
And even informally conducted a little bit of this myself, not as a formal study at university, but just myself having read some of Rupert's.
Sheldrake stuff and replicate it like his telepathy.
Like, can you guess who's calling you on the phone in these controlled trials?
And so, my guess is that there's something there.
But my hypothesis with any of that, okay, if it is real, we've got to keep our skeptical hats on.
But like you're saying, like the fart theory, like we don't know what we don't know.
Like, we probably are aware of way less than 1% of reality.
If some of these extraordinary phenomena exist, if they're real, These are just ultimately, I would say they're natural, they're not supernatural because there's some level of nature we're just not aware of, right?
I mean, I think everything we know about science should point to that humility.
I mean, even with like color, like we see this insignificant fraction of the EM, um, the spectrum of EM, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you know, like sound doesn't really exist, it's just our interpretation of vibrations through the air.
We can't see infrared or near infrared light, right?
So that's that's Interesting thing, right?
And then there's like earthworms.
Earthworms only have a very narrow amount of sensory input, so like you could like touch an earthworm, pick it up, it would never even know you're there.
I didn't know that.
Wow, yeah.
And then you get into like, I think so.
Like Daniel Hoffman, or um, is this in uh, I think it's Hoffman, but he's been on some podcasts, including Lex Friedman.
Daniel, I think his last name is Hoffman.
His first name, I'm not 100% sure.
The Daniel Douglas, or anyway, okay, but his um.
I believe he's a psychologist, but very much is informed by physics.
And he's really very much focused on this idea that time space itself is just this illusion.
Donald, I had the D right.
Yeah, sorry.
Sorry, Dr. Hoffman, Donald Hoffman.
But yeah, he has a fascinating account that he says the evidence suggests that there's every reason to think that just time and space themselves are just kind of part of the GUI or the operating system.
That's the desktop.
And what's underneath, we have no idea.
It's like ultimately the machine code, the countless billions of on off switches that creates this.
You know, whatever the menu that we're we think we're operating on the Mac or the Windows, um, but that we're as disconnected from whatever reality really is as far as possible, even to the degree that time and space are just these kind of functional illusions, right?
So, I don't know whether that's true or not, but I think we need to have this humility with us, like you know, and you know, the physicists, I mean, they you know, talk about the potential existence, I mean, string theory.
Theorists talk about all these other dimensions that might exist that we're unaware of, and who knows?
But we should have some humility that reality might be so complex that we just.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think that is one of the downsides in science, like that I've tried, probably not, definitely not totally successfully, but to try to stay open.
I feel like the more you learn, the more you become a learned person, the more you kind of dismiss things.
And like, unless something's been shown to my satisfaction, It definitely doesn't exist.
Telepathy and Natural Selection00:07:59
That's definitely bullshit.
Whereas I think the right balance is like, okay, I'm not going to confirm something, or I'm not going to, but I'm also not going to summarily dismiss it.
So I think we should kind of think more of a Bayesian framework instead of saying, well, unless.
Have lots of strong opinions loosely held.
Yeah, be open.
And then kind of think more, okay, like how likely, let your number, maybe you're 95% likely to think that.
Or maybe you're 60% likely to think that the UAP phenomenon is extraterrestrial.
There's another percent that maybe these are advanced military things.
You don't have to be black or white.
You could be open and just say, we don't know.
And I'm interested in more evidence, but not kind of be in this framework that until something's been completely proven, I'm saying it's complete malarkey.
Because psychedelics were that way.
I mean, the whole idea, when I started working in psychedelics, it's like, That's it, sounded absurd to most scientists, most psychiatrists, psychologists like that experiences with psychedelics would help people overcome these mental health disorders.
Yeah, it sounds absurd because people say, Oh, no, I've seen people in the ER come and tripping on too much acid, and like that's it's not good for you.
Like, what do you mean, you know?
Like, right, um, yeah, yeah, going to like the idea of um, that like Rupert Sheldrake and the morphic resonance stuff, and the idea that.
That there's more out there that we can't perceive, you know, that exists.
I mean, there's definitely evidence of this stuff, right?
Like the telepathy stuff, the Stargate remote viewing stuff.
Like there is scientific evidence that this stuff is real to a certain degree, right?
It's been measured, and then there's been tons of money that's been dumped on it with the United States to actually do this stuff and use it for spying or all kinds of things.
I think there's a phenomenon there.
There is.
I think there's very likely.
I would put it at 90, whatever, 5 plus percent that there's a real.
And yeah, because I've delved into the evidence and I didn't take any of this seriously until one day, probably like 20 years ago, where a buddy of mine just dropped one of these telepathy papers on my desk coming down the hall.
I was like, John, take a look at this.
And I thought, oh, that's got to be bullshit.
I would have learned about it in graduate school.
Yeah.
And it's just a very suboptimal way of thinking.
I think that humans used to be way more.
I think it's possible that we, way back millions of years ago, Were telepathic, like straight up telepathic.
And language has actually gotten in the way.
Language, yeah.
Language and developing technology, like the written word, like being able to offload our memory.
Right.
Like we probably had amazing memory.
We could probably memorize everything because we would have had to survive, right?
We've already seen it in our own lifetimes.
Look at our dependence on cell phones from back when I was.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
Yep.
That.
You can't remember.
I used to know all the phone numbers.
Yeah.
Like now.
Yeah.
I think technology is just making our senses atrophy.
I think that makes sense.
And that reminds me of something I've thought about with these kind of extraordinary phenomena that may exist that natural selection is going to work on whatever works.
Yeah.
So if there is, whether it's something we're aware of or whether it's something more subtle, like whatever is behind the telepathy, if it's real, you know, whether it's some quantum entanglement, I don't know.
I don't think anyone knows.
But if it can be leveraged by natural selection, as long as there's variation and there's selective advantage.
And so, in other words, if this critter of whatever type nudged them just a tiny, tiny bit to be more likely to find that food or find the mate, had they not tapped somehow, had that thing that detected the quantum entanglement?
That's a random example, to be clear.
I do not know.
Or whether it's some other dimensions that we exist in that we're not aware of, like the physicists speculate on, we're going to use it.
We're going to use whatever natural selection is going to find a way through this seemingly infinite push towards variation.
Yeah.
And it's going to be co opted.
So there may be that, like, you know, if it helped us survive and.
You know, I mean, my dog does things that just.
Right.
Yeah.
Dogs exist.
I can't explain.
Right.
Like, just seems to know.
It seems to know when we're about to arrive at a destination.
She knows.
And even when we make stops in the way where we stop at a stop sign, so it's not about slowing down, but like when we get to the final, like somehow, again, it's not a controlled experiment.
I could be fooling myself, but I'm intrigued by it.
Like, it seems like there's some sense in like knowing when I'm going to come home.
Right.
Like going back to that fart theory, like there's you've everyone's heard the story of you walk into a house where there was a murder and like the energy's off, yeah, or like that just the general idea of bad energy in certain places.
That could be something that could that could be part of this whole thing.
We should be open to it, something that we could can't sense, or like you'd alluded to, your dog or or or a cat, like cats always have weird senses and they can they can smell energy on people.
And like sometimes dogs like people, sometimes dogs don't like people for whatever reason.
What do we, you know, they're how.
What is that?
What sort of an invisible layer or what sort of fucking energy is there that could be palpable if you had the senses that they had that were completely invisible to us?
And if you take Rupert Sheldrake's research seriously, and this isn't the morphic resonance stuff, it's like the telepathy.
He published a bunch of variations on this stuff and found that, again, unless you just dismiss it all, like what he reported, and Unless he made it all up, but it seems that there's a trait some people are good at, like bowling.
Some people are really good at it, some aren't.
And no matter how much you practice, some people are just never going to be that great at bowling, or you name the sport.
But some people really have that's both practicable, but also there's an innate talent.
And the same thing you mentioned the Stargate stuff, the people that were involved with those programs, they all talk about this.
Some people find these superstars that seem to be really good at whatever this is.
And that we're good at remote viewing, for example, and that it's not something everyone can do, but they're not necessarily to the same degree and not necessarily to something that's going to be functional for everyone.
But some people, like my wife, seems to be one of those people that just kind of knows things.
She kind of has these things in her family.
I think if there's something there, it seems like it runs in her family.
Like they're mountain people, and there's like Just these weird things that have happened that just these stories that just make you wonder.
Yeah.
And she has a sense for people like, watch out for that dude, like, and that turn out to be right.
That I was just oblivious to.
That's really interesting because there actually has been people who have studied and done brain scans of people who have been able to witness like paranormal phenomena or people.
Paranormal Risks with Dissociatives00:09:28
I think they took groups of people who witnessed paranormal stuff, whether it be ghosts or spirits or even UFOs, and they did some sort of study of them and they found out that their basal ganglia.
Yeah.
What was really dense with neurons or the caudate potamen?
I think that's a similar.
Yeah, I don't remember the particular areas, but yeah, I at least, yeah, I was aware of the headline level of these findings.
I don't remember what the significance of the basal ganglia or the caudate potamen was, but there was, you know, that would be interesting to understand.
Like, you know, is there any implication to that part of the brain or is there any way you can affect that part of the brain or that that part of the brain is affected by psychedelics at all?
I wonder.
Like, is there a way that if in a thousand years from now, if we're on the trajectory human beings are on right now, if it is true that we had some sort of more sensory abilities in the past that we've lost now, if you extrapolate that into the future and we lose more of them because of technology and technology is like, you know, technology is compensating for all this stuff now.
So we're not having it.
Like, I wonder if there's a way to.
Turn the clock back, maybe with psychedelics, or that's not the right way of putting it, or like to maintain some of that stuff with psychedelics.
Well, it reminds me of a title of one of McKenna's books, The Archaic Revival.
I mean, he very much viewed them in that sense, sort of like an ability to kind of kindle something that we've lost.
Yeah, perhaps.
And it's, yeah, it makes sense.
I mean, it's sort of like, you know, it's a different way of looking at it because, like, obviously, the traditional way of studying psychedelics is you have to get funding to treat things like that are serious issues like depression, PTSD, and things like this.
But can we, at what point will we be able to study psychedelics and do serious research on it for enhancing the human experience or upgrading the experience?
Human consciousness.
So that's what I'm most interested in.
And we've done some of that, even the older work with, and you would say, you know, with the religious professionals that could be described in that fashion.
But I'm kind of more interested in, I think, along the lines that we're talking here.
And, like, for example, if these are learning enhancers, how radical can we push that?
Like, I've heard some interesting stories about people changing their, like, in a different culture where they speak a foreign language and that, like, psychedelics help them.
Really?
Like adapt to that, like in a single evening on LA?
I don't know.
Could be baloney.
But I know enough to take that seriously.
Like, could you learn a language more rapidly with psychedelics?
Could you.
And I mean, if you take any of this sort of call it whatever you will, the psi phenomenon seriously, can psychedelics.
I mean, psychedelics have a history.
Those basically researchers went two separate ways after the 60s out of mutual self.
Preservation.
Right.
This guy in Britain, David Luke, has very much been focused on the connection between psychedelics and psi phenomena.
Okay.
So, I mean, that, you know, these far, and I think Franz Vollenweider, the Swiss researcher, has done some, I think he was doing, I don't know, I don't think he's published anything, but I believe he was doing something with whether people could have a shared experience when they're in different rooms.
So, basically, something along these lines of, Telepathy.
Oh, really?
On psychedelics?
Yeah, I believe that.
Have you ever?
It was the case, and I don't know that it was ever completed, or maybe it's ongoing.
Have you ever heard any anecdotal stories?
Oh, yeah.
Like countless stories.
Really?
So people like doing DMT together or something?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And people even being in different locations and knowing something weird happened.
And there was some survey work that suggested that these types of.
Abnormal experiences are really high with dextromethorphan.
Which is the robo tripping.
Oh, okay, okay, okay.
Which is really interesting because, again, it's a ketamine relative and the wild stories, for example, John Lilly with the alien communication.
I mean, people get weird.
I knew a guy, actually, a university, not at any place I worked.
I don't, I want to keep him squarely anonymous, but a university professor who I believe started taking dextromethorphan pretty frequently before depression.
Just on his own, and he really smart guy, um, really interesting guy.
But he started, as he described it, like living in multiple timelines at the same time.
Like the dissociatives, you get some wild stuff.
So, I don't know, I don't know how much you know about like Lily with his dolphin research, and yeah, he started believing like there was a solid state in intelligence, yeah.
And he, you get really smart people on really high dose, frequent dissociatives, and you get some wild stuff, like so.
Who knows how much of it is like, you know, is somebody, is their brain just able to go deep, deep, deep into delusion and create post hoc stories?
Or is there something fundamental about how dissociatives can kind of tap you into some, who knows, speculative, like other dimension or something that might underlie these abnormal, paranormal phenomena?
I don't know.
We always have to keep both in mind.
Maybe just like the highly intelligent, crazy people are always like very interesting because they're able to go further into like the wild shit.
Right.
Yeah.
I always wonder what came first.
The drugs or that personality type?
Because the people I know that have done the most psychedelics, they seem to be the most interesting, intelligent people to begin with.
So was that their first, or were the psychedelics part of that?
I'm guessing it's just some of both.
Like a lot of it's usually the cop out in intro psychology textbooks.
And it turns out to be both.
It's both.
They start out.
The uninteresting answer.
Yeah.
They start out with a little nudge to be more.
And that's part of why they chose to use psychedelics, because they're a little more on the edge.
A little more interested in the stuff out there, a little higher risk taking.
And then they go even further once they start getting some acid in their system and talking to the aliens.
Yeah, what were you saying about John Lilly with the solid state?
Yeah, he thought he was in communication with, like, he had this bizarre language.
I won't be able to recreate all of it, but like this highly complex alien civilization that was sending signals.
He was like going crazy on ketamine towards the end.
Yeah, he almost drowned a couple of times.
His wife pulled him out of a pool, apparently, once he just felt.
Face down and on dissociatives, like Matthew Perry, like died on in a hot tub on ketamine.
Like, you got to watch out with like a lot of drugs.
Like, but dissociatives, people can drown in like a few inches of water because you're just anesthetized if you take too much.
And you don't have that basic instinct of, you know, getting jostled up when you need to take a breath of air.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the Lily's experience reminds me a lot of, I don't know if you know the author Philip K. Dick.
Oh, yeah.
So, Maybe my favorite book ever is Valus of his.
Okay.
So it's like that was, and this was a true story.
It was fictionalized, but it was about his life experience of thinking that he was contacted by this super godlike alien.
It's never clear.
And it's from one dimension, it's clearly, he described it's a psychotic break from one lens.
But from his experience, it was like he was.
He had this religious sort of alien intelligence download of information that just changed the course of his life.
And he actually wrote that book about the story.
It's called Valus, the most psychedelic book I've ever read.
But he also wrote something that I haven't read.
I think it's called The Exigenesis of Philip K. Dick, where I think it's thousands of pages, but it's about the actual download.
It's the direct information, it's the.
Yeah, what he felt like he downloaded from the alien godslash whatever intelligence.
He was doing tons of coke, wasn't he?
I think he was doing everything.
And he ended up being very anti drug.
I mean, A Scanner Darkly had a very anti drug.
A lot of his work ended up having very much sort of like this is sort of 70s, post 60s, like watch out for the drugs, kids.
Cocaine Fueling Creative Genius00:09:29
Like you can go overboard.
Why are some of the best artists, musicians, and writers.
Why were, what is the connection between them and tons of alcohol and coke?
Yeah.
Like there's an obvious pattern here.
The disinhibition from alcohol, like the loosening the bound, and then the stimulation from the cocaine to kind of counteract the downside of alcohol, like the sedation.
Right.
So, I mean, cocaine and alcohol together, they actually, they, Alcohol changes the metabolism of cocaine.
So you actually get.
It changes the metabolism?
Yeah.
So you get another psychedelic, I'm sorry, not psychedelic, but another stimulant compound, cocaine derivative from the metabolism when you're also consuming alcohol.
And so you actually get a synergistic effect.
Wow.
Yeah.
Sort of like with cannabis for people that take it orally, one of the metabolites that you don't get when you smoke, when you take it orally, is one of the metabolites when it's broken down in the liver is also a cannabinoid that has very potent.
Psychoactive effects.
So, kind of a similar thing, but alcohol will.
So, they go to hand in hand, coking and alcohol.
And I don't know that.
And you have like famous artists, like musicians specifically, that once they go sober, their art just starts to suck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's some examples to the contrary, but yeah, I think that's a real thing.
There's definitely.
Yeah.
I think there's some examples to the contrary.
You want to think there's still hope?
Like, it's like, yeah.
The person's burning themselves out.
Of course, it's true.
And there's plenty of old rock stars that say, like, I finally had to give the stuff up and like, but you have to look back and you're like, would the, I don't know, these like bands that were just wild, like, would they be who they were without wild drug use?
And probably not.
And it's not always just the psychic, you know, which, you know, cannabis and the psychos.
Sometimes, oh yeah, it's like crazy Coke and alcohol, you know, like Metallica.
They were really, really, really heavy drinkers in the early days.
And like, To what Eddie Van Halen, yeah, like all of those classic, like, yeah, all of those first several albums, like Coke and alcohol, like, he was drunk all the time, apparently, and just like, how could he do it?
And is it just that it's amazing that he did it and wasn't held back by those, or did they actually enhance, right?
I don't like you have to be open to it, you don't want people to do these, they're very dangerous doing a bunch of Coke and alcohol, yeah, but it just seems like there's an enhancement, it seems like there's some sort of It seems like it strengthens some sort of a connection to something, to some sort of like it unlocks some sort of creative thing that may not be inside you that they could be tapped.
I don't know.
Maybe they're tapping into it.
I don't know what it is.
I'm sure you're familiar with that book, The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, where he talks about the muse.
Yeah.
It's all this idea that, like, you know, if you can meditate and focus on writing, or he was a writer, so he would like write for X amount of hours, and all of a sudden, like, this weird sort of.
Consciousness would start to flow through him, and he called it the muse, where just like everything would start to click like the creative, like all the creative juices are just flowing instantly.
And, uh, you know, it maybe there's a shortcut to that.
Maybe you just do a ton of blow and you know, get blasted on vodka, you could just immediately tap right into that.
So, maybe part of it, just thinking behaviorally, when people talk about the muse, it's like, well, you got to be in front of the typewriter or the computer or whatever, have pen and paper in hand.
It's just like you got to make yourself available for the muse.
So, That may be where the Coke comes in handy.
Right.
And the alcohol to take the edge off the Coke or vice versa.
Yeah.
Like they sort of complement each other.
But that providing that fuel to be just like, okay, now I'm going to sit down and throw some cigarettes in there.
Yeah.
That like, and just you're just spending more time at the typewriter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like whether it's Hunter S. Thompson or any of these, like there's all these cases of like Stephen King, Wild Rider.
All of his fucking books on.
Was that alcohol or Coke?
Alcohol and Coke, I think.
Okay.
Yeah.
Another.
Yeah.
I think when he wrote Cujo, he was just doing mountains of Coke.
Wow.
And bands, I mean, like MC5 talked about plenty of that.
They just come to mind.
I remember reading an article years ago about them saying Coke was a huge part of their creative process, which is, you know, and some people say with stimulants, they're more tunnel vision.
It reduces their creativity, but they can focus.
But then others say, like, no, man, that was, you know, made me incredibly creative.
Right.
Maybe that, and this is all speculative, but maybe that's where the alcohol comes in to create that synergy.
Yeah.
And we know very little about.
Like drugs themselves individually.
So there's almost no drug.
I mean, there's some drug interaction research, but certainly nothing along the lines of creativity for anything.
So we don't know that scientifically.
I'd love to point to, oh, well, the 1979 study by so and so just doesn't exist.
I was reading this story the other day, this article where they interviewed somebody from the Rolling Stones and he was talking about how back in the day when they would perform their live shows, they're like, go to festivals and perform all day, like do, you know.
Multiple 40 minute sets that they would just have a giant pile of cocaine behind the subs, like the subwoofers and stuff like that.
You know, they had massive stacks of speakers and subwoofers.
And like just right behind it, they wouldn't have to go backstage.
They would just walk behind the speakers and they would get cocaine manufactured from Merck.
Yeah, so it was 100% pharmaceutical grade.
And the way they were explaining it in the article, and maybe you could confirm or deny if this is possible, but they were saying that you would not get the come down from Coke.
Because from this merc cocaine, they're saying, like, typically when you do cocaine, just like you do any stimulant that like hammers your dopamine receptors, there's going to be a price to pay at the end of it.
There's like a come down effect where you start to go through hell.
And he was saying that that didn't happen with this merc.
So I'm skeptical because you know, they mean just like pure caffeine, like you get a come down from caffeine, you know, and you're going to get a come down from stimulants.
But I'm also open to the idea of just speculating here, maybe to the degree that some of the adulterants, and there's a lot of adulterants in most cocaine.
What's an adulterant?
Oh, just other stuff they throw in there.
Oh, okay.
Like to cut it.
Yeah.
Okay.
And sometimes horribly, you know, just, you know, what it could be anything.
I mean, which is kind of scary.
Whether it be a nerd or something that has some effects itself, you know, that's thrown in there.
But to the degree that some of those adulterants, those other things they throw in to thin it out, could have negative side effects, maybe some of those are accounting for.
So that could be some truth.
You'll probably get some degree of a come down of.
Even pure cocaine.
Right.
But maybe it is less so to, you know, depending on what the, you know, street coke is cut with.
Right.
But it kind of makes sense.
I mean, just, I mean, not too long ago, I remember watching all of these.
I'd seen them before, but I hadn't really focused on, but these, there's these videos you can see on YouTube.
It was in the Rolling Stones, it was called Rock and Roll Circus.
So there's a live studio performance where they had this whole audience there and the Beatles were in the audience and other bands.
And I don't know why I bring up just a random.
But it was like, you know, in the day, and like Brian Jones was still alive.
So it was still relatively early days for the Stones.
And just like Mick Jagger.
I mean, he just.
The energy that he put in.
I mean, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
He was totally coked up because he was so just like.
Oh, yeah.
Like so alive and so just on the edge and just such a good performer.
And I don't want to send the message you got to be on Coke.
Coke is very dangerous.
But I also want to.
It's like.
Yeah, like, you know, drugs are very powerful tools, people, good and bad.
And it's just kind of mind blowing because you hear this, you know, like, oh, yeah, Mick Jagger and whatever is 80 years old now.
And like, there was a reason they became who they were.
It's like, it's remarkable just, you know, the passion and just his performance.
He takes his shirt off and he's just like so connecting with it.
And it just strikes me that he's like, Connecting so strongly with the audience and just is like he's firing on all cylinders.
Yeah.
But that seems like a total Coke thing.
Yeah.
Like, 100%.
100%.
Those guys, I mean, that, I mean, it was just, I think it was just a normal part of life during probably the 70s and 80s and rock and roll, you know, just rock and roll and drugs were synonymous with each other.
And, you know, I don't think it was, I mean, I don't know because I didn't live through it, but I imagine there wasn't the amount of stigma that there's around it today.
Regulating Harmful Drug Use00:08:12
Yeah.
But, like, you know, there's always an argument to be had is that's like if coke was legal or if heroin was legal, would that be better for society?
Would there be less deaths?
Would there be less people dying from this stuff being cut with things like fentanyl and all this other stuff?
And, you know, also on top of that, you have education.
People understand what it is, they understand what the downside is, they understand what the upside is.
Yeah, regulated doses.
So, you know, exactly, you're not accidentally, oops, there's a bunch of.
Fentanyl, there you didn't know about.
Right.
Now you're dead.
Right.
Right.
So, like, what are your thoughts as far as like all drugs being legal?
Or, I know there's certain countries where you can do like supervised injections of certain drugs.
Right.
Is there any sort of real argument that that would be beneficial?
Yeah, there's certainly an argument.
And is there, like, is there, do you think there should be a limit on like the type of drugs that could be, that should be legal?
Yeah.
It's sort of by analogy, it's sort of like if you believe in the Second Amendment, you probably don't think people should be able to construct nukes in their basement.
It's okay, so where is the line?
Like, what's the.
Totally.
You know, like there has to be some line.
You're going to get good and bad no matter what.
And so if you legalize and regulate it, and I tend to like to think more in terms of regulation than in legalization because.
Legal or illegal because you know, alcohol for kids is illegal and it's illegal for anyone driving, and many prescription drugs of abuse they're illegal unless you have a prescription.
And even in my studies with psychedelics, they're schedule one, but they're not illegal for us to use in these studies.
So, and even you know, caffeine in the form of coffee or tea, there's no regulation at all.
But even in over the counter Vivarin or Nodose, like you know, you can't just put whatever you want in there, that's regulated, you can't go over 200 milligrams.
So, it's like there's a lot of nuance that we don't normally appreciate, and um.
I do think we need more regulation, like, we should move more towards regulation across the difference rather than just throwing it in the black markets and pretending it doesn't exist.
So, there are strong data for various levels of harm reduction, like supervised injection sites, and, you know, especially if you have a known supply.
I mean, things like opioids, you can reverse almost all opioid overdoses with naloxone, Narcan.
And so it's like, yeah, if you just have a nurse or, you know, medical professional there, like it's not going to happen.
So, there's definitely an argument there.
At the same time, if you, I wouldn't want, Highly addictive drugs easily gotten, you know, at the 7 Eleven.
But even if there were steps to jump through, it's like, you know, like a, you know, liquor store, there's really no, you have to be of age, but, you know, cannabis, you know, stores in legal states, like, you're definitely going to get an increase in people that, oh, I'm curious to try that.
And you're going to get some harms.
You're going to probably see.
And it would probably be one of those things where eventually, if it was to normalize, like, it, You'd probably end up with less harm by having everything transparent and regulated.
Right.
But you'll probably go through a period where it's going to get really bad because, like, yeah, a lot of people are just going to decide to try opioids or cocaine or methamphetamine and they're going to really like it.
Right.
And they're going to do too much and it's going to destroy their lives.
And there's going to be other, like, with all of these drugs, most people who try them don't go on to become addicted.
But, 10 to 30 percent do, depending on the drug.
Right.
And we can't dismiss that.
So I'm definitely for moving away from treating drug use and possession as felonies and misdemeanors.
Like that just seems to me there's just mountains of evidence that suggest the harms outweigh the benefits.
And then there's the elephant in the room of cartels and people like smuggling drugs across the border and, you know, all the violence and killing that happens.
And human trafficking and everything.
Black market.
Yeah.
Right.
And you can't call the cops or sue someone.
Yeah.
You solve it with murder.
I mean, same thing.
We did it with alcohol.
We tweaked with our constitution twice in that experiment.
We created Al Capone and the rest.
And I think it's been a bad experiment, drug prohibition.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be levels of control that match the drug.
I mean, the control you have over a much more dangerous drug is not going to be what you should have over.
Cannabis, even where cannabis is legalized, it's like it's kind of absurd that some states put someone on like this list yet they register you, you know, like whatever.
It's like, well, I could go over there and just buy a couple of fifths of Jack enough to kill me, right?
To show my ID, but like you're not recording that I did it, like it's just kind of crazy.
Yeah, you can literally go right across the street and buy enough alcohol to kill yourself for sure, but easily, yeah, that is not possible by smoking weed unless you're in a room, unless you get in your car and fucking drive off a cliff or get a car accident, right?
Right, but but the this, the The substance itself cannot kill you, right?
Right.
And even with accidents, so it's like people do not drive, please do not drive intoxicated on any of this.
But we know through very good behavioral pharmacology research that the intoxication from alcohol is far worse.
So your chances of an accident are increased at a 0.08 alcohol level of about 14 times.
It doubles with cannabis, which is not good, but it's nowhere near as bad as 14 times.
Right.
You know, so and the nature of the intoxication is different.
Get trouble with like alcohol, and same thing the second biggest uh drug in fatal accidents is benzodiazepines like Xanax, which is the same basic mechanism of alcohol, it's working on the GABA system in the brain, which is the major kind of gross um motor impairment.
It just slows everything down.
Cannabis, where people have troubles with things like divided attention, it's like kind of going into the zone on cannabis, which for certain things, if you're like playing chess or something, or like right, it like maybe could be great, but.
If you're driving, you know, you can be in this zone, but it's people fail at, yeah, yeah, divided attention tasks is what they're called.
So if a ball comes out of nowhere and a little kid, you know, like whatever, right, it's that where cannabis people are screwed up, which is not as bad as the gross GABA impairment, but nonetheless, it's very clear, you know, which is why people can get, I think, on the ground.
Sometimes people by these comparisons can get over, like, I think it's pretty common in, you know, cannabis using communities to, like, yeah, it's driving, it's fine.
It's like if you know what you're doing, don't be a novice, but, you know.
It's still increasing your chance.
It's not just because it's not nearly as bad as alcohol doesn't mean it's good, right?
It's like, yeah, if you ever kill someone in an accident, man, you're living with that the rest of your life, right?
You know, like, right.
So, and I think a lot of people who would never drive drunk, or certainly wouldn't maybe they did once or twice and then they regret it, but like a lot of people who would never routinely drive drunk and think it's okay would, yeah, drive stoned.
And it's like, it's not good.
And I think even like a lot of cannabis users were as they get older, like, yeah, probably not a good, yeah, like.
Not so good.
Yeah, no, I've met people and I know people who have been smoking weed their whole life or abusing psychedelics their whole life, where when they get older, you notice they're like, their world seems a little bit more slippery than mine.
Pushing Boundaries Safely00:05:13
Like, it seems like they're a little bit more disconnected from the world.
You know what I mean?
Where it's like maybe it's.
And I've never heard anyone explain to me, I've never heard of any.
Situations where someone has used a psychedelic and like not come back or like stayed perma tripping.
Have you ever heard of anything like this?
So, yeah, I think that's pointing to something real, but it's not that they're permanently tripping.
So, those are cases of where people where the psychedelic helped to instigate a psychotic break.
Oh, okay.
So, I think all the evidence points to the notion that the people that that happens in are people who have a Either active psychotic disorders and schizophrenia is one type of psychotic disorder, it's the major class of psychotic disorders.
Um, or they have an identifiable predisposition, right?
So, like people, because the first break typically happens in adolescence or young adult adulthood when the people play with drugs for the like adolescence and young adulthood.
And so, you get cases like Sid Barrett, the first uh singer of Pink Floyd, seems pretty clear.
I don't think his family ever admitted it because these are you know difficult things, but he showed all the same, he seemed like he was schizophrenic.
And he did a lot of acid.
Oh, really?
And it seems, but he seemed like he, it seems this is all, I'm not whatever, this is just from the record.
And, you know, I wasn't alive.
I was born in 74, I wasn't alive.
But, like, that he showed those signs and he was the type of person that the acid pushed him over the edge.
And so I think that's the kernel of truth.
There's other cases of less famous people, you know, where that happened.
I mean, I put it this way if you're kind of dangling, if you're tethered to reality with a dangling thread, the last thing you need is a strong psychedelic, which at least the whole point is, at least temporarily, is to obliterate that thread and disconnect into the consensus world to explore the mind, to explore ideas, to whatever, explore consciousness.
But Yeah, so we've never seen a person so far.
There could always be a first, but in the hundreds of trials of psychedelics in both the older era, the 50s and 60s, and in the modern era for the last 20 years or so, of someone who's been screened out where we do look, and there's pretty easy ways with the psychiatric screening to identify people with that predisposition through like structured psychiatric interviews by clinicians.
There hasn't been a case so far of people being, you know, becoming psychotic because of.
Of being in one of these psychedelic trials.
It's not to say it's impossible.
Maybe if we approve them and we're treating thousands and thousands of people, it could happen every once in a while.
We don't know.
Right.
Certainly not common.
What is going on with Elon?
Are these videos of him?
Is he just like in a K hole or something?
I haven't seen.
So someone said the other day, and I've been out of town on another trip before I was here, and someone mentioned the stuff with Elon, which I apparently there's talk about bladder issues, and I haven't caught up on the recent Elon news.
Normally I'm a pretty.
Pretty up on the Elon stuff, but I know, of course, for a while now, people have been saying he does a lot of K.
I don't know, you know, yeah.
He apparently, well, there's been people that are saying he's like on ketamine and other psychedelics.
Um, and then there's like these videos of him, one of the inauguration, another one like last week, where he's in the Oval Office with Trump and he's just sitting there and he's like, there's like his eyes are rolling back in his head and he's like moving his head around like this.
And you know, the public speculation is that he's just freaking blasted on ketamine.
Could be.
I don't know.
I don't want to defame Mr. Musk.
Lots of great research you could fund, Mr. Musk.
But joke aside, I have no idea.
I do think people need to keep in mind that, I don't know, especially for public figures, like there can be a lot of reading into, you know, like he's also not your average person.
So, you know, there may be some awkwardness there that will help them.
And those people are already so much different than us because they're.
You know, their life is under a microscope, so you can't go anywhere without people chasing you down, taking photos of you.
Imagine then when you introduce psychedelics into that, I wonder what the fuck that I mean, Kanye, Jesus Christ, oh my god, yeah, that you know.
So, would you have interviewed Kanye?
I know he kind of went on a podcast circuit, that's one of these interesting questions.
Okay, yeah, I would interview, yeah, and what about now?
Yeah, okay, okay, so you really are like all conversations, yeah, I'm not, I mean, I'm not like, I'm not like acting.
Pursuing it, but yeah, of course, the opportunity arose.
Kanye West and Performative Blame00:02:44
I would fucking love to talk to him.
That's interesting.
Yeah, no, I mean, he's he's uh, there's something going on with him where I think he's just trying to push the boundaries as far as he possibly can with like this performative, yeah.
I don't think a lot of the things he said he's saying is, I don't even think he understands what he's saying, nor is he genuine.
He's a performance artist with his life, he's trying just to push the boundaries of the human mind and staying off argument now, you know.
But it's interesting, like the Lex Friedman interview with him, it seemed like he was like bending over backwards to get him to, like, whatever, provide some context.
You don't really mean, you know, like, and I think even when Alex Jones interviewed, same thing.
And so then you get like Alex Jones begging him, yeah, no amount to not say the crazy thing.
Yeah, it's like, yeah, yeah, there's no amount of reason you could present to him that would persuade him to think about it differently, which is, yeah.
You know, it feels like it's just an art project for him.
Yeah.
To me.
Yeah.
You know, I think I was, his interview, Gavin McGinnis did an interview with him and he stated in the beginning of the interview, he was like, I'm going to try to persuade him to drop the idea of anti Semitism.
He's like, and his whole thing was like, it's just a rut.
He's like, you want to blame the Jews because it's raining on your birthday.
That's just a pattern that you can get in to make excuses for everything in your life.
You know, it's like, and Gavin's like, this is like the people, the black folks in the inner city blaming whitey for all their problems.
Now you're going to blame the Jews for all your problems.
And, you know, statistically, our Jewish people, they're more high IQ, low testosterone.
They're better at systems, they're better at operating systems, you know, managing money, building big businesses.
Okay.
So just because that they're better at you, Just because they're better at doing these specific things, and maybe a little bit of maybe some of that has something to do with the fact that they went through a holocaust, they were almost extinct, so maybe they're more motivated to succeed and propagate their race.
You know, that can't you can't just blame them for all of your problems because of that.
You know, that's just a he and Gavin did a great better job of explaining this than I can, than I am.
But jealousy is a real thing, it's a rut, it's a rut you can get in, and that's a pattern that you can get stuck in for with everything in your life.
But yeah, anyways, that was an interesting time.
That was an interesting time when Kanye was going through all that stuff.
Exorcisms and Haitian Beliefs00:07:28
Probably no drugs needed.
No, he was on a lot of drugs, bro.
Oh, he was.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
He was doing, I mean, first of all, he was put on a lot of antidepressants, I think.
Okay.
Yeah.
Medications.
Yeah.
Lots of medications.
And then he was really hooked on nitrous.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
He was doing lots of nitrous oxide.
Ooh, that's rough.
I don't know.
I mean, that could have some effects like ketamine and dextromethorphine.
Oh, definitely.
That could really, yeah, that's the NMDA antagonism in the brain.
But also just side effects.
Man, the neuropathy.
That's something people don't want to get hooked on hippie crack.
You start getting nerve damage.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
It's something to do with, like, I think, absorption of B12 vitamin.
Yeah.
Okay.
That you get nerve damage, and it's a real thing.
Yeah.
There was another gas that Hamilton was explaining to me.
It wasn't nitrous.
Is it xenon?
Xenon, yeah.
I saw that.
I think that was one of the.
You're saying George Peterson did xenon, I think.
Really?
I think he said that when he went to.
I could be wrong.
So that was not the first, but one of the first Hamilton episodes.
I'd seen clips online and stuff from Vice, but in terms of his show, that was the first one.
And I remember thinking, he's in a roll.
He's about to take, like, essentially an anesthetic, and he's on a rolling chair.
On a concrete floor in some garage.
You're like, dude, you're an expert on trucks.
Lay out a mattress, just get on the ground.
It's just like he's just like rolling to you.
And then he breaks out a condom.
I couldn't find a balloon, so he's got a condom.
I mean, he's just like filling the tank over the condom.
It's just like, I was just thinking from having run all these countless, like, you know, drug administration studies, it's like, I was thinking, like, you know, like, just safety.
It's like, my God, you got a rolling chair on a concrete floor, dude.
That guy is wild.
Yeah, man.
He's a fucking renegade.
Some of his early vice docs are crazy, like going in the middle of the Amazon and getting that.
Toad venom put on him.
Yeah.
He went to, uh, where did he go?
He went to Haiti and he met with the zombie cult.
There's a zombie religion in Haiti.
Okay.
Did they use like scopolamine?
Yeah.
They get the drugs from the pufferfish that paralyzes you.
And they had this powder, this zombie powder.
Where, I mean, Hamilton went out there and there was this guy, I forget what they use for the name of the guy who's the head of the zombie cult, but he was basically like, I have this powder.
He's like, if you just touch it, you will be zombified.
And if you, if you, if you put too much of it on you, it can kill you.
And then, uh, Hamilton's like, okay, let's try it.
And then he like puts a little bit of it on his arm.
He's like, I'm not feeling anything.
Then he does a little bit more.
He's like, the zombie powder is not working.
Then the guy got mad and he like stormed off and like kicked him off because it seemed to be more of like a psychological thing.
Oh, wow.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
It's like when you grow up, the idea of it is that when you are grown, raised, and indoctrinated into this belief system that zombies are real.
And this kind of stuff works, then these drugs will start to have an effect that bolsters your belief system.
So your belief system and the drugs reinforce each other, and they're so intertwined, you don't even know what the difference is.
So, to some degree, it's like the faith healing effect, where I think people legitimately get up on the stage with the televangelist and he touches your head, and you just pass out.
Yes.
And I don't think people are snake handling it.
People aren't faking that.
That's a real.
If you want to believe, if you really believe something, and you know, so I could imagine with this, uh, you know, zombie drug that there's some effect there that, yeah, or like the same phenomenon as the old, like, 1980s, the karate masters to doing all the crazy stuff that would just like barely touch you and you'd go down.
All the students that they're, I think most of the students aren't faking that.
I think they're just bought into this.
I think exorcisms are the same thing.
Interesting, yeah.
There's tons of videos online that we were watching a couple weeks ago of these exorcists doing stuff, and then they're like, I command you from Jesus Christ.
They put the cross on their head and these people start like twisting, like convulsing and their eyes are rolling into the back of their heads, talking like a demon.
I wonder if the phenomenon of exorcism has changed at all pre and post 1973 The Exorcist, which I watched again recently.
What a wild film.
But I wonder if that helped to flavor, like if it's a cultural phenomenon.
Right.
Like you were saying, yeah, like that might have helped to change the flavor of, like people say with aliens, like once kind of the prototype.
That's interesting.
1950s UFO, like in everyone's experience.
Yeah.
I wonder if there's any videos or recordings of exorcisms before that movie came out.
Yeah.
Because the whole, like, yeah, the talking like that.
Yeah.
Like, yeah.
The head spitting.
I had an exorcist on the podcast once.
Really?
Yeah.
And I was at, we got into a big argument about drugs because he thought that drugs basically were the devil.
He's like, if you use drugs, you're going to hell, like any kind of drug.
And then, you know, I was kind of asking him, like, well, what if it's.
You're prescribed cannabis by a doctor.
And then he was like, Oh, well, in that case, it's, you know, it's different.
You know what you're doing here.
Stop trying to play these games with me.
He's like, Only if you're on the street and you're using these drugs in a bad way to get high, then you're going to go to hell.
So if in your living room with a couple of buddies and just kind of having a deep conversation, where is that at on the street?
Right, right.
You're not on the street.
You know, it's just a complete ignorance of the drug, right?
Obviously, the guy's never experienced it.
He's just You know, came up with his understanding of the Bible, and he's monetized being an exorcist because he charges money for it.
He charges like 250 bucks, I think, for an exorcism.
He doesn't want Skype.
Oh, okay.
That is serious grift.
Like, oh, dude, next fucking level.
That's like exercising by Skype is pretty.
Yes.
It's so.
Was that a long time ago, or is he just like old school?
Like, he's got Yahoo, not Gmail.
He's like, I'm doing Skype.
He still does Skype.
He still does Skype.
He charges, I think, a premium for the in person.
But he does, I think he says he's done.
How many exorcisms did he say he's done?
I'm pretty sure it was 10,000.
Over 10,000 exorcisms in his lifetime.
So that's fascinating as a personality because he's obviously, like, even within religious folks, like, exorcism is pretty open.
He's pretty wild.
He's pretty out there.
But then, you know, he's like, you do any drug and you're, like, going to hell.
He would be one of the people that I would like to hold down and get him high.
You know?
Because I was explaining to him, I was explaining, like, One of the biggest revelations I have when I get high are things that are like, for example, one of the most common things that happen, ideas that I have when I get high is that, like, I need to spend more time with my kids.
Everything else is bullshit.
You know what I mean?
Like, how is that the devil?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
Viagra, Stigma, and Sexual Performance00:14:42
It's looking at, like we talked about already, it's looking at everything from a different perspective and finding that ground floor base reality of what's most important to you.
And you get that with clarity.
Yeah, with psychedelics and also with cannabis, people will, you know, will talk about a perspective change where it's kind of just more obvious what their priorities are, that zoom out effect, things like that.
Like, or realizing, I don't know, contemplating the times like, oh, like, I shouldn't have talked to so and so like that.
I should have, like, done, I should have been more patient and this, you know, like.
You know, probably less likely people are like, I should have been more of an alpha and just like punched that guy out for that.
It's like the opposite.
Right.
One thing I wanted to talk to you about earlier, but we kind of got off track, but I wanted to learn more about your actual studies that you did in regards to cocaine.
And was that before the psychedelic stuff or did that lead up to it?
That was concurrent.
That was concurrent with the psychedelic stuff.
Yeah.
So I always like did the psychedelic sort of like.
The psychedelic research on the side because, like, there was hardly any funding for it.
So I kind of kept my day job, so to speak, by getting these grants to do research with cocaine, which I also found very interesting.
How do you get a grant to do research with cocaine?
You apply to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
And so, what I was, I did some research when I was a postdoc after I got my PhD on, like, the interactions between cocaine and nicotine and caffeine.
But the more interesting stuff was the stuff that I, I conducted as principal investigator, got my own grant.
I had a line of research where I took behavioral economic models.
So, a lot of my work has been using like economic concepts and studying human decision making to understand drug use and addiction.
And so, I developed these models from behavioral economics called delay discounting.
So, offering people a choice between smaller, sooner versus larger, later amounts of money.
And people who are addicted to whether it's cocaine or cigarettes or anything.
Tend to be more immediate focused.
They tend to take the smaller sooner at the expense of the larger later.
And so I applied that to cocaine and sexual risk.
I did this with methamphetamine and alcohol too.
Drugs that are associated with risky sex, like which can lead to HIV and all kinds of whatever unintended consequences, unintended pregnancy.
But asking people hypothetical decisions about if you were in this.
This content, you met this person at a get whatever somewhere, and first they pick out amongst these all these like 60 photos what person they'd have casual sex with, as long as they're getting along, you know.
And so it's kind of fun for people, it's like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever gender is something there for everyone.
You could pick one gender, two genders, all of the above, you know, whatever, whatever you're into.
And then from that, we do these tasks of like asking them, okay, so let's say they're down.
Would you use a condom or not?
Just like your likelihood on a scale.
And they make the rating.
And typically, even like high risk people, like cocaine addicted people, would say, you know, there's some exceptions, but they'd say, no, I'm very likely to use a condom.
But then you say, okay, now you got to wait five minutes.
You're having unprotected sex now or waiting five minutes.
And then different delays.
Like sometimes it's an hour, it could go up to like next day, you got to get together tomorrow.
But you could see that as you had to wait to use sex with a condom, you would see that would drastically change.
Is this their function?
They would shift towards unprotected sex, and then we got people loaded on cocaine, so we administered cocaine to them, and it didn't touch those money decisions.
So, whether they'd want the $50 now or $100 in a month, but for these sexual decisions that had a strong effect, they'd be like, No, I'm down now, like they're on cocaine.
And so, to me, it opened up a lens of like, This is where it's not just this association of cocaine, with it's like if you talk to people like they're you know heavy cocaine users and they'll just do like wild stuff.
Like, I remember stories of like one guy in a treatment study I was running.
We'd have him talk about context in which they would use cocaine.
He's like, okay, a lot of times I hang out with my female cousin.
This is a guy.
And it's like, we'd get, you know, we'd get high.
And let's just say we'd move from the kitchen into the bedroom and she wouldn't be my cousin anymore, if you hear me.
Like, things like this.
Like, there's all kinds of things that people.
And there's a good number of folks that would, you know, they identify as straight.
But once Coke's in the system, it's like, wow.
Yeah, that story doesn't hold up.
And they start divulging this stuff when they're on cocaine?
Well, those stories come from people, you know, not when they're on cocaine.
But I think it seems like very credible because they're not like, I see.
Nothing new or positive.
These aren't things to brag about.
Like, yeah, just people I've been able to talk to in the context of these studies.
Because I always like, whether it's cocaine or psychedelics, like, I've really valued sitting down and really talking to people.
Like, and a lot of scientists that do the type of thing I do, there can be a judgment, and like, well, these are cocaine users.
Or, you know, like, it's like, no, like, tell me how, like, how do you score coke in Baltimore?
Where do you, oh, you call it like Ready Rock.
What's that?
Oh, it's like, it's a Baltimore thing, you know, like, okay, do you sell it like $5 amounts?
Like, you know, how do you do it?
Like, what would you say?
You know, just, I want to, you know, oh, the different types of heroin on Eastside, Westside, Baltimore.
Like, I want to know, like, all these things that people, you know, like, you know, understand, like, what people are, what's motivating them and, like, how, like, just the, sociology.
Of the drug use environment and what's motivating people.
And so I've really valued that aspect.
So I'll usually take the time to, you know, really get to know people and try to understand these things.
And some of it is in the context, like the guy with his cousin, that was in the context of, yeah, as part of the study, we're having them talk about the environments that they normally use in.
But yeah, so cocaine and sex, though, go like, and same thing with methamphetamine, they go hand in hand.
You ask any.
Oh, with methamphetamine, same thing?
Meth and sex.
So any.
Psychomotor stimulant and sex.
They are like strong.
How do you experience that?
People get randy.
And so, and I showed for the first time, even though, you know, anecdotally, like anyone could have told you this, it's been around cocaine a lot, but we showed under double blind conditions that just cocaine increases sexual arousal to a substantial degree.
So people get horny when they're on cocaine or methamphetamine.
Sometimes, more so with cocaine, sometimes, not always, it interferes with the ability to perform.
Right.
So, for the male Viagra, right?
I don't know if you heard the story.
This is this dude named Dan Bilzerian, he was like a playboy type guy who was always running around on yachts with like tons of women.
Yeah, he had a heart attack in his 20s.
He explains he was in Vegas doing coke for like three days straight.
He said that he went to go have sex with this chick and he couldn't get it up, so he ate like four Viagras and he started to have a heart attack.
He had to go to the ER and he had like ended up having like two heart attacks or something.
Wow, yeah, not a good combination, especially in your 20s.
And a lot of people have used it.
Same thing can happen with MDMA, but like so Viagra.
I think about 25 years ago, at least it was in some headlines, people would call it sextasy, like the combo of like MDMA or ecstasy.
So, does that have the same effect?
Viagra.
Well, yeah, like what just counteracts.
Yeah, MDMA can cause impotence.
Oh, really?
So, it's like one might feel more romantic and cuddling up and everything, but if they want to seal the deal, right.
So, same with Coke.
Not always, but it just, yeah, it's like heavy alcohol.
Uh huh.
The will might be there, but things may not function totally.
Sure.
But nonetheless, it's enough of it, it's not a black or white thing, you know, because there's plenty of that's one of the issues.
That's how I got the grant funding to look at these drugs, both meth and coke.
So, hypothetically, there's a lot of HIV because of with heroin, it's more of injecting.
With coke and meth, it's more of like, no, I just, you know, got loaded and did some crazy stuff.
And a lot of it's like, like men on the, you know, there's a thing that was called, it was on Oprah decades ago, Brothers on the Down Low.
Like, Probably because of stigma.
I was like amongst African American men that didn't want to admit that they occasionally or more than occasionally had male partners, but then they didn't tell their, they kept it from the female.
So there was a transmission of HIV.
Oh, wow.
Because they were having anal sex with males, but then higher transmitting.
Which is higher, more chance of getting HIV that way?
Much.
Yeah.
Dramatically.
Which is like, and sometimes I think we don't do the public a service because it, you know, we're too prudish.
It's like, no, like, yeah, unprotected anal sex is like.
Right.
That was always the issue.
Yeah, if you drink cocaine, you're more likely to get AIDS because you're going to roll the dice if you don't have a condom.
So, the answer is have a condom on you.
Right.
Especially gay cokeheads out there.
Keep condoms on you.
It's not a bit because this is Pride Month.
We're doing them a service.
Yeah, because you don't know where things like people I worked with, it's like, yes, you meet someone at the laundromat, one thing, whatever.
I actually wanted to do some research on, didn't get the funding for it, but just trying to encourage people to carry condoms on.
Like high risk populations, men have sex with men who have a history of sex that they regret, you know, with novel partners unprotected.
But just to like reinforce them, like, if we text you like a few random times a week and you happen to have a condom in your wallet, we'll give you 10 bucks.
Like, just to get them in the habit of just like, just carry a condom on you.
Right.
Right.
Which would really help because, you know, you could be moralistic and puritan and say, oh, no, you shouldn't.
But like, okay.
Right.
Like, whatever, at least because what my research showed me was that not always, but most of the time, when these supposedly high risk populations had the choice, they would say they'd use a condom if they had it there, right?
But when they're rolling, like, and when it's not just the coke, but also just the you know, breaking the action, you know, biology's happening, and it's like someone's got to stop and say, Hold on, do you have a right?
No, right?
What's the phrase a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush or something?
What is it, two in the hand is worth no.
Yeah, a burden to Hannah's worth two in the bush.
Yeah, right, exactly.
I'm not going to risk this opportunity right now.
Oh, yeah.
Maybe she or he will, whatever, second guess.
And just once things are going, you don't want to put the brakes on.
And you add coke to that.
Yeah.
And it's like even gas on fire.
Yeah.
So, hypothetically, not that me or anyone I know would ever do such a thing, but in a purely scientific laboratory setting, if somebody was on cocaine and their PP didn't work, What drug would they use?
Well, they would use Viagra.
That would be the other, or Cialis.
But those are not safe combinations.
Well, first of all, cocaine's not safe.
Right.
Well, if you.
So this is all a relative conversation.
And there will always be, well, there's some exceptions, but virtually a combination of two things is almost always riskier than taking one thing.
Right.
So two drugs.
Exactly.
Is usually more risk.
So yes, there's risk.
But most toxic drug effects are dose and frequency dependent.
Meaning, yeah, the guy taking four Viagra is like, one thinks, well, couldn't he have tried one?
Right.
Maybe he wouldn't have had a heart attack.
He still could have, still a risk.
But I don't understand though.
So the Viagra is just like a vasodilator, right?
So, how would that hypothetically, mixed with cocaine, cause a heart attack?
Do you know?
I don't know.
Cocaine can be a vasoconstrictor.
Right.
I'm not even sure a cardiologist wouldn't.
Cardiologists probably would know something about how Viagra calls a cardiac event, but no one probably knows specifically about the combination together.
I mean, we know cocaine.
I mean, simply at the level of increasing blood pressure and pulse, like you do that with anything, which is why, even to a mild degree, psilocybin can be a risk for.
A heart, a cardiac event in people at severe heart disease risk.
Oh, really?
Because it has a modest effect on blood.
But these are the same people that they could have a cardiac event going up a couple flights of stairs, or it's actually pretty common, like people having sex.
Guy shows up to the ER, like having sex with his wife or whoever.
Totally.
Like anything that raises your heart rate up and your blood pressure for people who are at severe risk can push them over the edge.
So even psilocybin can be a risk and very, which you weed people out and research easy to check their blood pressure.
But yeah, yeah.
Wild.
Yeah, that's a.
It must be hard being a drug researcher in America.
This is, I bet you this is probably one of the most difficult countries to get that kind of shit done and funded.
I don't know.
I mean, we're just, we're bigger on research.
I know there's been a cutback in the current administration, but we've traditionally been conducted more research than other countries.
Drugs as Biological Technologies00:09:15
Oh, have we really?
But yeah, yeah.
I mean, the NIH in the US is a big.
So, for example, in terms of drug abuse research, NIDA, which is part of the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the biggest funder of research globally.
Oh, wow.
So, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, America's always this like interesting mix because, like, yeah, you have all kinds of opinions and we started the war on drugs, but we've also like we twisted everyone's arm and the rest of the world into it.
And then we start like legalizing cannabis state by state and the rest of the world's like, hold on, dude.
We've been doing this for 100 years because you told us.
We had to.
Right, right.
Which he'd black us from all the trade agreements and everything.
And now, so, but you also get, I mean, I think, you know, America is the best place to be.
I mean, whether it's business, science, I just, the level of creativity and I'm biased, I'm an American, but just, you know, the openness and just that kind of spirit of going into the unknown is kind of, it's a human trait, but I tend to think culturally it's something that America has an extra dose of.
And so, in terms of science, I mean, yeah, like we've been killing it for a long time, relatively speaking.
I mean, certain areas of science have definitely gotten stagnant.
But relatively speaking, I mean, we've, you know, we've been a powerhouse.
What is your like ultimate view of where all of this psychedelic research could take us?
Do you have some sort of like ideal goal in your mind to where it could take humanity?
Or, like, what kind of problem, like, what is the ultimate problem you think we could solve with it?
This is a big one, and I don't know whether it's ever solvable, but if psychedelics could be leveraged to help solve the hard problem of consciousness, in other words, explaining why phenomenal consciousness, the awareness itself, like, there's no scientific explanation for why that exists.
Why is this not just one big system?
That's behaving, you know, it's doing its thing like billiard balls, and that includes me.
Like, there could be a robot me, you know, we essentially are like we're biological mechanisms.
We could, we seem to be able to explain all the parts.
None of that explains why there's an inside experience.
So, it may be unsolvable by science, but we should be open.
But if there's any class of drugs that might play a role in that, the psychedelics seem a good bet.
Understanding how, and you know, as far as I'm concerned, there's all it's all speculation in terms of why, you know, as some of the theories suggest, maybe there's some level of complexity in the brain computationally that all of a sudden then creates consciousness.
I'm skeptical of that because that seems kind of magic, and other more panpsychist theories are about, you know, perhaps it's baked into the nature of reality itself, right?
Like some of the basic forces in physics.
I don't know.
But perhaps something, you know, if it's anything we can get a foothold in mechanistically, maybe these very altered conscious experiences with psychedelics can be used to help us figure that out.
But, you know, maybe not.
And then ultimately, I see psychedelics going down.
I think we're going to look back and see basically pharmacology, drugs in general is like so crude.
Like we dump things into our blood system, we eat them, inject them.
Yeah.
And there's a.
Like countless off target effects.
Like, eventually, I think it's going to be replaced by brain technology where we're going in, we're stimulating these specific neurons in these specific ways.
And even before, like, it may be much more directed pharmacology.
Like, these compounds don't just like flood our system, but they go, no, they go to somehow we're able to make them have effects just in this brain region, just on this subtype of neurons and have this particular.
Affect this receptor and have this particular post receptor signaling effect.
I just think it's going to get more and more specific, and that in combination with brain technologies to, because ultimately it's just affecting the brain, whether it's through putting in a chemical that has an effect on brain receptors, or if it's something like, you know, these days like TMS or using magnets, which is just, that's going to look very crude one day.
As we, I mean, you have like what, you know, we mentioned Elon, you know, Neuralink, technologies like that are obviously going to go.
I mean, they're going to advance and probably.
So I kind of see drugs in that mix, you know, like as merging with or being one type of or being a more specific form of technology that is able to, you know, change conscious experience in desirable or undesirable ways through this biological manipulation.
And everything we're doing now is just very crude with drugs or with whatever you have.
Yeah.
Cancer treatments and things like this.
Yeah, the history of cancer treatments.
So I sat through a talk a few years ago, it was amazing.
And they were describing all of these drugs that were thrown out years ago.
And now we're like, oh, now that we genotype people and realize, for this 13% of people, this is a miracle drug.
And now we know it's toxic, and these other people, these people, it saves their life.
And so, I mean, we might be able to go in and say, with your genotype and with your general history, you need exactly like, You know, this number of milligrams of this drug and this amount of this other drug to like more tailor, maybe in combination with some of these other technologies like brain stimulation.
Right.
But, you know, I think it's going to be kind of a race between that and AI and which might make all of this a moot point and like genetic engineering.
Like, I think when we think about where we're going in terms of our minds and bodies, like, it's pretty clear, like, very, very, very soon, like, We're just going to be editing our genes and we're going to be engineering the course of our evolution, right?
Like, if that doesn't happen, if we put mandates in prohibiting it, like, we can't go through the next couple hundred years, maybe the next hundred, maybe the next 20 years.
Like, that's going to happen.
You outlawed some crazy dude.
There's already been some of this in China where the guy wasn't supposed to do it and supposedly put him in jail.
Like, we're going to be doing that.
And there's every reason to believe.
One of the most fascinating talks I've ever seen is this guy that focuses on intelligence and genetics and said that the same number of genes that code for height code for intelligence.
I think it was something like 5,000.
Really?
And there's every reason to believe that through, you know, artificial insemination and selecting the right fertilized egg, that we are going to be able to move this out five standard deviations.
And everything we know through artificial selection, with, you know, everything from horses to dogs to, like, there's every reason to believe that we can move IQ up five standard deviations through selective breeding.
And he was saying, if you think that there's moral qualms in the people you know about, he's like, And he was ethnically Chinese.
He happened to be, he said, let me tell you, there's no Chinese family in China.
You know, we're talking culture, not race, clearly.
Right.
There's no family in China that would turn this down, the opportunity.
So I think about stuff like that.
How do drugs affect that?
Like, if we're already moving to this environment where there's going to be this, we don't even know what that means to have an IQ that's five standard deviations above normal.
Right.
Like, and what that means.
Will result in.
I mean, it's literally Khan from Star Trek, the Rathic.
That was his story.
He was a genetically modified super intelligent human and they ended up trying to take over the world.
And, you know, so like, how do drugs interact with all of these other things like AI and editing the human genome for intelligence and whatever?
Maybe for altered.
Maybe you want your kids to have, yeah, I don't want my kid going through life without mystical experiences.
We're going to edit the genome.
To have more openness and mystical experience, oneness with God, whatever.
Wow.
In the gene, you know, like, you know, I don't know.
Like, because there certainly seems to be genetics to like religious susceptibility and interest and, you know, like many human traits.
And so, why not code that in?
Editing Genes for Mystical Experience00:00:44
So, then how's that going to interact with psychedelic drugs?
Right.
Wow.
Are psychedelic drugs going to be a moot point?
With all these other changes.
Right.
Yeah.
Matt Johnson, thank you for doing this, man.
Thank you, Dave.
It's been super fun.
Three hours flew by like nothing.
Wow.
Tell people where they can learn more about what you're doing or get in touch with you, any of that stuff.
Probably best way on X is drug underscore researcher.