Transcript for #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics

Yeah. You can categorize them by their chemical structure. So, fenethalamines, triptamines, urgolines. That is less of a meaningful way to classify them. I think that their pharmacological activity, their receptor activities, the best way. Let me start even broader than that because they're talking about the classic psychedelics. So broadly speaking, when we say psychedelic, That refers to, for most people, a broad number of compounds that work in different pharmacological ways. So it includes the so-called classic psychedelics. That includes psilocybin and solosin, which are in mushrooms. LSD, dimethyl, triptamine, or DMT that's in Ayahuasca, people can smoke it to mescalin, which is in peyotein, San Pedro, cactus. And those all work by hitting a certain subtype of serotonin receptor, the serotonin 2A receptor. It's the act as agonists at that receptor. Other compounds like PCP, ketamine, MDMA, Ibo gain, they all are more broadly speaking, called psychedelics, but they work by very different ways, pharmacologically, and they have some different effects, including some subjective effects. Even though there's enough of an overlap, in the subjective effects that, you know, people informally refer them as psychedelic. And I think what that overlap is, you know, compared to, you know, caffeine and cocaine and, you know, ambient, etc. Other psychoactive drugs is that they have strong effects in altering one's sense of reality and including the sense of self. And I should throw in there that cannabis more historically like in the 70s has been called a minor psychedelic. And I think with that ladder definition, it does fit that definition, particularly if one doesn't have a tolerance.

Well, as far as we know, all of the psychedelics of all the different classes, we've talked about their major activity is caused by receptor level events. So either acting at the post receptor side of the synapse, in other words, neurotransmission operates by one neuron releasing neurotransmitter into a synapse, a gap between the two neurons. And then the other neuron receives. It has receptors that receives and then there can be an activation, calls by that. So it's like a picture and a catcher. So all of the major psychedelics work by either acting as a picture, mimicking a pitcher or a catcher. So for example, the classic psychedelics, they fit into the same catchers myth on the post receptor posts synaptic receptor side as serocone in itself. But they do a slightly different thing to the to the cell to the neuron than serocone and does. There's a different signaling pathway after that initial activation, something like MDMA, works at the pre synaptic side, the picture side, and basically it floods the synapse or the gap between the cells with a bunch of serotonin, the natural neurotransmitter. So it's like the picture in a baseball game, all of a sudden, just sort of throwing balls like every second.

So the classics, psychedelics, there's... What are the classics?

Right. It would be good to kind of define their, you know, their effects, like how they're different. And so it includes LSD, psilocybin, which is in mushrooms, masculine DMT, which one is a masculine. Mescalin is in the different cacti. So the one most people will know is is payote, but it also shows up in San Pedro or Peruvian torch. And all of these classic psychedelics, they have at the right dose, you know, and typically they have very strong effects on one sense of reality and one sense of self. What some of the things that makes them different than other more broadly speaking psychedelics like MDMA and others is that they're at least the major examples. There's some exotic ones that differ. But the ones I've talked about are extremely safe at the physiological level. like there's like LSD and psilocybin, there's no known lethal overdose. Unless you have like really severe heart disease, because it modestly raises your blood pressure. Same person, it might be hurt shoveling snow. We're going up the stairs, you know, that could have a cardiac event because they've taken one of these drugs. But for most people, you know, someone could take a thousand times what the effect of doses and it's not going to cause any organ damage affect the brain stem and can stop breathing. So in that sense, you know, it's they're freakishly safe at the fizzy a lot. I would never call any compound safe because there's always a risk. They're freakishly safe at the physiological level. I mean, you can hardly find anything over the counter like that. I mean, aspirin's not like that caffeine is not like that most drugs. You take five, 10, 20, maybe it takes 100, but you get to some times the effect of dose and it's going to kill you or call some serious damage and so that's that's something that's remarkable about these most of these classic psychedelics that's incredible by the way that you can go on a hell of a journey in the mind like probably transformative

So, bringing it back to Goggins, it's like you can do that without even destroying your near or whatever body.

I think we're coming close and writing that line.

And one of the ways that we're at differs is that you're unlike exercise. You're essentially, you know, most exercise required to really get to those intense levels. You really need to be persistent about it. I mean, it will be intense if you really ought to shape just, you know, jogging for five minutes. But to really get to those intense levels, you need to, you know, have the dedication. And so some of the other ways of altering subjective effects or or states of consciousness take that type of dedication. Psychedelics, though, I mean, someone takes the right dose. I mean, they're strapped into the roller coaster. And something interesting is going to happen. And I really like what you said about that distinction between the mind or the contrast between the mind effects and the body effects. Because I think of this. I do research with all the drugs, you know, caffeine, alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, legal, illegal. Most of these drugs, thinking about cocaine and methamphetamine, you can't give a regular user, you can't safely give a dose where the regular cocaine user is going to say, oh man, that's like, That's the strongest coke I've ever had, you know, because, you know, you get a past the ethics committee and you need approval and I wouldn't want to give someone something at Stanger. So to go to those levels where they would say that, you would have to give something that's physiologically riskier, you know, civil cyber or LSD, you can give a dose at the physiological level that is like, Very good chance it's going to be the most intense psychological experience of that person's life. And have zero chance for most people if you screen them of killing them. The big risk is behavioral toxicity, which is a fancy way of saying, doing something stupid. I mean, you're really intoxicated. Like if you wander into traffic or you fall from a height, just like playing people do on. High doses of alcohol. And the other kind of unique thing about psych, classic psychedelics is that they're not addictive, which is Pretty much unheard of when it comes to so-called drugs of abuse or drugs that people at least at some frequency choose to take, you know, most of what we think of as drugs, you know, caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, cannabis. Most of these, you can get into alcohol, you can get into a daily use pattern. And that's just so unheard of with psychedelics. Most people have taken these things on a daily basis. It's more like they're building up the courage to do it and then they build up a tolerance. They're in college and they do it on a day or can you take take acid seven days in a row and that type of thing rather than a self-control issue where you have and say, oh my god, I got to stop taking this. I got to stop drinking every night. I got to cut down on the coke whatever.

Right. So MDMA is the big one. And I should say that with the classic psychedelics, that LSD is sort of, you can call it a semi-synthetic, because there's natural, you know, from both Urgot and in certain seeds, morning glory seeds, as one example, there's a very close. There are some very close chemical relatives of LSD, so LSD is close to what occurs in nature, but not quite it. But then when we get into the other non-classic psychedelics, probably the most prominent one is MDMA, people call it ecstasy, people call it molly. And it differs from classic psychedelics in a number of ways. It can be addictive, but not so. It's like, you can have cocaine on this end of the continuum and classic psychedelics here, continuum of addiction. Continuum of addiction. You know, so it's certainly no cocaine. It's pretty rare for people to get into daily use patterns, but it's possible. And they can get into more like, you know, using once a week pattern, where they can find it hard to stop. But it's, it's somewhere in between mostly towards the, to the classic, like, psychedelic side in terms of, like relatively little addiction potential. But it's also more physiologically dangerous. I think that the certainly the therapeutic use, it's showing really promising effects for treating PTSD and the models that are used. I think those are extremely acceptable when it comes to the risk benefit ratio that you see all throughout medicine. But nonetheless, we do know that a certain dose and a certain frequency that MDMA can cause long term damage to the serotonin system in the brain so it doesn't have that level of kind of freakish bodily safety that the classic psychedelics do and it has more of a heart load a cardiovascular I don't mean kind of emotion I mean in this sense although it is very emotional and that's something unique about it's subjective effects, but it's more of a presser

So yes, that in the sense that you can't kind of push the dose up as high as you safely, as one can, if they're in the right setting, like in our research, as they can with the classic psychedelics. But probably more importantly, just the nature of the effects with MDMA aren't the full on psychedelic. It's not the full journey. So it's sort of a psychedelic with rose colored glasses on. A psychedelic that's more of it's been called more of a heart trip than a head trip. The nature of reality doesn't unravel as frequently as it does at a classic psychedelics.

That's true, relatively speaking. That said, at most doses and of classics, psychedelics, you still have a tether to reality. Chages a little bit when you're talking about smoking DMT or smoking five myth oxy DMT, which is some interesting examples we could talk more about. But with Yeah, with MDMA, for example, it's very rare to have what's called an eagle loss experience, or is the sense of transcendental unity, where one really seemingly loses the psychological construct of the self. You know, but MDMA, it's very common for people to have this, you know, they still are perceiving themselves as a self, but it's common for them to have this warmth, this empathy for humanity and for their friends and loved ones. So it's more, and you see those effects under the classic psychedelics. But that's a subset of what the classic psychedelics do. So I see MDMA in terms of its subjective effects is if you think about venn diagrams, it's sort of MDMA is all within the classic psychedelics. So everything that you see on a particular MDMA session, sometimes a civil-sciven session looks just like that. But then sometimes it's completely different with civil-sciven. It's a little more narrowed in terms of the variability with MDMA.

In terms of people's report of subjective experience, probably one of the most general things we can say is that it expands. that range. So many people come out of these sessions saying that they didn't know it was possible to have an experience like that.

Yeah, people like

So we do a lot of that with questionnaires, you know, some of which are very psychometrically validated. So the lots of numbers have been crunched on them. And there's always a limitation with with questionnaires. I mean, subjective effects are subjective effects. Ultimately, it's what the person is reporting and that doesn't necessarily point towards a ground truth. What their So, for example, if someone says that they felt like they touched another dimension, or they felt like they sensed the reality of God, or if they, you know, I mean, just you name it, people's ontological views can sometimes shift. I think that's more about where they're coming from, and I don't think it's the quintessential way in which they work. There's plenty of people that hold onto a completely naturalistic viewpoint and have profound and helpful experiences with these compounds, but the subjective effects can be so broad that for some people it shifts their philosophical viewpoint and more towards idealism, more towards thinking of the nature of reality, might be more about consciousness than about material. That's a domain I'm very interested in right now we have essentially zero to say about that in terms of validating those types of claims, but it's even interesting just to see what people say along those lines.

as much as what we can say about that through naturalistic psychology, especially as much as we can root it to solid psychological constructs and solid neuroscientific constructs.

I think very much so. And I think there's, I'm a little concerned, some of the science is going a little too far in the direction of around the edges, you know, speaking about changing beliefs in this sense, or that sense about particular domains. And I think what really what a lot of what's going on is what you just discussed. It's the priors coming into into it. So if you've been reading a lot of physics, then you might bring up space time and interpret the experience in that sense. I mean, it's not uncommon for people come out talking about visions of the, it's not the most typical thing, but it's come up in sessions. I've guided the Big Bang and the You know, this sort of nature of reality, I think probably the best way to think about these experiences is that in the best evidence, even though we're in our infancy and understanding it, they really tap into more general psychological mechanisms. I think one of the best arguments is they reduce the influence of our priors, of what we bring into the, all of the assumptions that we all that, you know, we're essentially especially as adults were riding on top of heuristic after heuristic to get through life. And you need to do that, and that's a good thing, and that's extremely efficient, and evolution has shaped that. But that comes out in expense. And it seems that these experiences will, will allow someone greater mental flexibility and openness And so one can be both less influenced by their prior assumptions, but still none the less the nature of the experience can be influenced by what they've been exposed to in the world. And sometimes they can get it at a deeper, in a deeper way. Like maybe they've read, I mean, I had a philosophy professor at the time as a participant in a high-dose civil society study and he's like, I remember him saying, my God, it's like Hagel's opposites to funny. I get it. I got this thing for years and years and years. I get it now. And so like that, you know. And even at the psychological emotional level, like the cancer patients, we worked with, you know, they told themselves a million times over the people trying to quit smoking. I need to quit smoking. Oh, I'm ruining my life with this cancer. I'm still healthy. I should be getting out. I'm letting this thing defeat me. It's like, yeah, you told yourself that in your head, but sometimes they had these experiences, and they kind of feel it in their heart, like they really get it.

I absolutely think there's huge potential there and it's there was some research in the late 60s early 70s that were it was very early and not very rigorous in terms of methodology but It was consistent with the, I mean, there's just countless anecdotes of folks. I mean, people have argued that just, you know, Silicon Valley was largely influenced by psychedelic experience. I remember the, I think the, the person that came up with the concept of freeway or shareware, it's like it kind of was generated, you know, out of, or influenced by psychedelic experience, you know, so to this, I think there's incredible potential there. And we know really, Next, there's no rigorous research on that.

I am influenced by the gosh that the incredible number of anecdotes surrounding these. I mean, Kerry Wallace, he invented PCR. I mean, absolutely revolutionized biological sciences. He says he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize for him and said he wouldn't have come up with that. Had he not had psychedelic experiences. Um, you know, now he's an interesting character. People should read his autobiography because you could point to other things he was into, but I think that speaks to the casting your nuts wide and this mental flexor more of these general, these general mechanisms, where sometimes if you cast your nuts really wide and it's going to depend on the person and their influences, but sometimes you come up with false positives. You know, you know, you connect the dots where maybe you shouldn't have connected those dots, but I think that can be constrained and so much of our not only a personal psychological suffering, but our limitations academically and in terms of technology are because of the self-imposed limitations and heuristics, these intrinsic ways of thinking. Those examples throughout the history of science, where someone has come up with the paradigm shifts. Here's something completely different. This doesn't make sense by any of the previous models. like we need more of those. I mean, you know, and then you need the right balance between that because so many that, you know, novel crazy ideas are just bunk. And you need, that's what science is about separating them from from the valid paradigm shifting ideas. But we need more paradigm shifting ideas in a big way. And I think we could, I think you could argue that we've because of the structure of academia and science and modern times.

Yeah, well, we need experiments, you know, and that's tied to kind of the policy level stuff. And I should be clear, I would never encourage anyone to do anything illicitly. But, yeah, you know, in the future, we could see these compounds used for technical and scientific innovation, what we need are studies that are digging into that right now, most of what the funding, which is largely from philanthropy, not from the government, largely what it's for is treatment of mental disorders like addiction and depression, etc. But we need studies, you know, one of the early initial stabs on this question decades ago was they took some architects and engineers and said, what problems have you been working on? Where have you been stuck for months? Like working on this damn thing and you're not getting anywhere, like your heads budding up against the wall. It's like, come in here, take, and I think it was 100 micrograms of LSD, so not a big session. And a little bit different model where they were actually working was a matter of enough dose where they could work on the problem during the session. I think probably I'm an empiricist, so I'd like to see all the studies done, but the first thing I would do is like a really high-dose session where you're not necessarily in front of your computer, you know, which you can't really do on a really high-dose.

I think that's where all the, and we're, again, where we're babies at this point, but my gut tells me, yeah, that it's the, it's the so-called integration, the aftermath. We know that there's some different forms of neuroplasticity that are unfolding in the days following a psychedelics, at least in animals. Probably going on humans, we don't know if that's related to the therapeutic effects. My gut tells me it is, although it's only part of the story, but we need big studies where we compare people, like let's get 100 people like that, scientists that are working on a problem, and then randomize them. And then I think you need a even more credible, you know, active controls or active placebo conditions to kind of tease this out. And then also in conjunction with that and you can do this in the same study, you want to combine that with more rigorous sort of experimental models where we actually get their problem solving tasks that we know for example that you tend to do better on after you've gotten a good night's sleep versus not and my my senses there's a relationship there in the people go back to first principles you know questioning those first principles they're operating under and you know, getting away from their priors in terms of creative problem solving. And so you, I think, wrap those things and you could speak a little more rigorously about those, because ultimately, if everyone's bringing their own problem, that's, that's, that's more in the face of all aside, but you can't dig in as much and get as much experimental power and speak to the mechanisms as you can with having everyone do the same sort of, you know, canned, you know, problem solving tasks.

There, particularly, I'm most interested in psilocybin and LSD. And I think we need to do a lot more with LSD because it's mainly been psilocybin in the modern era. I've recently gotten a grant from the have to research to do an LSD study. So I haven't started yet, but I'm going through the paperwork and everything. therapeutic meaning there's some issue and you're trying to treat that issue right right in terms of just like what's the most fascinating you know understanding the nature of these experiences if you really want to like wrap your head around what's going on when someone has a a completely altered sense of reality and sense of self they are I think you're you're talking about the the the high dose, either smoked vaporized or intravenous injection, which all kind of, they're very similar, pharmacologically, of DMT and five myth oxy DMT. This is like when people, this is what, I don't know if you're familiar with Terrence McKinney, he would talk a lot about smoking DMT, Joe Rogan has talked a lot about that. People will say that and there's a close relative called five myth oxy DMT. Most people who know the terrain will say that's that's an order of magnitude or orders of magnitude beyond anything one could get from even a high dose of psilocybin or LSD. I think it's a question about whether you know how therapeutic I think there is a therapeutic potential there but it's probably not as sure of a bet because one goes so far out. It's almost like you're not contemplating their relationship and their direction and life. They are like reality is ripping apart at the seams and the very nature of the self and of the sense of reality. And the amazing thing about these compounds and in the same to a lesser degree with the, you know, with oral cell, cyber and LSD is that Unlike some other drugs that really throw you far out there, um, you know, anesthetics and even even alcohol like it as reality starts become different at higher higher doses. There's there's this numbing. There's this sort of, um, there's this ability for the sense of being the center, having a conscious experience that's memorable, that is maintained throughout these classic psychedelic experiences, like one can go as far so far out while still being aware of the experience and remembering the experience.

Right.

One of the common methods for people to use is to smoke it or vaporize it. And it usually takes, this is a pretty good kind of description of what it might feel like on the ground. The caveat is it's it's it's it's a completely insufficient description of someone's it's going to be listening. It's like nothing you could say is going to come close. But it'll take about three big hits inhalations in order to have what people call it breakthrough dose. And there's no great definition of that, but basically, meaning moving away from, you know, not just having the typical psilocybin or LSD experience where like things are radically different, but you're still basically a person in this reality to go in somewhere else. And so that'll typically take like three hits. And this stuff comes on like a freight train. So one takes a hit and around the time of the first exhalation. So we're talking about a few seconds in, or maybe just, you know, sometime between the first and the second hit, it'll start to come on. And they're already up to, let's say, you know, what they might get from a 30 milligrams or 300 microgram LSD trip, a big trip. They're already there when at the second hit, but they're going, they're consciousnesses gear. This is like acceleration, not speed.

Okay. It's like you're just, those receptors are getting filled like that and they're going from zero to 60 in like, you know, Tesla time.

At the second hit, again, they're at this, maybe the strongest psychedelic experience they've ever had. And then if they can take that third hit, even some people can't, they're, I mean, they're, they're propelled into this. other reality and the nature of that other reality it will will will differ depending on who you ask but you know folks will talk often talk about and and we've done some survey research on this entities of different types elves tend to pop up yeah all the caveat is I strongly presume all of this is culturally influenced you know but Thinking more about the psychology and the neuroscience, there is probably something fundamental, you know, like for someone that might be colored as elves, others that might be colored as, um, I don't know, Terrence McKinnon called himself dribbling basketballs for someone else that it might be little animals or someone else that might be aliens. I think that probably is dependent on who they are and what they've been exposed to, but just the fact that one has a sense that they're surrounded by autonomous entities.

Right, and people come back with stories that are just astonishing. Like there's communication between these entities and often they're telling them things that the person says are self-validating, but it seems like it's impossible. It really seems like, and again, this is what people say oftentimes, that it's It really is like downloading some intelligence from higher dimension or some whatever metaphor you want to use sometimes these things come up in dreams where it's like someone is exposed to something that I've had this in a dream you know where it seems like what they're being exposed to is. physically impossible, but yet at the same time self-validating, it seems true, like that they really are figuring something out. Of course, the challenge is to say something in concrete terms after the experience that where you can verify that in any way. And I'm not familiar with any examples of that.

Yeah, and you mentioned young, and I think that's, he's particularly interesting, and it kind of points to something I was thinking about saying is that I think what might be going on from a naturalistic perspective. So regardless, whether or not there doesn't depend on autonomous entities out there, what might be happening is that just the associative net, the level of learning, The comprehension might be so beyond what someone is used to that the only way for the nervous system, for the, for the, for the aware sense of self to orient towards it is all by metaphor. And so I do think, you know, when we get into these realms as, as, as a strong empiricist, I think we always got to be careful and being as grounded as possible, but I'm also, willing to speculate and sort of cast in that's wide with with caveat, but you know, I think of things like archetypes and you know, you know, it's plausible that there are certain stories. There are certain, you know, we've gone through millions of years of evolution. It may be that we have certain characters and stories that are sort of That are central nervous system are is sort of wired to tend to Yeah, those stories that we carry those stories in us.

And we think about stories like our sense of self is basically narrative self is a story and we think about the world of stories. This is why metaphors are always more powerful than, you know, sort of laying out all the details all the time, you know, speaking in parables. It's like if you really get, you know, this is why as much as I hate it, you know, if you're presenting to Congress or something and you have all the best data in the world, it's not as powerful as that one anecdote as as the mom dying of cancer that had the psilocybin session and it transformed her life. That's a story that's meaningful. And so when this kind of unimaginable kind of change and experience happens with a DMT ingestion, It the stories of entities, they might be that, you know, stories that are constructed that is the the closest, which is not to say the stories aren't real. I mean, I think we're getting the layers where. What is really right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the closest we can come to making sense of it because I do what we do know about these psychedelics. One of the levels beyond the receptor is that the brain is communicating it with itself in a massively different way. There's massive communication with areas that don't normally communicate. And so it I think that comes with. Both, it's casting the net's wide. I think that comes with the insights and helpful novel ways of thinking. I do think it comes with false positives. You know, that could be some of the delusion. And so, you know, when you're so far out there, like with a DMAT experience, like maybe alien is the best way that the mind can wrap some arms around that.

I'm definitely familiar with it. I remember telling you all flying that when I first, the first time I learned who Joe Rogan was, it's probably 15 years ago, and I came upon a clip and I realized there's another person in the world who's in the both DMT and Brazilian Giu-Jitsu. And I think both those worlds have grown dramatically since and it's probably not such a special club these days. So he definitely got onto my radar screen quickly.

I mean, you know, it is all relevant because there's people that were, you know, before the late 90s and early 2000s were into it to say, you know, you're a Johnny come lately, but yeah, compared to where we're at now. But yeah, one of the things always found fascinating by by Joe's, you know, telling of his experience experiences, I think, is that they resemble very much Terrence McKinnas. experiences with DMT and Joe was talked very much about Terrence McKenna and his experiences. If I had to guess, I would guess that probably just having heard Terrence McKenna talk about his experiences that Joe's that that influenced the coloring of Joe's experience.

Right. But I also see some elements that seem to relate to Joe's psychology, get just from what I've seen in, you know, from hours of watching him on his podcast is that, you know, he's a self critical guy. And I think with always as positive, and I'm always struck being a behavioral pharmacologist and no one else really says it about cannabis. I'll get back to the D&T thing about he likes the kind of the paranoid side of things. He's like that you radically examining yourself. It's like that's not just a bad thing. That's you need to like look hard at yourself and something's making you uncomfortable like dig into that and like that's his it's sort of along the lines of of gogons with exercise and it's like Yeah, like things, learning experiences aren't supposed to be easy, like take advantage of these uncomfortable experience. It's why we call in our research in a safe context with psychedelics. They're not bad trips. They're challenging experiences.

Is it bad? Okay. All right. Great. You know.

Yeah, Joe's treating cannabis as a psychedelic, which is something that I'd say, like a lot of people treat it more like Xanx or like beer or vodka. But he's really trying to delve into those minus it's been called a minor psychedelic. So with D&T, as you brought up, it's like the entities mocking him. And it's like, you're not, I mean, this reminds me of him, you know, in describing his, you know, writing his or just his entire method of of of comedy. It's like, watch the tape of yourself. You know, don't just ignore it. Like, that's where I screwed up. That's where I need to do better. This like sort of radical self-examination. Which I think our society is kind of getting away from because all the children win trophies type of thing and it's like no, don't go overboard, but like recognize when you've messed up. And so like that's a big part of the psychedelic experience. Like people come out. Sometimes saying, my God, I need to say sorry to my mom, you know, like it's so obvious. Like or whatever, you know, interpersonal issue or like my God, I don't, I'm not pulling enough weight around the house and helping my wife. And, you know, these things that are just obvious to them, the self-criticism that can be a very positive thing if you act on it.

Yeah, and the lens is that I view addiction through very much our behavior like a nomic, but I also think they converge on, I think it's beautiful at the other end of the spectrum sort of just a completely humanistic psychology perspective. And it converges on what people come out of 12 step meetings talking about.

So behavioral economics, my definition of it is the application of economic principles, mostly micro economic principles. So understanding the behavior of individual agents surrounding commodities in the marketplace, applying micro-economic types of analyses to non-economic behavior. So basically, at one point, like psychologists figure it out that there's this whole other discipline that's been studying behavior just happened to be all focused on monetary behavior spending and saving money, et cetera. But it comes with all of these principles that can be wildly and fruitfully applied to understanding behavior. So for example, I've studied things like demand curve analysis of drug consumption. So I look at, for example, tobacco, cigarettes and nicotine products through the lens of of of of demand curves and in other words, at different prices, if there's different work requirements for being able to smoke cigarettes, sort of modeling price,

So I think a particularly important one there is elasticity or in elasticity, you know, two ends of the spectrum. So that's the price sensitivity. So for example, you could have something that's pretty price, inelastic like like gasoline. So the price of gas at times can keep going up and Americans are just going to pretty much, you know, buy the same amount of gas. Or maybe, you know, the price of gas doubles, but they're consumption only decreases by 10%. So it's a sub proportional reduction. So that's an inelastic. And in that change is like you push the price up high enough. I mean, if it was $100 a gallon, it would eventually turn the curve would turn and go downward more drastically and it would be elastic. But you can apply that to someone who regular cigarette smoker, who who is working for cigarette puffs, who has who's gone six hours without smoking and you're asking questions like How many times are they willing to pull this knob in the lab during this three-hour session and do a lot of work like this in order to earn a cigarette pot? How does the content of nicotine in that effect? It has the availability of nicotine replacement products like nicotine gum or e-cigarettes affect those decisions. It's a certain lens of a way to take the classic behavioral psychology definition of reinforcement, which is just basically reward, you know, how much is this a good thing? And it kind of breaks that apart into a multidimensional space. So it's not just the ideas reward or reinforcement is not unit dimensional. So for example, you can unpack that with demand curves. At a cheap price, you might prefer one good to another. You know, so the classic examples, luxury versus necessity. It's a diamond versus toilet paper. So at those cheap prices, you can look at something called intensity of demand. you know, if it was basically as cheap as possible or essentially zero, how much would you buy of this good. But then you keep jacking up the price and you'll see, so diamonds will look like the better reward at that low price sort of intensity, a demand side of things. But as you keep jacking up the price, you got to have some toilet paper. Yes. And again, we can get into the whole like the day thing, but forget that, you know, like, I know Joe has been pushing that to. You're going to hang on and keep buying the toilet paper to a greater degree than you will, the diamonds. So you'll see a crossing of demand curves. So what's the better reinforcer? What's the better reward? Depends on your price. And so that's one, that's an example of one way to, in that of look at addiction. So specifically drug consumption, which is, isn't all of addiction, but it's like, In order for something to be addictive, it has to be a reward. And it has to compete with other rewards in your life. And one of the two main aspects of addiction in my view, and this doesn't map on to how the DSM, the psychiatry Bible defines addiction, which I think is largely bunk, but there's some value to have some common description. But it's how rewarding is it from this multi-dimensional lens. And specifically, how does that rewarding value compete with other rewards, other consequences in your life? So it's not a problem if the use of that substance is rewarding. Okay, yeah, you like to have a couple beers every once in a while. It's like not a problem. But then you have the alcoholic who is drinking so much that it tanks their career. It ruins their marriage. It's in competition with these pro-social aspects to their life.

Right, right. And so it's not just the rewarding value, but it's the relative rewarding value. And in the other major aspect, again, from that behavioral economics, the thing that makes addiction is something called delayed discounting. So an economic, sometimes it's called time preference. It's what compound interest rates are based upon. It's the idea that delaying a good access to a good or a reward comes with a certain decrement to its value. So we all rather have things now than later. And we can study this at the individual level of, would you rather have $9 today or $10 tomorrow? And when you do that, you get huge differences between addicted populations and non-addicted. Not just heroin and cocaine, but just cigarette smokers, like normal everyday cigarette smokers. And even when you look at something like, you know, monetary rewards. And so you can go into the rabbit hole with with this delayed discounting model. So it's not only those huge differences that that seem to have a face valid, aspect to it, like the cigarette smoker is choosing this thing that's rewarding today, but I know it comes with increased risk of having these horrible consequences down their lines. So it's this competition between what's good for me now and what's good for me later. In the other aspect about delay discounting is that if you quantitatively map out that that discounting curve over time. So you don't just do the, you know, how much, you know, that $10 tomorrow, how much is it worth to you today? So you can say, what about nine, what about eight, what about seven dollars? And you can tie trade it to find that in difference point. And so we can say, aha, six dollars, you know, $10 tomorrow is worth six dollars today. So it's by the one day it's decreased by 40%. We can do that also. one week and one month and one year and ten years and map out that curve get a shape of that curve and one of the fascinating things about this is that whether you're talking about pigeons making these types of choices between a little bit of food now or a little bit of food a minute from out or rats or every like dozens of species of animals tested including humans the tendency is pretty consistently that we we discount hyperbolicly rather than exponentially. What exponentially means is that every unit of time is associated with the same proportional reduction. Every unit of delay is associated with the same calls of the same proportional reduction in value. And that's the way the compound interest rate works. You know, that there's, you know, compound every day, you know, you get this sort of out of whatever values in there at the beginning of that day, you get this, you know, we'll give you this amount of extra money to compensate you for that delay. But then The way that all animals tend to function is of this very different way where the reductions, the initial that initial delay. So like one day is worth a delay. You see a much stronger discounting rate or reduction in value. Then you do over those. So you see the super proportional, the changes to these lesser rates. And so the implication of that and I've gone like really into the weeds quantitatively. But what that means is that There's these preference reversals. When you have curves of that nature, the decay that's hyperbolic, it maps onto this phenomenon we see both in terms of how people deal with future rewards, but also how perception works. When two things are far away, whether it's physical distance or whether in terms of perception or whether it's in terms of time, when you're really far away, the value, the subjective value for that further that the laid reward is larger. So for example, let's say we're talking about 360, 364 days from now you can get $9 or 365 days a year. Now you get $10 and you're like, it's like, it's a year. No difference. I'll take why not get one more dollar. Yeah. You bring that same exact set of choices closer, nothing's changed other than the time to both rewards. And it's like, would you rather have nine dollars today or ten dollars tomorrow and plenty of people would say, ah, just about the sounds to go ahead and take it today. So you see this preference reversal. And so that is That's a model of addiction in the sense that consistently with true addiction, I would argue, you see this competition between molar and molecular utility. intra-personal, like within the person competing agents. Someone sometimes has control of the bus that wants to do what's good for you in the short term and someone, at all the times, is a control of driving the bus and they want to do what's good for you in the long term. So you tell the, you know, you're trying to quit and you see a doctor, you see your, you know, 12 step therapist since I got, I know the stuff is killing me. Like, I'm really, I'm on the path. I'm like, I'm done. And that's when you're kind of in their office or wherever you're not, you know, it's not around you. And then later on that day, your buddy says, hey, man, I just scored. I got it right here. Do you want it in that rewards right in front of you? That's like bringing those two choices right in front of you. And it's like, hell, yeah, I want to use. And then you can go through that cycle for like years of the person telling themselves, I want to quit. But then other times that same person is saying, I don't want to, you know, functionally they're saying I don't want to because they're saying, yeah, yeah, give me some.

And this isn't just something, this is something that has, has huge clinical ramifications with addiction, but it's like, all humans do it. Anyone who's hit the snooze alarm in the morning, like the night before they realized, oh, I got to get up extra early tomorrow. That's what's ultimately better for me. So I'm going to set the alarm for, you know, 5 a.m. And they, they, It goes off at 5am, you know, and then it's another two consequences have come sooner and it's like what the hell and they hit the snooze alarm. It's not just once, but then five minutes later and five minutes later. You know, and so, and it's why it's easier to exert exercise self-control at the grocery store compared to in your fridge. Like, if that snack is like 30 seconds away in your fridge, you're going to more likely yield to temptation than if it is further away.

Right. I mean, I think you just described it. Yeah, you can jack up the price and, you know, some people are going to drop off, but the people, you know, and it's not dichotomous because you can just consume less, but some people are going to consume less in the people that are most addicted are going to keep You know, I mean, you see this, they're going to keep, you know, purchasing. So you see this with cigarettes. And so it's interesting when you interface this with policy, like in one respect, heavily taxing cigarettes is a good thing. We know it keeps, you know, at lessons, particularly price sensitive. So you definitely, people smoke less and especially kids smoke less when you keep cigarette prices high and you tax the hell out of them. But one of the downsides you've got a balance and keep in mind is that you disproportionately have working class poor people. And then you get into a point where someone's been in, you know, what are their paycheck?

Right, so you're making it worse for, if they don't, if they are completely inelastic, you're actually making that person's life worse because we know that by interfering with the amount of money they have, you're interfering with the other pro-social, the potential competitors to smoking, you know, and we know that when someone's in more impoverished environments and they have less sort of non-drug alternatives, you know, the more likely they're gonna stay addicted, so, you know,

I think so. I mean, they're basically that whether they're crunching the numbers or not, they're basically sensitive to that demand curve. And they're doing the same thing that businesses do in a legal market. And you know, you want to sell as much of a product to get as much money. You're looking more the total income. So if you jack the price a little bit, you're going to get some reduction in consumption. But it may be that the total amount of money that you rake in is going to be more Then it's going to overcompensate for that. So you're willing to take, okay, I'm going to lose 10% of my customers, but I'm getting more than enough to compensate from that, from the extra money from the people who still are buying. So I think they're more, you know, and especially when we get to the lower, I wouldn't be surprised if people are crunching those numbers and looking at the mankers maybe at the you know at the really high levels of the you know up the chain the cartels and one I don't know I wouldn't surprise me at all but I think it's probably even more implicit at the at the lower levels where Something you brought up drug policy, I will say that for years now, it's been this kind of unquestioned goal by, for example, the drugs are office in the US to make the price of illegal drugs as high as possible without this kind of nuanced approach that, yeah, if you make, for some people, if you make the price so high, you're actually making things worse, I mean, I'm all about reducing the problems associated with drugs and drug addictions. And part of that is that are more direct consequences of those drugs themselves. And but a whole lot is what you get from indirectly and you know, sort of the, both for the individual and for society. So like making a poor person who doesn't have enough money for their kids, making them even poor. So now you've made their, their chill. children's future worse because they're growing up in deeper poverty because you've essentially levied a tax onto this person who's heavily addicted. But then at the societal level, you know, so everything we know about the drug war in terms of the heavy criminalization and filling up prisons and reducing employment and educational opportunities, which in the big picture, we know are the things that In a free market, compete against some of the worst problems of addiction is actually having educational and employment opportunities, but when you give someone a felony, for example, you're pretty much guaranteeing they're never going to go very high on the economic ladder. And so you're making it drugs a better reward for that person's future.

really depends on what we mean by legalization. So this is one of my beefs with this, you know, how these things are talked about. I mean, we have very few completely las a fair, you know, legal drug. So even Caffeine is one of the few examples. So for example, caffeine and tea and coffee is in that realm. Like there's no limits, no one's testing, there's no laws, regulation at any level of how much caffeine you're allowed to buy or how much in a private. But even like with this Starbucks like Nitro, there are rules with soda and with canned products, you can only put so much in there. Yeah. So this is FDA regulated and it's kind of weird because there's a limit to sodas that's not there for energy drinks and other things. You know, so even caffeine, it depends on what product we're talking about. Like, if your, like, no dose and other caffeine products over the counter, like, you can't just put 800 milligrams in there. The pills are like 1 or 200 milligrams. And so it's FDA regulated as no recount drug. Some of the most dangerous drugs in society, I would say arguably one of the most dangerous class of drugs are the volatile anesthetics. Huffing people huffing gasoline and, you know, airplane glue, tallywine, whatnot, severely damaging to the nervous system. Pretty much legal, but there's some regulation in the sense that there's a warning label, like it's illegal to do it for, not that it's not that people, they're busting people for this, but, you know, it's against federal law to use this in a way other than intended type of the basic thing, like yeah, don't huff this, you know, your paint thinner or whatnot. At least keeps people from selling it for that. Like no, because they're going they're going to go after that person they're not going to be able to find the 12 year old who's having. So anyway, just as some extreme examples at at the end and then. You know, even the so-called illegal, like schedule one drug, psilocybin, we do plan in terms of schedule two, which is ironically less restricted than psilocybin, but methamphetamine and cocaine. I've done human research with my research has been legal, so they're scheduled compounds, but they're not completely legal. You can do research with them with the appropriate licenses and approval. There really is no such thing. And in like alcohol, well, it's illegal if you're 12 years old or 18 years old or 20 years old. And for anyone, it's illegal to be drinking it while you're driving. So there's always a nuance.

There's some movement there in the house past the bill that's not going to be passed by the by the Senate, but yeah, it's, it's, it's clearly a change in it.

The way I like to talk about it is that I would say that it's possible and it would probably be a good thing if we regulate all drugs.

So yeah, and you were already, you know, going, you know, where I was going with that kind of first I described how there's always anyone else. And even like the cannabis and Massachusetts federally illegal. So for example, if I was like, and I, you know, colleagues that do cannabis research where they get people high in the lab, like your federal funded research within NIH funds, you can't get that stuff from the dispensary because it's, you're breaking a federal law. Even though the feds don't have the resources to go after, they don't want the controversy at this point to go after the individual users or even the sellers in those legal states. So there's always this nuance, but it's about the right regulation. So I think we already know enough that, for example, like I think safe injection sites for hard drugs makes a lot of sense. Like I wouldn't want heroin and cocaine at the convenience stores. And I don't think maybe there's some extreme libertarians that want that. I think even the folks that identifies libertarians probably most of them don't why I don't know like not all of them want that you know I think you know that as a form of regulation like look if you're using these hard drugs on a on a regular basis you're putting yourself at risk for lethal overdose you're putting yourself at risk for catching HIV and and hepatitis If you're going to do it, if you're doing it anyway, come to this place where at least you're not pulling the the water out of like, you know, the puddle on the side of the street.

That's a huge part of it, the education, but then I think with the opioids, like the big part of it is just like With Naloxone, which is an antagonist, it goes into the receptor, it's called Narcan. That's the trade name, but it's what they revive people on an opioid overdose. That's almost completely effective. Like, if there's a medical professional there and someone's Odin on an opioid, they're virtually guaranteed to live. Like that's remarkable that if 100% at the opioid crisis, you know, if all of those people right now that are dying, we're doing that in the presence of a medical professional, like even to like a nurse with Narcan, there'd be basic almost no deaths. There's always some exceptions, but, you know, almost no deaths. Like that's staggering to me. So the idea that people are doing this you know that we could have that level of positive effect without encouraging the drug and this is where like you get into this like terrain of like sending the wrong message and it's like No, you can do that. You can say like we're not encouraging this. In fact, probably one of the greatest advertisements for not getting hooked on heroin is like visiting a method on clinic, visiting a safe injection site. Like this is not like an advertisement for getting hooked on this drug, but knowing that we can save people. Now you have a landscape here because a lot of times it's just like Supervised injection, but you bring your own stuff. You bring your own heroin, which could still be dirty and filled with fentanyl and fentanyl derivatives, which because of the incredible potency and the more difficulty measuring it, and some differences at the receptor, like you may be more likely, you are more likely on average to leafly overdose on it. You know, so you could the the level that's been more explored in Switzerland is in some places is is you actually provide the drug itself and you supervise the injection so I don't feel like that idea Yeah, I did public health data are completely on the side of there. There's really no credible evidence to this. If we allow that, we're sending the wrong message and everyone's going to book. I mean, I'm not showing up. Like, you know, it's different by drug. Like, yeah, you, you legalize, you set up cannabis shops and some people are going to say, so you're going to go there. I don't think a whole lot of people are going to go to one of these places and say, I'm going to shoot up heroin for the first time. Because even if like, you know, it's a country of 300 million people. Like, even if someone does that, You have to compare this to the everyday people are dying from opioid overdoses, like people's kids, people's uncles, people's like, these are real lives that are being shattered. So you just look at that and then the other thing, and I know this from having done residential, even like non-treatment research where we just have a cocaine user or something, stay on our inpatient word for a month and you really get to know them and sometimes you see, like, Oftentimes, that's the first time this person has had a discussion with a medical professional in their entire life around their drug use, even if they're not looking to quit. And it's like, you know, you could imagine that in these safe injection settings where it's like, it might be a year into treatment and they're like, you know, doc, I know you're not the cops. Like, you really care for me like, I think I'm ready to try that method on thing.

Yeah, they get to trust the people and realize that they're there because they truly like they have a compassion, a love for for for this community like as human beings and they don't want people to die and you get real human connections in that and again like those are the conditions where people are going to ultimately seek treatment and not everyone always will But you're going to get that. And then you're, you know, you're going to get people like looking into treatment options. Sometimes in maybe years into to the treatment. So it's like they're just all of these indirect benefits that I think at that level. I don't know if you'd call that legalizing, you know, I think again, right, least well regulated it.

Right, minimizing as many harms as we can while not encouraging. I mean, we don't encourage people to drink all the, I mean, people die every year from caffeine overdose like, you know, there's different ways to like, you know, just by allowing something, it doesn't mean we're sending the message that, you know, by saying we're not going to give you a felony, which is actually often, the, the, the, the, the penalty for psychedelics. I just actually testified for the judiciary committee, the Senate, the assembly in New Jersey. And just to move, civil siren from a felony to misdemeanor, they used different language in New Jersey. It's weird, but like the equivalent of felony in misdemeanor. And that was like two people didn't vote for that on this committee because it was, one of them said it might be sending the wrong message. And it's like a felony I mean, there's real harms like that's the scarlet letter, the rest of your life, your stuck at the lower ends of the employment ladder. You're not going to get, you know, loans for education, all of this, maybe because of a stupid mistake you made once as a 19 year old. Doing something that like, you know, a presidential candidate could have done an admitted to and had no problem, you know?

It depends and you've already alluded to this nuance. It depends on how you define it. If we're talking about on the ground today and you know modern society, I'd say nicotine tobacco. I mean, in terms of mortality, it kills It kills far more than any other drug known to humankind. Four times more than alcohol, like a half million deaths in the US every year and about five to six million worldwide due to tobacco. That's four times more in the US than alcohol. And if you graph all of the drugs legal and illegal, like, you know, put all of the illegal drugs in like one category on that figure and you put alcohol into back on that figure, all the illegal drugs combined barely their bare barely visible blip to this incredible like it's there's no even all of the opioid epidemic rolled up along with cocaine and everything else the meth barely shows up compared to tobacco that's one of those uncomfortable truths

It's like terrorism versus swimming pools, I remember that being back in the after the warrant Harris started, and I was like, yeah, there's not even comparison.

And you didn't ask about mortality or deaths, you asked about addiction, but that really is hard to evaluate. It gets into those nuances I spoke of before about there's not a unidimensional way to measure reinforcement, it kind of depends on the situation and what measure we're looking at. But, you know, more people have access to tobacco. And I'm not, I'm not ready advocating that we make it an illegal drug. I think that would be a horrible mistake. Although there is a very credible push to mandate the reduction of nicotine in cigarettes, which I have most scientists that study at our for it. I think There's some real dangers there because I see that in the broader history of drug use. It's like when has drug prohibition worked broadly speaking and it's to me that that that path would only make sense in very good conjunction with e-sigrats which once they're fully regulated can be a safer not safe but much safer alternative and if we don't if we tax the hell out of e-sigrats and ban every if track to feature like like flavors and everything, then that's gonna push people to a black market if they can't get the real thing from real, like some people will just quit straight out. But I think what the regulators and what a lot of scientists that study tobacco like myself, it's a big part still of what I study. They're not used to thinking about the like tobacco really as a drug, largely speaking, in terms of, you know, for example, the history of prohibition. And I think of, like, we already know there's an illicit market, a black market for tobacco to get around taxes. I mean, and for selling even loose cigarettes, that's what initially caused in Stadneilin, the police approach was that Eric Garland, who was selling loose cigarettes, and he got choked out, I mean, the thing that caused that police contact was he was selling, well, I think reported to sell individual cigarettes for like, you know, you can sell them for court. It happens in Baltimore. And it's like, that's technically illegal. You know, are you not going to have massive boats of, you know, supplies coming over in China and elsewhere of real deal cigarettes if you ban, you know, the sale of us nicotine like it's obviously going to happen and you have to weigh that against, you know, you're going to create a black market to one size or another.

Right, but I see a potential path forward, but only if it's well, It's if it's only conjunction with e-cigarettes.

The difference here the unique thing that could be taken advantage of here is nicotine is by large not what causes the harm. It's the the aromatic hydrocarbons it's the the carcinogens and And tobacco, it's burning tobacco smoke. It's not the nicotine. So that it's not like alcohol prohibition where like, you know, you couldn't create the adools, the near beer is not going to have the alcohol. And so people aren't like, like, here you do have the possibility of giving a, another medium, the ability to deliver the drug, which still aren't, to a lot of people isn't preferred to the tobacco, but nonetheless, again, if you overlay those and make them less attractive, like if you, aren't thoughtful about the nicotine limits and thoughtful about whether you're allowing flavors and everything and if you overtax them, you're actually decreasing in the ability to compete with the more dangerous products. So I feel like there is a potential path forward, but I don't have a lot of confidence that that's going to be done in a thoughtful analytical way and I'm afraid that it could decrease the increase of black market calls all of the harms like every other drug we're moving away from the heavy from the prohibition models slowly but the big barge ship is like making a very slow turn and like okay we really had a step back and question if we went with nicotine tobacco or we moving into that direction like yeah the picture

Yeah, sex and drugs to them, just missing the rock and roll. The two controversial rock and roll isn't very controversial anymore. Yeah, so the cocaine, you know, lots of hoops to drum through. You got to have a lot of medical support. You got to be at a basically an institution, a research unit like I'm at that has a long history and the ability to do that. And get ethics approval, get FDA approval, but it's possible. And whenever you're dealing with something like cocaine, you would never want to give that to a a not someone who hasn't already used cocaine and you want to make sure you're not giving it to someone who's an active user who wants to quit. So the idea is like okay if you're if you're using this type of drug anyway and you're we're really sure you're not looking to quit. Hey use a use a couple times in the lab. with us. So we can at least learn something and part of what we learn is maybe to help people not use and reduce the harms of cocaine. So there's hoops to jump through with the sexual decision making. Look at the main thing I looked at was this model of I applied delayed discounting to what we talked about earlier the now versus later that kind of decision making that goes along with addiction. I applied that to economy's decisions. And I've done probably published about 20 or so papers with this in different drugs.

Right. I'll hype it that. And so this is using hypothetical decision making, but I've published some studies looking at showing a tight correspondence to self-reported in correlational studies to self-reported behavior.

Right. So it's not quite a questionnaire, but it's a it's a it's a it's a behavioral task requiring them to respond to see show pictures of a bunch of individuals and it's it's kind of like one of these fun behavior like a lot of them you get like numbers of born but it's like okay hot or not like which of these 60 people would have a one night stand with men women to pick whatever you like little bit of this little bit of that whatever you're into it's all variety there. Out of that group, you pick some subsets of people who do you think is the, you know, when you most want to have sex with the least, he thinks most likely to have an STI or least likely a sexually transmitted disease by STI. And then you could do certain decision making question. So what I've done is asked say this person read a vignette this person wants to have sex with you now you've met them you get along. Um, casual sex and they're like a one night stand with a condoms available. Just write your likelihood from 100 on this kind of scale. Would you use it? Would you use it? But then you can change your your scenarios. Okay. Now imagine you have to wait five minutes to use a condom. So the the choice is now instead of using condom versus not in terms of your likelihood scale. It now it ranges from have sex now without a condom. versus on the other end of the scale is wait five minutes, I have sex with the condoms. So you rate your likelihood of where your behavior would be along that continuum. And then you could say, OK, well, what about now or what about three hours? What about, you know, what about 20. Right.

Right. And so we do get at that through some individual measures and this task is more of a face ballot task where there's a lot underneath the hood. So for most people, sex with the condom is the better reward. But underneath the hood of that is just that the purely physical level, they do have sex without the condom.

Well, it's it's it's it's really based on I mean, yeah, yeah, presumably that's the case that that there's but it's measured by like what would really that first question where there is no delay most people say they would be at the higher in that scale a lot of times a hundred percent they said they would definitely use use a condom Not everybody in there. We know that's the case. It's like that some people don't like on some people say, yeah, I want to use a condom, but quarter of the time ended up not because it just didn't lost in the passion in the moment. So for the people, I mean, the only reason that people, so behaviorally speaking, at least for a large number of people in many circumstances, condom uses a reinforcer just because people do it. Like, you know, Why are they doing it? They're not because it makes the sex feel better, but because it makes that it allows for at least the same or general reward. Even if actually even if it feels a little bit not as good, you know, with the condom, nonetheless, they get most of the benefit without the concurrent, oh my gosh, I guess this risk goes by their unwanted pregnancy or getting HIV or way more likely the HIV, you know, Herpes, you know, in general, the words, et cetera, all the, all the lovely ones. And we've actually done research saying like where we gauge the probability of these individual S different SDIs and it's like what's the heavy hitter in terms of what people are using to judge into a value over there, going to use a condom.

And then yeah, because it would normally be the larger later reward, like the $10 versus the nine, it's like the $10, which is counterintuitive if you just think about the physical pleasure.

Yeah, you can get people loaded on like any number of drugs like cocaine alcohol and that's in bed of me or the three that I've done and published on and it's interesting that

Right. I love to get people loaded in a safe context and like, but to really, it started like there was some early research. Alcohol. I mean, the psychedelics are the most interesting, but it's like all of these drugs are fascinating. The fact that all these are keys that unlock a certain like psychological experience in the head. And so there was this work with alcohol that showed that it didn't affect those monetary delay discounting decisions. You know, nine dollars now versus ten dollars later. getting people drunk and I thought to myself, are you telling me that getting someone that people being drunk does not cause people, at least sometimes to make to choose what's good for them in the short term, at the expense of what's good for them in the long term. It's like bullshit. We see it like, but in what context does that happen? So that's something that inspired me to go in this direction of like a high, risky sexual decisions is something they do when they're drunk. They don't necessarily go home. And even if some people have gambling problems and alcohol interacts with that, the most typical thing is not for people to go home.

Right, that's a big effect, and we see that. And interestingly, we do not see with those different drugs, we don't see an effect if we just look at that zero delay condition. In other words, the condoms right there waiting to be used, which you how likely are to use it, you don't see it. I mean, people are, by and large, going to use the condom. Yeah. So, and that's the way most of this research outside of behavioral economics that's just looked at condom use decisions. Very little of which has ever actually administered the drugs, which is another unique aspect, but they usually just look at like assuming the condoms there. But this is more using behavioral economics to delve in and model something that and I've done survey research on this, modeling what actually happens. you meet someone at a laundry mat like you weren't planning on like you know one thing leads another they live around the corner you know these things you know and like we did one survey with with men who have sex with men and found that uh twenty five percent of them twenty four percent about a quarter reported in the last six months that they had unprotected anal intercourse which is the most risky in terms of sexual transmitting infection. In the last six months, in a situation where they would have used a condom, but they simply didn't use one just because they didn't have one on them. So this to me, it's like, if unless we delve into this and understand this, these suboptimal conditions, We're not going to fully address the problem. There's plenty of people that say, yep, condemuses good. I use it a lot of the time. You know, it's like, where is that failing? And it's under these sub-optimal conditions, which in Frank, if you think about it, it's like most of the case. Action is unfolding. Things are getting hot and heavy. Someone's like, do you got a condom? Eh, no. It's like, do they break the action? And take 10 minutes to go to the convenience store or whatever. Maybe everything's closed. Maybe they got to wait until tomorrow.

I think in terms of how we use this to help people. Yeah. It's mostly on the environment side rather than on the on the. Yeah, although those those interact, so it's like, you know, in one sense, if you're especially if you're going to be drinking or using another substance that is associated with, you know, a stimulant. I mean, alcohol and semions go along with risky sex. You know, good to be aware that you might make decisions, just to tell yourself you might make a decision that that is going to, that you wouldn't made in your sober state. And so, hey, throwing a condom in the, in the purse and the pocket, you know, might be, you know, a good idea. I think at the environmental level, just more condom, I mean, it highlights what we know about just making condoms widely available. Something that I'd, I'd like to do is like, you know, reinforcing condom use. And, you know, so, Um, you know, just getting people used to carrying a condom everywhere they go because it's such, once it's in someone's habit, if they are say like a young single person and, you know, it's, you know, they occasionally have unprotected sex, like training those people. Like what if you got a text message? You know, once every few days, saying, ah, if you show me, if send back a photo of a condom within a minute, you get a reward of a $5, you could shape that up like the, it's a process called contingency management. It's basically just straight up operant reinforcement. You could shape that up with no problem. And, and, I mean, those procedures of contingency management, giving people systematic rewards is like, for example, the most powerful way to to reduce cocaine use and addicted people. And, uh, but, but by saying, if you show me a negative urine for cocaine, I'm going to give you a monetary award and like that has huge effects in terms of decreasing cocaine use. If that can be that powerful for something like stopping cocaine use, how powerful for that could that be for shaping up just carrying a condom? Because the primary, unlike cocaine use, Here, we're not saying you can't have the main reward. You can still have sex. And you can even have sex in the way that you tell yourself, you'd rather do it if the column is available. So, you know, you're not, you know, it's relatively speaking. It's way easier than not using cocaine if you're using cocaine. It's just basically eating in the habit of carrying a condom. So that's just one idea of like,

I've thought about it, not with condoms, but a very similar line of thinking line that you're going into in terms of Uber and people getting drunk when they intend to the bar playing to have one or two, they ended up having five or six and it's like, okay, yeah, you can take the cab home with Uber home. But you've left your car there. It might get towed. You might like, there's also the hassle of just, you know, you want to wake up tomorrow with your hangover and forget about it and move on. And I think a lot of people in the situation and they're like screw it. I'm going to take the risk, just get it, you know, what if you had a new service where two, you know, you have a car come out with two drivers. And one of them, two sober drivers obviously, and the person they, the one driver drops off the other that then drives you home in their car in your car. So that you can, I mean, I think a lot of people would pay 50 bucks. It's going to be more than a regular Uber. But it's like it's going to be done. I got the money. I already spent 60 bucks at the bar tonight. just get the the damn thing done tomorrow. I'm done with it. My car. I wake up my cars in front of my house. I think that would be I think so. I'm not going to open that business. So like if anyone hears this and wants to take off with that, like I think it could help a lot of people.

I read about an Austin where they, I don't know where it's at now or where they outlawed Uber for a while, you know, because of the whole taxi cab union type thing and and how just yeah, there were like hordes of drunk people that were used to Uber that now didn't have a cheap alternative.

I think, and there's much more to study with this, but I think the biggie there is that the stimulants, they create risky sex by really increasing the rewarding value of sex. Like if you talk to people that are really, especially that are hooked on stimulants, one of the biggies is like sex on Coke or meth is like so much better than sex without. And that's a big part of why they have trouble quitting, because it's so tied to their sex life.

Yeah on the reward side. I think on the alcohol it works more through this inhibition. It's like alcohol is really good at reducing the ability of a delayed Punisher having effect on current behavior. In other words, there's this bad thing that's going to happen tomorrow or week from now or 20 years from now. Being drunk is a really good way. And you see this in like rats making decisions. You know, a high dose of alcohol makes someone less sensitive to those consequences. So I think that's the lever that's being hit with alcohol. And it's the more just the increasing the rewarding value of sex by the psycho stimulants on that side. We actually found that it and it was amazing because I hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by NIH to study the connection between cocaine and HIV. Like we ran the first study on my grant that like actually just gave people cocaine under double blind conditions and showed that like, yeah, when people are on coke, Like their ratings of sexual desire, even though they're not in a sexual situation, you know, some pictures, but did you're saying they're horny like you get subjective ratings of how like how how much sexual desire are you feeling right now. People get horny when they're on stimulants and do a lot of people say, duh, if they really know these drugs.

Those effects of that, the time course of that.

Yeah, we didn't say cornyness. We said sexual arousal.

Right. Rouse in it to you. There was one headline from some publicity on the work that said. Corny cocaine users don't use condoms or something like that. Like I wouldn't have put it that way, but like yeah, that's right.

Yeah. I think of the work with like using psilocybin to help people quit smoking and we've talked about smoking being such a a serious addiction. And so that what inspired me to get into that was just kind of having like behavioral psychology is my primary lens sort of the sort of like me and a kind of radical empirical basis of it got really interested in the mystical experience and all of these reports very interested and but at the same time like okay let's let's get down to some behavior change and something that we can record like quantitatively verify biologically so

Like really change it, not just people saying, which again, is interesting. I'm not dismissing it, but folks that say, my life has turned around. I feel this is completely changed me. It's like, yep, that's good. All right. Let's see if we can harness that and test that into something that it's That's real behavior change. You know what I mean? It's quantifiable. It's like, okay, you've been smoking for 30 years. You know, like, that's a real thing. And you've tried a dozen times, like, seriously to quit and you haven't been able to long term, like, okay. And if you quit, like, we'll ask you, and I'll believe you, but I don't trust everyone reading the paper to believe you. So we're gonna have you, you have P in a cup and we'll test that and we'll have you blow into this little machine that measures carbon monoxide and we'll test that. So multiple levels of biological verification. Nice. like now we're getting like to me that's where the rubber meets the road in terms of like therapeutics it's like can we really shift behavior and since in so much as we talked about my other scientific work outside psychedelics is about understanding addiction and drug use it's like you know looking at addiction it's a no brainer and smoking is just a great example and so back to your question like we've had really high success rates i mean it really it rivals anything that's been published in the scientific literature The caveat is that, you know, that's based on our initial trial of only 15 people, but extremely high long-term success rates. 80% at six months per foot smoke free.

Yeah, yeah. So the drug we're using is psilocybin and we're using moderately high and high doses of psilocybin. And I should say this about most of our work. These are not kind of museum level doses. In other words, nothing even big fans of psychedelics want to take and go to a go to a concert or go to the museum. If someone's at Burning Man on this type of dose like The probably going to want to find their way back to their tent and zip up and hunker down for, you know, not be around strangers.

That's right. So in our studies, we use the pure compound psilocybin. So it's a single molecule, you know, a bunch of molecules. And we give them a capsule with that in it. And so it's just, you know, a little capsule this while what people when psilocybin is used outside of research, it's always in the context of mushrooms. Um, because they're so easy to grow. There's no market for synthetic civil side and there's no reason for that to pop up. Um, that that The, the, the high dose that we use in research is 30 milligrams body weight adjusted. So if you're a heavier person, it might be like 40 or even 50 milligrams. We have some data that based on that data, we're actually moving into like getting away from the body weight adjusting of the dose and just giving an absolute dose. It seems like there's no justification for the body weight based dosing, but I digress generally 30 40 milligrams. It's, it's a high dose. And based on average, even though as you alluded to, there's variability, which gets people into some trouble, in terms of mushrooms, like Salasbi, Kupensis, which is the most common for species in the list market in the U.S. This is about equivalent to five dried grams, which is right at about where right where Nikana and others, they call it a heroic dose. This is not hanging out with your friends, going to the concert again. So this is a real deal dose, even to people that like really, you know, just even to psychonauts. And even we've even had. Yeah, people that. Yeah, that's a great term. That's a great term.

Right. Right. They're like, holy shit. I didn't know the orbit would be that far out. You know, like, or I escaped the orbit. I was in interplanetary space there.

right right very out of hundreds of volunteers over the years we've only seen a couple of people where there was a mild effect of the of the 30 milligrams and who knows that persons their serotonin's they they might have lesser density of serotonin to a receptors or something we don't know but it's extremely rare for most people this is like like something interesting is going to happen put it out we can a jarogon i think that jamey his producers uh immune to uh

So that's interesting. Now, I'm not the caveat. I'm not encouraging anything illicit, but just theoretically, my first question is a behavioral pharmacologist is like, you know, increase the dose. I'm not telling him, Jamie, to do that, but like.

It is, but most, they've gone that direction and states that didn't initially have these rules to have now have them. So it was like, you'll get, I think, you know, five, 10, Miller, I think, 10, five or 10 milligrams of THC being a common. And like, and this is an important thing like where they've moved from not being allowed to say like have a whole candy bar and have each of the eight or 10 squares on the counter bar being 10 milligrams, but it's like, no, the whole thing. Because like, you know, somebody gets a candy bar. They're eating the freaking candy bar. And it's like, unless you're a daily cannabis user, if you take 100 milligrams, it's like, that's what could lead to a bad trip for someone. And it's like, a lot of these people, it's like, oh, you used to smoke a little weed in college. They might say, they're visiting Denver for a business trip and like, why not? Let's give it a shot. And they're like, oh, I don't want to smoke something because it's going to, so I'm going to be safer with this edible. I can assume this massive, but there's huge tolerance. So a regular like for Someone who's smoking weed every day, they might take five milligrams and kind of hardly feel anything. And they may, they may really need something like 30, 40, 50 milligrams have a strong effect. But yeah, so they've evolved in terms of the rules about like, okay, what constitutes a dose? You know, which is why you see less big candy bars, or if it is a whole cane bar, you're only getting a smaller dose like 10 milligrams or Yeah, because that's where people get in trouble more often with animals.

Yeah, so the recruitment, I really liked this fact. It wasn't people that, you know, largely were, you know, we were honest about what we were studying, but for most people, it was, they were in the category of like, you know, not particularly interested in psychedelics, but more of like, they want to quit smoking. They've tried everything, but the kitchen sink, and this sounds like the kitchen sink. You know, it's like, well, it's Hopkins, so, you know, thinking that sounds like it's safe enough, so like what the hell, let's give it a shot. Like, most of them were in that category, which I really, you know, I appreciate, because it's more of a test, you know, of, of, yeah, just like a better model of what if these are approved as medicines, like what you're gonna have the average participant, you know, be like, And so that the therapy involves a good amount of non-silocybin sessions of preparatory sessions, like eight hours of getting to know the person, like the two people who are going to be their guides or the person in the room with them during the experience, having these discussions with them where you're both kind of rapport building, just kind of discussing their life, getting to know them. But then also telling them, preparing them about the, the, the sales sign and experience, it could be scary in this sense. But here's how to handle it, trust, let go, be open. And also during that preparation time, preparing them to quit smoking, using really standard bread and butter techniques that are, can all fall under the label, typically of the cognitive behavioral therapy, just stuff like before you quit, we assign a target quit date ahead of time. You're not just quitting on the fly. And that happens to be the target hood date in our study was the day where they got the first civil cyber dose. But doing things like keeping a smoking diary like, okay, during the three weeks until you quit. Every time you smoke cigarette, just like jot down what you're doing, what you're failing, what situation, that type of thing, and then having some discussion around that, and then going over the pluses and minuses in their life that smoking kind of comes with, being honest about the, this is what it does for me. This is why I like it. This is why I don't like it preparing for like what if you, what if you do slip how to handle it, like don't dwell on guilt, because that leads to more. full on relapse, you know, just kind of treat as learning experience, that type of thing. Then you have the session day where they come in, they five minutes of questionnaires, but pretty much they jump into the, we touch base with them. We give them the capsule. It's a serious setting, but you know, a comfortable one. They're in a room that looks more like a living room than like a research lab. We measure their blood pressure than experience, but kind of minimal kind of medical vibe to it. And they laid down on a couch and it's a purposefully an introspective experience. So they're laying on a couch during most of the five to six hour experience in the Ring Eye Shades, which is a better connotation as a name than blindfold. So the Ring Eye Shades, and they're wearing headphones through which music is played. Mostly classical, although we've done some variation of that, I have a paper that was recently accepted, kind of comparing it to more like gongs and harmonic bowls, and that type of thing kind of sound, kind of... You've also added this to the science and have a paper on the musical accompaniment to the psychedelic experience that's fascinating. Right, and we found basically that about the same effect, even by a trend, not significant, but a little bit better in effect, both in terms of subjective experience and long-term whether help people quit smoking just a little tiny, non-significant trend even favoring the novel playlist with the Tibetan singing bowls and the gongs and did you redo and all of that? So anyway, just saying, okay, we can deviate a little bit from this, like, what goes back to the 1950s of this method of using classical music as part of this psychedelic therapy. But they're listening to the music and they're not playing DJ in real time. You know, it's like, you know, there just be the baby. You're not the decision maker for today. Go inward. Trust like go be open. And pretty much the only interaction that we're there for is to deal with an anxiety that comes up. So guide is kind of a misnomer in a sense. It's where I'm more of a safety net. And so like tell us if you feel some butterflies that we can provide reassurance, a hold of their hand can be very powerful. I've had people tell me that that was like the thing that really just grounded them.

Yeah, so trust is trust the context, trust the guides, trust the overall institutional context. I see it as layers of like safety, even though it's everything I told you about the relative bodily safety of sales. I'm nonetheless we're still getting blood pressure throughout the session just in case. We have a physician on hand who can respond just in case. We're literally across the street from the emergency department, just in case. All of that, you know,

Right, and hopefully they've really gotten that by that point deep into the study that they realize we take that seriously and everything else. So it's really kind of like a very special role you're playing as a researcher or a guide and hopefully they have your trust. And so, you know, and trust that they could be as a motion, everything from laughter to tears like that's going to be welcomed. We're not judging them. It's like it's a therapeutic relationship where, you know, this is a safe container. It's a safe space.

But it truly is it's a safe space for that. for this type of experience and to let go. So trust, let's see, let go. So that relates to the emotional, like, you feel like crying, cry, you feel like laughing your ass off, laugh your ass off. You know, it's like, all the things actually that sometimes it's more challenging with a someone has a large recreational use. Sometimes it's harder for them because people in that context and understandably so it's more about holding your shit. Yeah. Someone's had a bunch of mushrooms at a party Maybe they don't want to go into the back room and start crying about these thoughts about the relationship with their mother. And they don't want to be the drama queen or king that bring their friends down, because their friends are having an experience too. And so they want to like compose, you know?

Right, and it's all about like you're the astronaut and we're there's only one astronaut. Yeah, we're ground control and I use this often with I have a photo of the space shuttle on a plaque in my in my office and I kind of use often use that as example and it's like we're here for you like we're a team but we have different roles. It's just like you don't have to like compose yourself like you don't have to like be concerned about our safety like we're playing these roles today. And like, yeah, your job is to go as deep as possible, or as far out, whatever your analogy is as possible. And we're keeping you safe. And so, yeah, and the emotional side is a hard one, because you really want people to, like, if they go into realms of subjectively of despair and sorrow, like, yeah, like, cry, you know, like, it's okay, you know, and especially if someone's at, you know, more macho, And you want this to be the place where they can let go. And again, something that they wouldn't or shouldn't do if someone were to theoretically use it in a in a social setting. And like in also these other things like even that you get in those social settings of like, yeah, you don't have to like worry about your wallet.

And even the cops at that later, even though it's seemingly unlikely for most people that cops would come in and bust them right when like even at that theoretical like that one in a billion chance like that might be a real thing psychologically. In this context, we even got that covered. This is, we've got DEA approval. This is okay by every level of society that counts, that has the authority. So go deep, trust the setting, trust yourself, let go and be open. So in the experience, and this is all subjective and biology, but like If there's a door open it, go into it. If there's a stairwell, go down it or a stairway, go up it. If there's a monster in the mind's eye, you know, don't run, approach it, look at the eye and say, you know, let's talk. Yeah, what's up? Where do you do in here? Let's talk turkey, you know?

Right, it really is that it that really is a heart of this this radical courage like it courage people are often struck by that coming out like this is heavy lifting this is a hard work people come out of this exhausted and it can be extremely some people say it's the most difficult thing they've done in their life like choosing to let go on a moment a micro second by micro second basis Everything in their inclination is to, is to say, stop sometimes. Stop this. I don't like this. I didn't know it was going to be like this. This is too much. And Terrence McKinna put it this way. It's like comparing to meditation and other techniques. It's like spending years trying to press the accelerator to make something happen. Hyto's psychedelics is like you're speeding down the mountain in a fully loaded semi truck and you're, you're charged with not slamming the brake. It's like, you know, let it happen. You know, so it's very difficult and to engage always, you know, go further into it and take that radical, you know, radical courage, you know, throughout.

Yeah, and some more so than others, because everyone has been exposed at some level or another, but some of it is pretty superficial, as you're saying. One of the hallmarks of psychedelics is just their variability. So a more strut is like not the mean, but the standard deviation is so wide that it's like it could be like hellish experiences and, you know, just absolutely beautiful and loving experiences, everything in between, and both of those, like those could be two minutes apart from each other. And sometimes kind of at the same time, concurrently. Let's see, there's different ways to, there are some union psychologists back in the 60s, masters in Houston that wrote a really good book, the varieties of psychedelic experience kind of, which is a plan, varieties of religious experience by William James, that they described this perceptual level. So most people have that, you know, when You know, whether they're looking at the room without the eye shades on or inside their their mind's eye with the eye shades on colors, you know, sounds like this as as a much richer sensorium, you know, which can be very interesting and then another level of masters in Houston called that the psychodynamic level. And I think you could think about it more broadly than, you know, that's kind of union, but just the personal psychological levels, how I think of it. Like, this is about your life. There's a whole life review. Oftentimes people have thoughts about their childhood, about their relationships, their spouse or partner, their children, their parents, their family of origin, their current family. Like, you know, that stuff comes up a lot, including every, like, like the love, just people just like pouring with tears about like, Like how much like it hits him so hard how much they love people like in a way that you know for people that like they love their family but like it just hits them so hard that like how important this is, and like the magnitude of that love and like what that means in their lives. So those are some of the most moving experiences to be present for is where people like it hits home, like what really matters in their life. And then you have this sort of what masters in Houston called the archetypal realm, which, again, is sort of viewing aim with the focus on archetypes, which is interesting, but I think of that more generally as like symbolic level. So just really deep experiences where you do have experiences that seem symbolic of, you know, very much in like, you know, what we know about dreaming and what most people think about dreaming. Like, there's this randomness of things, but sometimes it's pretty clear and retrospect, oh, like, this came up because this thing has been on my mind. you know recently so it seems to be there there seems to be this symbolic level and then they have this the last level that they describe is the mystical integral level which in this is where there's lots of terms for it but transcendental experiences experiences of unity mystical type effects we often you measure on Europeans use a scale that will refer to oceanic boundlessness this is all pretty much the same thing yeah This is like, at some sense, the deepest level of the very sense of self seems to be dissolved, minimized, or expanded, such that the boundaries of the self go into and here, I think some of this is just semantics, but whether the self is expanding, such that there's no boundary between the self and the rest of the universe or whether there's no sense of self again might be just semantics but this radical shift or sense of loss of sense of self or self boundaries. And that's like the most typically when people have that experience they'll often report that as being the most remarkable. thing and this is what you don't typically get with MDMA. These deepest levels of the nature of reality itself, the subjectivity and objectivity just like the the the the seer and the scene become one and and it's a process and yeah and they're able to bring that experience back and be able to describe it. Yeah, but one of the, to a degree, but one of the hallmarks going back to William James of describing a mystical experience is the ineffability. And so even though it's ineffable, you know, people try as far as they can to describe it, but when you get the real deal, they'll say, and even say that they say a lot of helpful things to help you describe the landscape, they'll say, No matter what I say, I'm still not even coming anywhere close to what this was. Like the language is completely failing. And I like to joke that even though it's it's ineffable, we're researchers. So we try to eff it up. If I ask you them to describe the experience.

So when that pilot study was very, it was very small and it wasn't a randomized study, so it was limited. The only question we could really answer was, is this worthy enough of follow up? Yes. And the answer to that was absolutely, because this success rates were so high, 80% biologically confirmed, successful, six months, that held up to 60%. biologically confirmed absent at two and at an average of two and a half years of very long. Yeah and so I mean the best that's been reported in the literature for smoking cessation is in the upper 50% and that's with not one but two medications for a couple of months followed by regular cognitive behavioral therapy where you're coming in once a week or once every few weeks for an entire year. and so but this is what very heavy and this is just like what a few uses of uh... so this was three doses of psilocybin over a total course including preparation everything a fifteen week period where there's mainly like uh... for most part one one meeting a week and then the three sessions are within that and so it's and we scale that back in the more the state we're doing right now which i can tell you about which is a randomized controlled trial But it's the original pilot study was these 15 people. So given the positive signal from the first study telling us that it was a worthy pursuit, we hustled up some money to actually be able to afford a larger trial. So it's randomizing 80 people to get either one still a side in session when we've narrowed we've scaled that down from three to one mainly because we're doing FMRI near imaging before and after and it made it more experimentally complex to have multiple sessions but one still a side in session versus uh... the nicotine patch using the the FDA approved label like standard use of the nicotine patch so it's randomized forty people get randomized to psilocybin one session forty people get nicotine patch and they all get the same cognitive behavioral therapies for the standard talk therapy and we've scaled it down somewhat so there's less a weekly meetings but it's been the same ballpark and right now we're still um... uh... the study still ongoing and in fact we just recently started recruiting again we paused for COVID now we're starting back up with some protections like masks and whatnot but right now for the 44 people who have gotten through the one-year follow-up and so that includes 22 from each of the two groups the success rates are extremely high For the psilocybin group, it's 59% have been biologically confirmed as smoke free at one year after their quit date. And that compares to 27% for the nicotine patch, which by the way is extremely good for the nicotine patch compared to previous research. The results could change because it's ongoing, but we're mostly done and it's still looking extremely positive. So if anyone's interested, they have to be sort of being commuting distance to the Baltimore area, but, you know, to participate. Right, right to participate.

Thanks for bringing this off. This is a glad to get the opportunity to address this. If someone's interested in producing a study, the best thing to do is go to the website. of the study or of like yeah which website so we have all of our psilocybin study so everything we have is up and on one website and we link to the different study websites but Hopkins psychedelic.org So everything we do, or if you don't remember that, just go to your favorite search engine and look up Johns Hopkins, psychedelic, and you're going to find one of the first hits that's going to be our is this website. And there's going to be links to the smoking study and all of our other studies. If there's no link to it there, we don't have a study on it now. And if you're interested in psychedelic research, more broadly, You can look up, you know, like at another university, there might be closer to you and there's a handful of them now across the country. And there's some in Europe that have says going on, but you can at least in the US, you can look at clinicaltrials.gov and look up the term psilocybin. And in fact, optionally people even in Europe can register their trial on there. So that's a good way to find studies. But for our research, rather than emailing me like a more efficient way is to go straight and you can do that first the first phase of screening. There's some questions online and then someone will get back in touch with you. But I do already you know and I you know I expect it's like going to increase but I'm already at the level where my simple limited mind and limited capacity is already I I sometimes fail to get back to emails. I mean, I'm trying to respond to my colleagues, my mentees, all these things, my responsibilities. And as many of the people just inquiring about, I want to go to graduate school. I'm interested in this. I had this. I have a daughter that took us like a duck and she's having trouble. And it's like, I try to respond to those, but sometimes I just simply can't get to all of these already.

Right, right, right, you know, as it is either a volunteer or if we're looking for, you know, somebody, you know, we're going to be, you know, posting and including on the Hopkins University, like website, we're going to be posting if we're looking for a position. I am right now actually looking through and it's mainly been through email and contacts, but should I say it? I think I'd rather cast my nets. Why I'm looking for a postdoc right now? Oh, great. So I've mentored postdocs for I don't know like a dozen years or so and more and more of their time is being spent on psychedelic so someone's free to contact me that's more of a that's sort of so close to home that's a personal you know that like emailing me about that but I come to appreciate more that the advice that folks like Tim Ferriss have of like I think it's him like five sends emails you know like you know a subject that gets to the point that tells you what it's about so that like you break through the signal to the noise but I really appreciate what you're saying because part of the equation for me is like I have a three year old and like my time on the ground on the floor playing blocks or cars with him is part of that equation and even if the day is ending and I know some of those emails are slipping by and I'll never get back to them and I have I have I'm struggling with it.

So anyway, there's a good thoughts about the forms and everything.

I'm thinking of that in two categories, one kind of more more scientific, and they're both scientific, but one more about, you know, more about the brain and behavior and the mind, so to speak. And as a behavior, as always, see sort of the mind as a metaphor for behaviors of, but anyway, that gets philosophical, but It's really increasing the, so the one category is increasing the appreciation for the magnitude of depth. I mean, so these are all metaphors of human experience that might be a good way to, because you use certain words like consciousness and what it's like, We're using constructs that aren't well defined unless we kind of dig in, but in human experience like that the experiences on these compounds can be so far out there or so deep. And they're doing that by tinkering with the same machinery that's going on up there. I mean, I'm My assumption, and I think it's a good assumption, is that all experiences, there's a biological side to all phenomenal experience. So there is not the divide between biology and experience or psychology. It's not one or the other. These are just two sides of the same. coin.

And even that word, there's some ways that like sort of like if we're talking about access consciousness or narrative self-awareness, which is an aspect of like, You can't wrap a definition around that we can't talk meaningfully about it, but so often around psychedelics it's used in this much more. You know, in terms of ultimately explaining phenomenal consciousness itself, the so-called hard problem. You know, relating to that question and psychedelics really haven't spoken to that, and that's why it's hard because it's hard to imagine anything. But I think what I was getting is that Psychedelics have done this by the reason I was getting into the biology versus mind psychology divide is that just to kind of set up the fact that I think all of our experience is related to these biological events. So whether they be naturally occurring neurotransmitters, like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine, et cetera, and a whole other sort of biological activity and kind of another layer up that we could talk about network activity, communication amongst brain areas, like this is always going on, even if I just prompt you to think about a loved one, you know, like there's something happening biologically, okay, so that's always another side of the coin. And another way to put that is all of our subjective experience outside of drugs. It's all a controlled hallucination in a sense. This is completely constructed. Our experience of reality is completely assimilation. So I think we're on solid ground to say that that's our best gas and that's a pretty reasonable thing to say scientifically.

So in that definition implied a causation. It comes from and so that's that's we know at least there's solid correlation there. And so then we don't dig we delve deep into the philosophy of like idealism or materialism and things like this, which I'm not an expert in, but I know we're getting into that. territory you don't even necessarily have to go there like you at least go to the level of like okay we know there's there seems to be this one-on-one correspondence and that seems pretty solid like you can't prove a negative and you can't put you know it's a fun in that category of like You could come up with an experience that maybe doesn't have a biological correlate, but then you're talking about there's also the limits of the science. It was at a false negative, but I think our best guess in a very decent assumption is that every psychological event has a biological correlate. So with that said, you know, the idea that you can throw alter that biology in a pretty trivial manner. I mean, you could take like a relatively small number of these molecules, throw them into the nervous system. And then have a 60-year-old person who has, you name it, I mean, that has hiked to the top of Everest and that speaks five languages and that has been married and has kids and grandkids and has, you name, you know, like, been at the top and say, this fundamentally changed who I am as a person and what I think life is about. Like that's, That's the thing about psychedelics that just floors me and it it it never fails I mean sometimes you get bogged down by the paperwork and running studies and all that I don't know all of the the BS that can come with being an academia and everything and then you And sometimes you get some dud sessions where it's not the full met all the magic isn't happening and it's you know more or less it's or it's other a dud or somewhere in and I mean it dismissed them but you know it's it's not like these magnificent sort of reports but sometimes you get the full monti report from one of these people and you're like oh yeah that's why we're doing this whether it's like therapeutically or just to understand the mind And you're still floored. Like, how was that possible? How did we slightly alter serotonergic neurotransmission and say in this person is now saying that they're making fundamental differences in the priorities of their life after 60 years?

And then like, where is that going to go with like, I mean, I'm always like aware of the fact that like we always as humans in a scientist think we figured out 99% and we're working on the first 1% and we got to keep reminding ourselves it's hard to do like we figured out like not even 1% like where we know nothing. Yeah. And so like I can speculate on might sound like a fool but like what are drugs, even the concept of drugs like 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years if we're surviving. like, you know, molecules that go to a specific area of the brain, in combination with technology, in combination with the magnetic stimulation, in combination with the, you know, like targeted pharmacology of like, oh, like this subset of serotonin 2A receptors in the classroom, you know, at this time, in this particular sequence, in combination with this other thing, like this baseball cap, you wear that like has, you know, You know, has one of the, is doing some of these things that we can only do with these like giant like pieces of equipment now like where it's going to go is going to be endless and it becomes easy to, you know, combine with in virtual reality where the virtual reality is going to move from being something out here to being more in there and then we're getting like we talked about before we're already in a virtual reality in terms of human perception and and and cognition models of the of the universe being all representations and You know, sort of, you know, color not existing and just, you know, our representations of EM wavelengths, et cetera, you know, sound, being vibrations in all of this. And so as the external VR and the internal VR come closer to each other, like this is what I think about in terms of the future of drugs, like all of this stuff sort of combines. And, and like where that goes is just, it's It's unthinkable. Like we're probably going to, you know, again, I might sound like a fool with this may not happen, but I think it's possible, you know, to go completely offline. Like where most of people's experiences may be going into these internal worlds. And I mean, maybe you threw through some, through a combination of these techniques you create experiences where someone could live a thousand years. in terms of maybe they're living a regular lifespan but in over the next two seconds you're living a thousand years worth of experience inside inside your mind through the yeah through this manipulation of the like is that possible like just based on on like first principles in life yes I think so yeah like give us another fifty hundred five hundred like who knows but like how could it not go there

I guess broadly speaking, I'm all for it. I mean, for the same reason I am with psychedelics, but it comes with all the caveats. you know you're going into a brave new world where it's like all of a sudden there's going to be a dark side there's going to be you know that serious ethical considerations but that that should not stop us from from from moving there I mean particularly the stuff from an unmill expert but on the short list in the short term it's like yeah can we help these serious neurological disorders like hell yeah Like, and I'm also sensitive to something being someone that has lots of neuroscience colleagues. You know, with some of this stuff, and I can't talk about particulars. I'm not recalling, but, you know, in terms of, you know, stuff getting out there and then kind of a mocking of, of, of, of, of, you know, oh gosh, they're saying this is unique. We know this or sort of like this belittling of like, oh, You know, this sounds like it's just a, I don't know, a commercialization or like an oversimple. I forgive what the example was, but something like something that came off to some of my neuroscientific colleagues as an oversimplification, or at least the way they said it.

Right. Oh, we've known that for years. Yes. And like, but I'm very sympathetic to like, maybe it's because of my very limited, but relatively speaking, The amount of exposure the psychedelic work has had to my limited experience of being out there and then you think about someone like like musk who's like like really really out there and you just get all these arrows that like and it's hard to be like when you're plowing new ground. like you're going to get you're going to get criticized like every little word that you like this balance between speaking to like people to make it meaningful something scientists aren't very good at yes having people understand what you're saying and then being belittled by oversimplifying something in terms of the public message So I'm extremely sympathetic, and I'm a big fan of what Elon Musk does, tunnels through the ground and SpaceX and all of this is like hell yeah, like this guy has some great ideas.

It seems pretty clear. Like, we're going to be there.

Like, another question is like, what's the timeframe? Is that going to be 20 or is it 250 or 100? Like, how could we not?

And there's the delay discounting aspect I talked about before. It's like saying, oh, this is going to be a thing 20, 50 years from now. It's like, what motivates anybody if you can even if you're fudging it or you're like wishful thinking a little bit or let's just say airing on one side of the probability distribution. like there's value in saying like yeah like there's a chance we could get this done in a year and you know what and if you set a goal for a year and you're not successful hey you might get it done in three years where is if you had aimed at 20 years well yeah that would have never done it all or you would have aimed at 20 years and then when it was taking a 10 So the only thing I think about this like in terms of his work and I guess we've seen with psychedelics is like there's a lack of appreciation for like sort of the variability you need a natural selection sort of extrapolating from biological you know from evolution like Hey, maybe he's wrong about focusing only on the cameras and not these other things. Be empirically driven. It's like, yeah, you need to like, when he's, you know, when you need to get the regulation, is it safe enough to get the same on the road? Those are real questions and be empirically driven. And if you can meet the whatever standard is relevant, that's the standard and be driven by that. So don't let it affect your ethics. But if he's on the wrong path, how wonderful someone's exploring that wrong path he's going to figure out it's a wrong path and like other people he's damn it he's doing something like he's you know and and so appreciating that variability you know that like it's it's valuable even if he's not on I mean this is all over the place and science it's like a good theory one standard definitions that it generates testable hypotheses and like The ultimate model is never going to be the same as reality. Some models are going to work better than others. Like, you know, Newtonian physics got us a long ways, even if there was a better model like waiting. And some models weren't as good as, you know, we're never that successful, but just even like putting them out there and test it. We wouldn't know something as a bad model until someone puts it out anyway.

So yeah, there's a bunch there. I think my preface is that I certainly have opinions that are outside that I can say here are my best speculations as as a as just a person in an armchair philosopher and it's that philosophy is certainly not my my training and my expertise. So I have thoughts there, but that that I recognize are completely in the realm of speculation that are like things that I would love to wrap empirical science around, but that are You know, there's no data and getting to the hard problem, like no conceivable way, even though I'm very open, like I'm hoping that that problem can be cracked. And I do, as an armchair philosopher, I do think that is a problem. I don't think it can be dismissed as some people argue it's not even really a problem. It strikes me that explaining just the existence of phenomenal consciousness is a problem. So anyway, I very much had to keep that divide in mind when I talk about these things. What we can really say about what we've learned through science, including by psychedelics versus like what I can speculate on in terms of the nature of reality and consciousness. But in terms of by and large, skeptically, I have to say psychedelics have not really taught us anything about the nature of consciousness. I'm hopeful that they will. They have been used around certain, I don't even know if features is the right term, but things that are called consciousness. So consciousness can refer to not only just phenomenal consciousness, which is like, you know, the source of the hard problem and what it is to be like niggles, um, description, but, um, the sense of self, or so, which can be sort of like the experiential, self-moment amount, or it can be like the narrative self, the stringing together of story. So, those are things that I think can be, and a little bit's been done with with psychedelics, regarding that, but I think there's far more potential, like, but So, like one story that unfolded is that psychedelics are cutely having it affects on the default mode network, a certain pattern of activation amongst the subset of brain areas that is associated with self-referential processing. It seems to be more active, more communication between these areas, the posterior singular cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex, for example, being parts of this that are And others that are tied with sort of thinking about yourself from mimicking yourself in the past, projecting yourself into the future. And so that it's an interesting story emerged when it was found that when civil siren is on board in the person's system that there's less communication amongst these areas. So with resting state FMR, imaging that there's less synchronization or presumably communication between these areas. And so I think it has been overstated. And so we see this as like this is the dissolving of the ego. This is the story made a whole lot of sense, but there's several, I think that story is really being challenged like one we see increasing number of drugs that are that that decouple that network including ones like that aren't psychedelic so this may just be a property frankly of being like you know screwed up you know like you know being out of your head being like like you know

Right. And it couldn't. I'm speculating it could be tied to more if you had to download in the language everyday language like, not feeling like yourself like so whether that be like really drunk or really hopped up on in fetamine or you know on like we found it like decoupling of the default mode network on salvan or nay which is a smokeable psychedelic which is a non-classic psychedelic but another one where like DMT where people are often talking to entities in that type of thing that was a really fun study to run but nonetheless most people say it's not a classic psychedelic and it doesn't have some of those phenomenal features that people report from classic psychedelics and not sort of the clear sort of ego loss type, not at least not in the way that people report it with classic psychedelics. So you get it with all these different drugs. And so, and then you also see just broad changes in network activity with other networks. And so, I think that story took off a little too soon, although, so I think in the story that the DMN, the default mode network, relating to the self, and I know some neuroscientists, it drives him crazy if you say the ego, but self-referential processing, if you go that far, that was already known before psychedelics. really contribute to that, the idea that this type of brain network activity was related to a sense of self. But it is absolutely striking that psychedelics that people report with pretty high reliability these unity experiences that where people subjectively like like they report losing or again like the boundaries of that however you want to say it like like these these unique experiences I think we can do a lot with that in terms of figuring out the nature of the sense of self now I don't think that's the same as the hard problem or the existence of phenomenal consciousness, because you can build an AI system and you correct me from wrong that will pass a turning test in terms of demonstrating the qualities of a sense of self. It will talk as if there's a self and there's probably a certain algorithm or whatever, computational scaling up of computations that results in somehow And I think this is the argument with with humans with some speculated this why do we have this illusion of the self that's that's evolved that and we might find this with AI that like it works you know having a sense of self or in that state at wrong incorrectly like acting as if there is a an agent at play and behaviorally acting like, you know, there is a there is a self that might kind of work. And so you can program a computer or a robot to basically demonstrate having algorithm like that and demonstrate that type of behavior. And I think that's completely silent on whether there's an actual experience inside there.

So I am very hopeful that, and so I, I mean, I'm a radical empiricist, which I'm very strong with with that. Like that's what, you know, it's, you know, sciences and about ultimately being a materialist. It's like it's about being an empiricist in my view. And so for example, I'm very fascinated by the so-called siphon, and stuff that people just kind of reject out of hand. I kind of orient towards that stuff with an idea of, hey, look, what we consider, anything exist as natural. And so, but the boundary of what we observe in nature, like what we recognize as in nature moves, like what we do today and what we know today would only be described as magic 500 years ago, or even 100 years ago, something like that. So there will surely be things that like you explain these phenomena that just sound like completely they're supernatural now, where there may be, for some of it, like some of it might turn out to be a complete bunk, and some of it might turn out to be, it's just another layer of nature, whether we're talking about multiple dimensions that were invoked or something, we haven't even had the language toward. And what you're saying about the moving together, the model, and the real thing of conscious, like, I'm very sympathetic to that. So that's that part of, like, on the arm share side where I want to be clear, I can't say this is as scientists, but just terms of speculating. I find myself attracted to these more of the the sort of the pan psychism ideas and that kind of makes sense to me. I don't know if that's what you meant there, but it seemed like related the sense that ultimately if you are completely modeling like it's like if you completely modeling unless you dismiss like the the idea that there is a phenomenal consciousness which I think is hard given that we all I seem like I have one that's really all I know but if that's so compelling I can't just dismiss that like if you're if you take that as it given then the only way for the model and the and the real thing to merge is if there is something baked into The nature of reality, you know, sort of like in the history of like their certain just like fundamental forces or fundamental like in that and that's been useful for us and sometimes we find out that that's point where something else or sometimes it's still. of seems like it's a fundamental sentence, it's a placeholder for somewhere free gap, but there's something like this is just to give in. This is just, you know, and sometimes something like gravity seems like a very good placeholder, then there's something better that comes to replace it. So, you know, I kind of think about like consciousness, and I didn't, I kind of had this inclination, but I knew there was a term for it, reselling and monos, the idea that, which is a A form of pain, again, I'm not, I'm an armchair philosopher.

And something that struck me is like consistent with just, you know, inclinations of mind, just total speculation is this idea of, Everything we know in science and with most of the stuff we think of physics, you know, really describes, it's all interactions. It's not the thing itself. Like there was something to In this sounds very new age, which is why it's very difficult and I have a high bullshit like meter and everything, but like an isn'tist. I mean, I think about like Huxley, all this Huxley with his masculine experience and doors of procession, like there's an isn'tist there in Alan Watson, like there is a nature of being, again, very new agey sounding, but maybe there is something to And when we say consciousness, we think of like this human experience, but maybe that's just that's so processed and so that's so far, so derivative of this kind of basic thing that we wouldn't even recognize the basic thing, but the basic thing might just be this is not about the interaction between particles. This is what it is. like to exist as a particle. And maybe it's not even particles. Maybe it's like space time itself. I mean, again, totally in the speculation and something out there.

The reason I lean towards, and again, armchair spec, if I had a bet, like $1,000 on which one of these ultimately be proved, I would head, I would lean towards, I'd put my bets on something like pan psychism rather than the emergence of phenomenal consciousness through complexity or computational complexity. Because although certainly, What, if there is some underlying fundamental consciousness, it's clearly being processed in, in, in, in, in, in this way, you get through computation in terms of resulting in our experience in the experience presumably of other animals. But the reason I would let on panpsychism is to me, It just in terms of truly the hard problem, like at some point you have an inside looking out. And even looking for a first division and it doesn't, that's just an exam. But just, there's an inside experiencing something. At some point of complexity, all of a sudden, you know, you start from this objective universe and all we know about is interactions between things and things happen. And at this certain level of complexity, magically there's an inside. That to me doesn't pass, Occam's Razor as easily as maybe there is a fundamental property of the universe of, you know, there's both subjective and objective. There is both interactions amongst things and there is the thing itself.

phenomena can happen and the thing that gives me pause is is that I'm concerned about the threshold there like how is it likely that now there may be in there may be some qualitative shift that in the realm of like we don't even we don't even understand complexity yet like you're saying like some maybe there is but I do think like if it if it is a result of the complexity well You know, just having helium versus hydrogen is a form of complexity. Having the existence of stars versus clouds of gases is a complexity. The entire universe has been this increasing complexity. And so that kind of brings me back to then the other of like, okay, if there's if it's about complexity, then we should then it exists at a certain level in the simple systems like a star. Or you know, they all have complex atom psychism.

Yeah. I do think it's likely that this idea that whether or not there's an inner experience, which is phenomenal, it's the hard problem that acting like an agent, like having an algorithm, but basically like operates as if there is an agent, that's clearly a thing that I think has worked and that there is a whole lot to figure out there that that, and I think psychedelics will be extremely helpful and figuring more out about that because they do seem to a lot of times eliminate that or whatever, radically shift that sense of self.

What we've been talking about, like, okay.

and how would it communicate?

Would it be necessarily spaceships? Would I still travel a little more?

But I mean, there's no grand unifying theory yet, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. And I've, to some degree, laid my cards out with, by identifying as a radical empiricist, you know, it's like, so the answer is it possible? And I think, you know, ultimately, if you're a good scientist, you got to say, now that's at the extremes, it's like, yes, you know, and it might get more interesting when you had to, you're asked to guess about the probability of that. Is that a one in a, one in a million, one in a trillion, one in a bit, one in more than the number of atoms in the universe, uh, probability.

Well, can you get some information that's verifiable, like, like, um, information that about some other planet that, or, or some aspect, some and gosh, it would be an interesting range, but what range of discovery that we can anticipate we're going to know within, you know, whatever, a few years, next five, 10, 20 years, and seeing if you can get that information now and then over time, it might be verified. You know, the type of thing like, you know, part of Einstein's work was ultimately verified, not until decades and decades later, at least certain aspects through the, through empirical observations.

So they wouldn't even sign the consent form to be a participant in our agreement.

and maybe that will be us in a few years, how could it not? Instead of explaining something laboriously to you, like having people describe the ineffable, psychedelic experience, like if we could record that and then get the near a link of 50 years from now, like, I'll just plug this into your... It's just transfering these things. And it's like, oh, now you feel what it's like, and like, in one sense, like, how could we not go there? And then you get into the realm of especially when you throw time into it, are the aliens us in the future, or even like a transcendental temporal, like the us beyond time. Like I don't like you get into this. Well, one is a lot of possibilities. Yeah, but I think, you know, there's one psychedelic researcher that's who did Hido's DMT research in the 90s who speculated that that end of a lot of alien encounter experiences like maybe these are like entities from some other dimension or he labeled it a speculation, but you know, do you remember the name? Rick Strasman. Yeah, yeah, the DMT work. He labeled it as speculation, but you know, I think that. Yeah, I think we'd be wise to kind of, you know, it's always that balance between. being empirically grounded and skeptical, but also not being, and I think in science, we'll often we are too closed. Yeah, which relates to like you're talking about Elon, like in academia, it's like often like I think you're punished for thinking or even talking about 20 years from now because it's just so far removed from your next grant or for your next paper that your it's easy pickins and you know that you're not allowed to speculate so

And that's consistent with what I think the great scientists of history, like in most of the history, you know, the greats, you know, the newtons and you know, Einstein's. I mean, there was less of it, and it's changed, I think, as time marched on, but less of a separation between those realms. It's like there's the inclination now for it's like, as a scientist, And this is like, you know, this assigns, this is my work and then this, it like my inclination is say, oh, Alex, don't take me too serious. Like, this is my armchair. I'm not speaking to the scientists. I'm bending over backwards, you say, you know, to divide that self. And maybe there's been less of, there's been that evolution. And that's, and like the greats like didn't see that. I mean, Newton, and you go back in time, it's like it that obviously like connects to then religion, especially if that is the predominant world where we're Newton, like how much you know like how much time did he spend trying to like decode the Bible and whatnot you know maybe that was a dead end but it's like if if you really believe in that in that particular religion and your this mastermind and you're trying to figure things out it's not like oh this is what my job description is and this is what the grant wants it's like no i've got this limited time on the planet i'm gonna figure out as much stuff as possible Nothing is off the table and you're just putting it all together. So this is kind of the trajectory is really related to this the siloing in science, like, again related to my like, oh, I'm not a philosopher. You know, where they could say science or not, not empirical science, but like going to these different disciplines, like, you know, the greats, you know, didn't, you know, deserve the boundaries, didn't exist.

Yeah, yeah. So I do ponder it and you're afraid of death. Probably on a daily basis, I ponder it. I would, I'd have to pick up a part more and say, Yeah, I am afraid of dying, like the process of dying. I'm not afraid of being dead. I mean, I'm not afraid of, I think it was Pendulet that said, and he may have gotten it from someone else, but like, I'm not afraid of the year 1862 before I existed. I'm not afraid of the year 2262 after I'm gone, like it's gonna be fine. But yeah, you know, dying, like, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid of You know, dying. And so there's both like the process of dying, like, yeah, it's usually not good. It'd be nice if it was after many, many years and just sort of, you know, I'd rather not fall at the, you know, dying my sleep, I'd rather kind of be conscious, but sort of just fade out with old age maybe, but like, you know, just being in an accident and like, you know, horrible diseases. I've seen enough loved ones. It's like, yeah, this is not good. This is enough to be, you know, I'd like to say that I'm peaceful and sort of balanced enough that I'm not concerned at all, but no, like, yeah, I'm afraid of dying. But I'm also concerned about, I think about family, like, I'm really, I'm afraid, or at least, you know, concerned about Like not being there, like with a three year old, not being there, not being there for him and my wife and my mom, the rest of her life. I'm concerned about not, I'm concerned more about the harm that it would cause if I left prematurely. And then kind of even bigger, long lines of some of the stuff that Ford think we've been talking about. I think Maybe way too much about just like, and I'll never know the answer. So even if I lived a, you know, 120 like, but like, I want to know as much as I can, but like, how is this going to work out, like, as humans? Are we in a big one? I think is are we going to, and I don't think, unfortunately, I'm going to learn it. In my lifetime, even if I live to a ripe old age, but I don't know. Is this going to work out? Are we going to escape to planet? I think that's one of the biggies. Like, are we going to like, to survive all of the speed? Like, I think the next, like the time we're in now, it's like with the nuclear weapons with pandemics and with, I mean, we're going to get to the point where anyone can build a hydrogen bomb. Like, you know, it's like, You just like the, or engineer like the, you know, something that's a million times worse than COVID and then you're spread. It's like we're getting to this period of and then not, you know, not to mention climate change, you know, it's like, although I think that's not, there's probably going to be surviving humans with that regard, you know, but it could be really bad, but these existential threats, I think the only real guarantee that we're going to get another, you name it, thousand million, whatever years is like, diversity versus fire portfolio get off the planet, you know, don't leave this one. Hopefully we keep you know, but like, and I, you know, it's like, either we're going to get snuffed out, like, really quickly, or we're going to, like, if we, if we reach that point, and it's going to be over the next, like, 100 to 100 years, like, like, we're probably going to survive, like, like until like, I mean, you know, like our son, like, and even beyond that, like we're probably going to be talking about millions and millions of years. It's like, and we're, we're, I don't know, in terms of the planet four billion years into this and depending on how you count our species, you know, we're, you know, millions of years into this and it's like, it's just like the point of the rear relay race where we can really screw up.

Yeah, then at least we'd be good until like the, you know, hopefully probably until the, the, the sun goes red giant, you know what I mean? Rather than, oh, like 20 years from now when there's someone with their finger on the nuclear button that just, you know, miss perceives of, you know, the radar, you know, like the signal, they think Russia's attacking a really not or China and like that's probably how a nuclear accident. War is going to start rather than or like I said, these other horrible things.

Yeah, I think this is the getting back to the psychedelics in terms of the people in our work with cancer patients who we had civil-sciven sessions to help them and it did substantially help them to vast majority in terms of dealing with these existential issues. And I think, you know, it's something I could say that I really feel that I've come along in that both like being with folks who have died that are close to me and then also that work. I think are the two biggies and sort of like I think I've come along and that's sort of acceptance of this, like it's not going to last. Anyway, whether at the personal level or even at the species level, like at some point all the stars are going to fade out and it's going to be the realm of black which is going to be the vast majority if it can do it unless there's a big crunch which just apparently doesn't seem likely like most of the universe there's this blink of an eye that's happening right now that life is even possible like the era of stars so it's like we're going to fade out at some point like you know and you know didn't we get at this level of consciousness and like okay maybe there is life after death maybe there is maybe times in illusion maybe we're going to like That part I'm ready for. Like, I'm like, you know, like, that would be really great. And I'm looking, I'm not afraid of that at all. It's like, even if it's just strange, like, if I could push a button to enter that door, I mean, I'm not going to, you know, die. I mean, kill myself. But it's like, if I could take a peek at what that reality is or choose at the end of my life, if I could choose of entering into a universe where there is an afterlife of something completely unknown versus one where there's none. I think I'd say, well, let's see what's behind that.

Right. When I am attracted to this idea, like, you know, it's organized. It's easier said than done to say, I'm okay with not existing. Yeah. It's like the real test is like, okay, check me on my deathbed. You know, it's like, it's always, I'll be all right. It's a beautiful thing in the humility of surrendering. And I really hope, and I think I'd probably be more likely to be in that realm right now. than I would like if you know or check me when I get a terminal cancer diagnosis and I really hope I'm more in that realm but I know enough about human nature to know that like I don't want I can't really speak to that because I haven't been in that situation and I think there can be a beauty to that and the transcendence of like yeah and you know it was it was beautiful Not just to spite all that, but because of that, because ultimately there's going to be nothing, and because we came from nothing, and we dealt with all this shit, the fact that there was still beauty and truth and connection like that, you know, like it just, it's a beautiful thing. But I hope I'm in that, it's easy to say that now, like, yeah.

Those merge together for me because it's just hard been doing this research for almost 17 years and not just the cancer study, but so many times people like I remember a session in one of our studies that someone who wasn't getting any treatment for anything but one of our healthy normal studies where he was contemplating the suicide of his son and just these. I mean, just like the most intense human experiences that you can have in the most vulnerable situations sometimes like people like you know and it's just like you had that have a and you just feel lucky to be part of that process that people trust you to let their guards down like that. Like I don't know the meaning of life is defined meaning. And I think I think I just described it a minute ago. It's like that transcendence of everything. Like the it's the beauty despite the absolute uglyness. It's the it's the and as a species and I think more about this like I think about this a lot. It's the fact that We are, I mean, we're, we come from filth. I mean, we're, we're, you know, we're animals. We come from like we're all dependent from murders and rapists. Like we Despite that background, we are capable of the self-sacrifice and the connection and figuring things out, you know, true science and other forms of truth, you know, seeking an artwork, just the beauty of music and other forms of art. It's like the fact that that's possible is the meaning of life.

Right. And that's part of this we're going across different levels here, but like the idea that So-called bad trips or challenging experiences are so common. It's like, like, experiences. It's like, that's a part of that. Like, yeah, it's tough. And most of the important things in life are really, really tough and scary. And most of the things, like, the death of a loved one, like, it totally, like, the greatest learning experiences and things that make you who you are are the horrors. And, you know, it's like, yeah, we try to minimize and we try to avoid them. But, And I don't know, I think we all need to get into the motive, like given ourselves a break, both personally and societally. I mean, I went through like the, I think a lot of people do these days in my 20s, like the, all the humans are just kind of a disease on the planet. And then in terms of our country, it turns into the United States, it's like, oh, we have Halle's horrible, you know, sins in our past. And it's like, I think about that like the, I think about it like my three year old, it's like, yeah, you can construct a story where this is all just hard. You can look at that stuff and say, this is all just horror, you know, where you are, does it like there's no logical answer to our, you know, rational answer to say we're not a disease on the planet from one lens we are, you know, You know, and like there's you could just look at humanity as that, like nothing but this horrible thing. You can look at in you name the system, you know, modern medicine, Western medicine, you know, the university system, and it's like you can dismiss everything. It's like, you know, big font or like hopefully these vaccines work. And then like, yeah, I'd like to, you know, like, I kind of had a big farmer was a part of that, like, you know, and it's like the United States, you can like point to the horrors. like any other country that's been around a long time that has these legitimate horrors and kind of dismiss like these beautiful things like yeah we have this like modifiable constitution over public that just like I still think is the best thing going you know that that as a model system of like how humans have to figure out how to work together it's like it's how there's no better system that I've come across

Right. So the meaning is choosing to focus on that positivity and not forget it.

Likewise, I very much enjoyed it. Thank you.