Danny Jones Podcast - #322 - Priests on Psychedelic Drugs: The Governments Search for a New God | Dr. Matthew Johnson

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Matthew Johnson, PhD, is one of the world’s most accomplished scientists on the human effects of psychedelics and has conducted seminal research in the behavioral economics of drug use, addiction, and risk behavior. Dr. Johnson, an expert in behavioral pharmacology research, has decades of experience. In his most recent role, he served as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine. SPONSORS https://morning.ver.so/danny - Use code DANNY to save 15% off your first order. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://x.com/Drug_Researcher FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Johns Hopkins Religious psychedelic study 12:01 - The dark side of psychedelics 18:10 - CIA's psychedelic "studies" 30:27 - Army's experimental drug warfare 42:02 - Adderall & dopaminergic drugs 49:33 - Why nicotine is so addictive 01:01:39 - Why psychedelics should be allowed in church 01:04:42 - The common core of all religions 01:13:50 - How drugs rewire the brain 01:24:26 - Best psychedelics for for therapeutic use 01:35:10 - Why most DMT users see the same thing 01:39:02 - Hidden human abilities that science can't detect 01:53:12 - Upgrading consciousness with psychedelics 02:00:49 - The science behind alcohol & coke 02:10:56 - Should all drugs be legalized? 02:21:39 - Elon Musk & Kanye drug use 02:29:00 - Psychological drugs & exorcisms 02:34:54 - Cocaine / sex research 02:50:12 - The ultimate goal of psychedelics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Mother's Day means celebrating your mom, your wife, maybe even your daughter as a new mom, trust 1,800 flowers to help you celebrate every important woman in your life. With double blooms from 1,800 flowers, order one dozen roses and get another dozen for free. It's a simple way to give beautifully, with colorful blooms that make Mother's Day feel meaningful. For every mom you're celebrating, order with confidence, and get double blooms at 1,800flowers.com slash Spotify. That's 1,800flowers.com slash Spotify. Yeah, I want to get to a lot of that stuff, the stories of like taking the, I know there's a huge DARPA grant to take the stuff out of the, out of the psychedelics for soldiers and stuff like this. Yeah, Brian Roth's book.

Yeah, yeah. And I want to talk also about the cocaine stuff. But this morning, I read that article by Michael Pollan and the New Yorker. Right. Yeah. About the spiritual professionals study at Johns Hopkins. The clergy study, religious professionals. Yeah.

Can you? So I'm an author on it. Can you lay out this whole story for us and like how it started, who was behind it, and then what ended up happening with the whole thing? Yeah. So the idea is, so we had a history of doing this work that was first published in 2006, 2008, a series of studies looking at in spiritually interested people. What are the basic effects?

So this isn't treating disorders, but what are the effects from just people interested in taking these things spiritually. And this is sort of a follow-up to that work. It's also a follow-up, basically, to the old Good Friday study from, was it, 1962. That was conducted at Harvard by Wally Pankey, who was a student of Tim Leary, who was his Ph.E. advisor. And they were, it's called the Good Friday study because they were in the basement of the Marsh Chapel in the Boston area. And there's a very charismatic.

speaker preacher delivering the good friday service and they were the people who were on psilocybin or an active placebo nice and they were in the basement listening to the service and um yeah they found that the people who received psilocybin largely had what we call mystical experiences they were very spiritual had the sense of unity and these other aspects of the mystical experience and and some follow-up work that rick dobblin the head of maps did um 25 years later He did a lot of digging to find most of these people who were in that study. And these were seminary students, I should say. So that's a key there.

Those were religious leaders in training. And these people largely said, yes, they still valued that experience. Many of them said that it had informed their life in the priesthood or what have you. And so this study had threads from all of that work, our work with spiritually interested, non-clergy, you know, threads to the Good Friday study that found those, you know, subjectively positive effects from those folks. And so it was set up like that, you know, like, you know, getting people from different religious faiths that ended up being, what was it, 21 Christians and five rabbis and one

Muslim imman and one Buddhist. I think that's what it, yeah, it turned out to be in terms of, so mostly Christian. So who was behind the initial idea? And to get this study done and get it funded and start? Like, who was behind the start of it? So the initial idea was really a convergence of a number of people who had interest. Bill Richards at Hopkins, Tony Bosses at NYU, Roland Griffiths, myself. I thought it was a very interesting study.

So really, I think all of the investigators had, you know, an interest. in it and there were, you know, funders that were interested in the effects. Now, a lot of stuff ended up happening over the course of the conduct of the study that sort of became controversial. And I wasn't aware of all of it. I was aware of some of it during the course of the study, but that's kind of what the, some of what Michael Pollan wrote about. That's what it was all about. Things like funders working on the studies. I knew that. I advised against it, but I wasn't the so-called PI, the principal investigator. Funders, people that were funding the study,

were coming in and participating in some of the... Yeah, not as patients, but as a therapeutic-like role, a so-called session guide, and in doing interviews with people at the end of the study, doing qualitative analysis for interviews. And so what I didn't know is that some of this wasn't even reported it to the review board that, you know, there was someone on there who was functioning as a study team member who wasn't listed on the IRB protocol, a funder. And the funding relationship hadn't

been revealed to the IRB. And this was in the context of that individual who I don't think did anything wrong. It's not their job to scope out these rules as a non-academic and, you know, not a faculty at the medical schools. But NYU did the right thing and asked their review, well, you know, can they participate in helping to run the study? And they said no. Well, she ended up doing that at Hopkins. And apparently, as we know now, it wasn't,

not only was that relationship not reported, but they weren't included, even listed, as someone working on the study. Oh, wow. And then there were other things. So there was in Travis, I know you've talked to him about this. I forget the degree that you focus on this in your interview, but Travis has written about and others.

Some of the funders subsequently funded some of the participants in the study to start organizations to focus on psychedelics in religion, to kindle interest in this area of psychedelics and in their various, you know, faiths. And so, and then there was a retreat that some of the scientists had a role in, but I was completely unaware of after the study to get the participants together, to presumably look at paths forward about the implications going forward. So there was some, I mean, so some of the concern was related to, it ended up appearing looking more like a mission with the goal in mind to introduce psychedelics, to kindle this interest in religious practice, sort of more explicitly rather than having just, you know, this scientific question. And so I think there's good science.

there and that's why I remained an author on the paper and that's you know I don't like being in these situations where I mean if it reaches a certain level where I think well we can't trust the science I wouldn't want to be an author sure on the paper and other situations like that came up with for example the cancer study where I caught wind and then investigated it for example a participant who um in an interview with the principal investigator they described their experience but then on the questionnaire, ranking how meaningful this was in your life, they gave a certain rating and then a discussion with the principal investigator, oh, well, it sounded like your description was more impressive than that. Are you sure you don't want to change your rating? Oh, interesting. And they changed, and I prompted, you know, hey, like, I'm concerned about that because have we ever done the opposite? If we ever said, your rating looks more impressive than what I heard, like probably not. And so that was, in that say, that was the one case I was aware of and was told, well, it would be reassessed with the participant, which I never got confirmation of. But again, if it had reached a certain threshold, you know, I would have, you know, made a formal issue out of it.

But it didn't rise to that level. And the reason I, that some of this is disappointing is this is something you don't need to fluff up. up, you know, in the right context, I mean, I'm convinced from not just data, but from the now hundreds of participants that I've talked to, you know, a good number of which I've been in the room with them in this so-called guide role. What was the drug administered? That was psilocybin. And all, everything I've mentioned so far. And so, you know, why risk, you know, muddying the waters with this type of thing? Hey guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video.

Back to the show. To me, it looks like there's a real effect there. In other words, that, yes, many people have what they claim to be very meaningful experiences that they hold in a spiritual light and that they report, you know, positive long-term effects on their life and well-being. but you know I'm also concerned that you know in some of the states like have we really looked at the negative so there was sort of like an explicit rejection of things like assessing the credibility of the blind or which is to say simply asking the person afterwards you think you got the drug or the placebo you know in the sense that you're going to get an answer that could be used as ammunition

because most people do correctly identify it but you know we want more data than not. And you could do things statistically to at least imperfectly to, you know, once you have the deity you could look at in regressions, for example, how much that might have accounted for some of the positive results. But then other things like simply asking people

at their long-term follow-ups have used psychedelics again. And, you know, sometimes, and it's certainly not normative, but sometimes someone's introduced to a psychedelic in one of these studies and they get really into it. I've even seen cases where,

like they become a neo-shaman and are doing these things more on a regular basis. And, you know, again, with the concern that, oh, this could be used as ammunition against this research. But I just think, one, that's not right. But even strategically, look, if these things are approved by the FDA, we want to know what the outcomes are going to be. Something that could be on the market, and it could get plenty of drugs are pulled from the market after they're approved. So it's not just like, you know, once one of these things like psilocybin or MDMA were approved, then, oh, you know, we've achieved the result, you know, the world's going to be a better place. You know, you're going to get some of these effects. Like you're going to,

you know, you are going to kindle some interest. My impression is that it's not, you know, that it's a small minority, but you're going to introduce psychedelics to people who are using in, whatever you want to call it, unsupervised, whatever. Yeah. Someone in school. scores of mushrooms and they go hiking with it and this type of thing, you know, and then there's questions about that. Not all, most of that is not going to be harmful as we know. You know, most people that use psychedelics aren't

harmed by it, but some are. But we just have to understand the full landscape, the good, the bad, the ugly. And we shouldn't be afraid to kind of, we shouldn't be operating under a context in which we are just had this mission

in mind to kind of mainstream psychedelics. no matter what. Because one, it's not right. And two, just even if that always your goal, to mainstream, like, it's going to back fire. Like, the best policy is transparency and, you know, learning as much you can, including about the dark side. There's plenty of dark side with these compounds, which, you know.

What is the dark side? Well, I mean, more at the superficial level, yeah, the bad trip is a very real thing. I've been in the room with plenty of people, like, having a real existential, you know, cry, you know, and I'm sure I'm not, you know, telling you anything you don't know, but like your soul's being shredded, you've gone permanently insane, you're never going to come out. And in a safe environment, when you've prepared the person as much as possible, and you're, you know, when you be holding their hand through the experience and keeping them safe, yeah, the effects subside and you can keep them safe.

But, you know, out in the wild, sometimes that leads to dangerous effects. I mean, pretty rare, but sometimes people freak out. and, you know, they're run across street, hit by a car. And even though it was definitely overplayed in the 60s with some of the propaganda, but there have been cases where people have been so far out there, it really appears that they thought they could fly. You know, and we don't know how common that is,

but it has happened. And anyone with enough experience, or who's been around enough people with psychedelics, they should know that at least, sometimes some crazy stuff like that can happen. That's how powerful these drugs are. And I always kind of think people should take Bill Hicks rule. I don't know if you remember it.

Like, if you think you can fly in psychedelic, just test that on the ground. You know, not on the fifth floor. Yeah. But there are some interesting cases in the popular press that looks pretty, you know, you never, of course, know what's going exactly through someone's mind, but someone take one of the colleges in Boston. I remember a story. might have been in Rolling Stone years and years ago,

but some kid that just goes to this big university library with this, I don't know how many floors it was, but this big kind of atrium where you could and just sort of took a swan dive, right? Seemingly. And there was a case at Hopkins where someone, and I saw the video, I wasn't in the room, but it saw the video,

where someone tried to jump through the painting on the wall, And my kind of take from that, and it looked like from the video that this person, again, you don't know what's in their head, but it looked pretty credible. It seemed like this person was expecting to go through the painting, into another dimension. I don't know. And they were fine. They had a little bump in their head. It was reported. But even that, I've conveyed that before on, I think it was on the Huberman podcast and got some pushback from a college. It's going to scare people. It's the truth. If you treat a few hundred people with this,

every once in a while you're going to get something like that. Sure. And thankfully, that wasn't. And who knows, maybe they wouldn't had it been a window. But it is, you know, a cautionary tale. It's like, oh, that's a good reason not to do this on the eighth floor with a wide open window. You know, that's kind of a bad idea.

And I've even heard. Yeah, it's like if it's your first time surfing, You shouldn't go surf pipeline the first time. Right. It's just like, it's that linked up to anything. Right, right. And I've heard stories in like, say, Oregon, and I went to college in eastern Oregon. My first thought with the Oregon psilocybin program was, oh, that's some of the natural beauty out there.

That must be incredible. And then the second thought is like, oh, there's some mountains there. And I hope folks are. Right, right. But a story of someone just being kind of too close to the, I don't, it wasn't that they, you know, thought they could fly or anything. but the story I heard was that they kind of almost fell off the edge because they were just intoxicated, which happens all the time with any intoxicating drug. Right. You just got to be careful if you're impaired on something.

Yeah. So when it comes to that John Hopkins study, what was the ultimate question of, of, what was the connection that you hoped to find between all of these different people of different faiths? So the real, and there's really a number. It wasn't one singular question. but generally the primary questions related to were, are they going to have experiences like have been seen in these other, either the healthy, normal, spiritually interested populations, or in the people seeking treatment for depression or addiction, cancer distress,

are you going to have the same type of spiritual experiences, you know, including mystical experience? Are you going to, are those experiences going to be similar, even in these religious professionals? And then, again, like those other populations, are there going to be long-term positive attributions? And for this population, that takes on us an additional flavor of, oh, what kind of impact did that have on your work as a priest, rabbi, etc. And so to me, now, those very interesting questions, I always thought that it seemed very likely. It would be one thing we had to keep in mind is that you can't randomly plug people off the street.

So a religious professional willing to be in an experimental study of a psychedelic. They have to be somewhat open-minded to that idea. Right. With a focus on explicitly, even in the advertisement, referring to sacred experiences. So this is not a random sample. So a religious professional willing to do this, it'd probably be different if it was a random sample. which is not ethically possible. Again, you can't force someone to do this. It'd be funny if you could force them to do it.

Yeah, it would be an interesting experiment. My guess would be you'd get much lower rates of people. And anecdotally, there are some stories from the 60s where there were skeptical religious professors who tried it. And some of which said, no, this is a false, like, and there's people, I mean, Buddhist and Christians and stories of this nature. I wonder if there's any Catholic priests who've been locked up that we can do it, test it on, like prisoners against their will. You know? I wouldn't want to, you know, I wouldn't want to dose anyone without their real life. It wouldn't hurt them, you know.

They'd be safe. It'd be in a safe environment. But it'd be curious. It would be really interesting to see, like, I'm not saying, like, whatever your ethics and morals are, to do it to somebody against their will, you know, knowing they're not going to be harmed. And there were some studies done like that at the, I mean, call them studies, whatever, but the CIA did plenty of that. Oh, yeah, yeah. And you tend to get people thinking they're going crazy, having extremely disforced. In other words, people hating it.

Experience is not highly valuing it. Was it Ted Kaczynski one of those at Harvard? Did he know about it? Did he know about it? I don't know. I don't remember what he was given. I don't know that story in depth, but I believe you're right. And I don't think this was Leary, but someone else, another project. But that he, yeah, was.

Steve, find out who drugged Ted Kaczynski and what drugs he was given. But there were certainly plenty that the CIA was doing. both through money funded into universities but also just, I mean, in one classic example, I think it was called Project Midnight Climax where they took a sex worker and then the client, he was dosed and then they're watching behind a mirror.

Just imagine these freaks watching, you know. The Johns, they gave the Johns drugs and then they would put them in a room behind a glass mirror and see how they would, you know, what kind of secrets they would tell them. right. Ted Kaczynski expressed concerns about the use of drugs like LSD in psychological experiments. Specifically, it was noted that Kaczynski was a subject of a psychological experiment involving LSD at Harvard under supervision of Henry Murray. Right. I knew it wasn't yet.

Okay. It wasn't leery. Interesting. Imagine a society the subject subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy and even gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. what? And so there's, I mean, I'm really interested in the Charles Manson case and Psychedelics played a, but appeared to me a big role there. Yeah. And you're probably familiar with the book Chaos. Yeah.

And seems highly suggestive that there was a whole lot of connections with the CIA there, whether they were allowing him or whether he was a direct agent. I'm guessing probably not. but that he was, they were kind of letting him do his thing and sort of kind of using him as a naturalist experiment to see how a charismatic figure could use this. Yeah. Well, it's interesting that Hayd Ashbury Clinic, they were doing research on LSD and infetamines, both simultaneously. I know infetamines really did. That whole scene, it shifted from LSD to it to amphetamines, methamphetamine, and that just kind of ruined the whole. whole scene. Yeah. And Jolly West was a huge part of that. And he's a fascinating figure. I don't know how

much you've looked into Jolly West. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have. But yeah, he's been had his hands in so much during the Cold War, you know, especially like if you want to talk about like Jack Ruby when he went to prison was visited by Jolly West and then went insane like that. Went insane. And then there's a crazy in Aero Morse's documentary on the chaos book. He had. has a clip of Jolly West walking out of his prison cell after and basically talking to the press. We've determined that he is unfit for whatever for like undergoing a trial or anything like that. Like he was kind of, he said basically he was clinically insane. And it makes, I'm always mindful that what that stuff that the FOIA released MK Ultra information, which was released in, it was the mid-70s, might have been 75, but it was really outlined in the classic Leon Schlaan's Acid Dreams book, which was the first kind of.

of like public dumping of that information and making the uh all the details known what i'm always mindful of is that there was a lot that disappeared oh yeah files and even amongst what was released a lot of blacked out and you're like okay the stuff we learned about the tip of the is the lightweight stuff yes exactly i mean they burned all the stuff that yeah that was beyond like 1960s and 50s like CIA mm-hmm I mean, every, I mean, they were at basically at war with Kennedy, completely trying to, like, subvert his policy in Vietnam and LOWS and just, and then the stuff with Cuba where his brother was like basically,

the CIA was funding the mafia to, and the Justice Department under his brother. They were basically at war, you know, with like they were trying to stop these attacks by the Cuban exile mafia funded folks attacking Cuba and then yeah the Bay of Pigs and just

you know whether it's with psychedelics or with Kennedy's policy and just it's humbling what the you know

a lot of that's in the realm of like people just think like that's not possible like that's so beyond the pale it's so unspeakable that it's just hard to

to believe that you don't want to believe it. I think in just, you know, like, did the CIA have a hand in killing Kennedy? I think, and I don't think we'll ever going to have the smoking gun. I think there's a lot of very interesting suggestive evidence pointing in that direction. But, you know, I think that is for a lot of people, it's just, it's hard to come to that point to think, like, my God. a part of the government may have like actually killed our president. Like that's just, I think that there's something very, very deep and psychological where it's hard to come to grips with that, even when there's some evidence pointing to it. Yeah.

And once you kind of like, for certain things like the MK Ultra program included, you start to have a more open mind. no i'm not like can you imagine being teleported back to 1959 and being a chemist contracted by the CIA with a blank check and being allowed to do whatever the fuck you want or even being told to do things that you might think are not moral or maybe against your ideals but you know this is for national security you can we're going to do this crazy shit and there there's uh no consequences for any of it and you have unlimited money and i could speak as a professional scientist for decades that just the funding alone like you know everyone's desperate for funding to do the work and then i mean back then i mean this

human subjects protections just were in their infancy anyway but nonetheless the idea that like you could just it was a wild west you could do whatever oh you're interested in like brainwashing people like oh you get to try that and if you don't have a moral compass um and and if you add to that hey this is actually for the country as part of this fight against global communism like the fate of humanity is literally at stake here so you add that as the backdrop and you get this really strong ends justifies the means mentality that could i'm sure nudge people i'm sure if you Well, my strong guess is you've asked someone like Charlie West if you resurrected him. And, you know, they'd say, yeah, well, yeah, this is dirty stuff.

But like, welcome to the dirty world where it's like, did you want the Soviets taking over the planet? Right. And the CIA knows how to contract people or recruit people who are on that sociopathic spectrum. And I think they look for those people. Of course they do. Yeah. That's why they do all those extensive interview, that huge extensive interview process. with those people.

And with certain people, I think they pick wacky people that they could just easily discredit. Mm-hmm. Afterwards, if they're already into whatever, any number of things, then they could just. I think you're totally right about that. Yeah. I think you're on a, yeah. We could, that, that's a thread that we could go down a deep rabbit hole, but I don't want to get lost in the weeds. There's a, there was even in, I think it was the early 90s.

I don't know if you've heard about this, like the, the most sinister aspect of the, the, the, the, that we've been known to do is on the stuff that we did on kids with there was a program Steve we've talked about this before but there was a program they had where there was a hospital for mentally disabled children and we were injecting them with plutonium I'm not familiar with this and they were trying to understand like the effects on these nuclear materials on human beings and I think Clinton is the one who shut it down but this really happened Steve I don't if you can find the name of it or when it was shut down, but we pulled this up many times before. And it was only recently shut, like during Clinton's presidency, I think it was shut down.

Yeah, it's the reason, see, as you're describing it, that's shocking to me. Because, of course, we know about Tuskegee and. Yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Between 46 and 56, no, that's too early. Massachusetts were subject children at a school in Massachusetts. were subjected to radioactive nutrition experiments sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and conducted by researchers from Harvard University in MIT.

The children were fed Quaker Oats Breakfast cereal containing radioactive traces and absorption of plant material and calcium. Parents were not informed that radioactive elements were involved in these tests. Additionally, in a separate experiment, 73 children at the Furnald State School were spoon-fed oatmeal that contained radioactive isotopes over several years. The children were blah, blah, blah, blah. The parents were never talked about. But there was a, there was one that was recently shut down.

Could it have been the follow up of this? Because like, for example, Tuskegee, the plan was to just follow these guys for the next 50 years for the rest of their life. And so maybe it was the following up of these people that Clinton finally. I'm just hearing about this. It could have been. The one that I read about was a shutdown in like the late 80s or early 90s, I think. Wow. But again, it gives you humility about, like, there are some dark forces in the world. Yeah. And when you get into things like psychedelics, like, you've got to keep that in mind.

Well, we're talking about like MK. Ultra, the declassified stuff that's been confirmed, which is likely just one percent of what was really going on because they're obviously going to get rid of all of the evidence of the serious sinister stuff that they were working on. And it always makes me wonder, what are they doing now? What kind of stuff is DARPA doing now? You know, they're publicly funding $40 million to, what's the guy's name again? That's doing the psychedelic research. Oh, Brian Roth. Brian Roth. So they're giving him, what is it, like $40 million to take the second dollar trip?

Yeah, it was huge. That's public above board. What are they doing right now? Right. Right. Very respected. Totally. Nice guy.

Yeah. Good scientist. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what they're doing that's still black and not not revealed to the public. It's, I can only, I can't fathom what that would be. Well, you look at other. areas, like for example, the

UFO, you think, and there's this whole history of like, oh, we shut down all the, you know, Blue Book and, you know, it's done. And then you find out later and oh, no, well, we had this other program then that was revealed like the more more recent arrow. You know, and so regardless of not

to take us down that rabbit hole, but just as a demonstration that often there's this, oh, we've shut it down. Yeah. No, you haven't. And I remember a guy that, what was his name? Jim Ketchum, who had an interesting book released about 20 years ago. And he had been a leader at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Department or agency.

I forget the exact name. But they were basically testing a lot of it under the guise of, like, we need to test things to know what we're dealing with in defense of the Soviets doing it to us. So you see, I mean, it's the same kind of thing with the COVID-COVID. what do you call it gain of function so same rationale it's like we need to do and there is a rationale there you know we need to

do the thing that we think the enemy is going to do to us even in the context of knowing how to defend against it but then of course you can also play offense I mean it was the same thing with like the Reagan Star Wars program oh nooks in space to knock out the other nukes but oh you could also use those nukes in a first try You know, so this, you know, these types of, like, the logic, you know, plays out.

So he was doing this chemical, and they were doing stuff. As far as I've seen, like, ethical work, you know, giving soldiers LSD and all kinds of interesting things. This wasn't, as far as I know, part of the CIA, but this is under the Department of the Army. And, again, that I know of nothing nefarious. But he gave a, he was giving a tour and giving some talks when that book. came out, I forget the name of the book about 15, 20 years ago, but I remember in the conversation him saying that... Leave that up, Steve. I want to go back to that eventually. He wouldn't be surprised if the, what was it, the Russians and the Chechninean rebels back in,

was it the late 90s? I might have the dates wrong, that he thought that when they were, had a bunch of kids hostage in a big school or something, but they finally ended it and had they came in and there was a siege and he was remember speculating that there were some some of these exotic drugs that they used as part of that and of course like the russians are kind of known for in toxicology like you know like you know all these like exotic you know like people have been done in with these kind of yeah poisons and but but that that some of this stuff might have been used um like for example the u.s army tested on its own soldiers uh a BZ cloud. So BZ is short for a super long, like, I don't know, like a word that has like 25 characters. I can't remember the plane. But it's BZ is a super potent, kind of on the level of LSD,

but super potent analog of the class of drugs like scopolamine and atropine. So the antichin, so the anticholinergics, which Sasha Shulgin, I remember saying he's the psychedelic chemist that developed hundreds of psychedelic compounds. But he said, you know, those anticholinergics were the true hallucinogens. You know, the classic psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin aren't really hallucinogens because people rarely truly hallucinate. But on the anti-colonergics, they do. So the U.S. Army was testing and like had an aerosolized bomb. So you dropped this on the battlefield.

This is the idea. and you're instead of having to and there's a rationale here you know like rubber bullets like instead of killing it right can we just make them into delirious like everybody trip their balls off right and especially with that drug class where it's not like people

having mystical insights they're just like zombies like out of it like scopolamine and Colombia that people call it the zombie drug because there's this take American tourists drop it in their drink and actually met one of these guys at Danish guy he had his laptop stolen, they apparently spiked his drink, and they approached him outside of the bar, whatever,

and they said, oh, is your hotel here? Yeah, that's right. You know, go get your laptop. Okay. And he goes, he got his laptop and just, like, handed it off to these guys. He was just in this zombie-like state. So that's the side, you know, he was a good friend of a good friend of mine, and it was a very credible story, consistent with what we know about the drug class. So, any, Anyway, another type of wild thing, but, but the reason I brought that up is because Kitcham, you know, bleep some of this, you know, a lot of this work continued, at least in other countries. Who knows about the United States, probably, you know, this experimental warfare stuff with these drugs, you know, probably hasn't stopped. No, no, especially with a government like ours who has unlimited amounts of money that they're spending on warfare stuff and technology for warfare. Like that's that's the biggest bucket bucket of money.

I mean, there's $21 million missing from the freaking Pentagon from the DOD. Like they're going to spend their money on, we've been spending money on drugs since the beginning since after the World War II, figuring out how to win wars and how to maintain dominance in the world. Yeah. So the idea that we're not doing that now is naive. And, you know, just, you know, going back to that DARPA stuff,

I wonder, you know, where. that could possibly go or where it's going and if we're probably we'll never find out but the idea of um the idea which i think Travis alluded of creating not just psychedelics that can treat things like PTSD or get people back in the state where they can actually get back out in the battlefield but making more badass soldiers with psychedelics is a crazy idea like making people that can have better are edge detection or kill more people or make them more productive in combat. That's a crazy idea to me.

Yeah. Well, and we already know that we use drugs all the time for these things. Like amphetamine drugs, like amphetamine itself, deemphetamine is used. The go pills. And it makes sense. And they can kind of hand them out. Like, you know, and I'm not disagreeing with it. But like, you know, that's what the, that's what the.

You need the pilots to go up on a sortie and like they need to be on and it's they haven't slept in 20 hours. And it's like, yeah, like these are perform. It works. There's a drug that Joe Rogan used to talk about on his podcast that I think he said that he used to take. That was a drug that fighter pilots ate. God, what was it? Medaphanel. No, it wasn't that.

It was something. I forget what it was. But it was a stimulant. It was a stimulant pill that he would take that he said that fighter pilots took it. And he's talked about it. He used to talk about it years ago. I haven't heard him talk about it since. Oh, I'd be interested.

I'd have to, I'd have to find out what that was. Steve, maybe you can do some searching. Oh, by the way, here is Steve found what I was talking about with Clinton. It was in 1996, the U.S. federal government agreed to pay $4.8 million as compensation for injecting 12 people with radioactive materials in a recent Cold War experiment. So it was a settlement to make amends for the unethical experiments conducted by the government doctors and scientists. So there's two sides of this story. There's that.

Yes, those experiments for between 44 and 74. Then I got more information here specifically on what you were talking about, which includes these experiments directing plutonium and other radioactive elements directly into patients. Some of these were kids. That didn't know about it, right. A five-year-old. Jesus Christ. God.

I mean, levels of depravity that. I guess it's hard to wrap your head around. I'm like, but history tells us time and time again. Like, like, there's kind of no bottom to the pit of hell. Like, I mean, you know, the human animal is capable of anything. Yes. The way they think about it, though, which is the way every country has to think about this kind of stuff, is what's worse? Are we willing to do this terrible thing to save something way worse from happening?

Right, right, which I get. I'm not saying I agree. And a lot of this is going to depend on. Right. Like, I'm glad we have an intelligence, you know, the intelligence age, you know, a country needs to, I mean, the original mission was like collect intelligence to inform the president and before it kind of devolved into their own agenda that the president sometimes doesn't even know about. But, you know, it's going to come town to these. And yeah, we need secrecy. You can't have everything being public, but the government obviously way overdoes secrecy and confidentiality.

and they have every incentive to do that. So it comes down to the nuances of like ultimately it took human beings to do this. And just like the, I mean, the torture stuff and Abu Ghraib and, you know, enhanced interrogation. I think we're still coming out of this amnesia where it's like we didn't want to admit at the, it's hard for the American, the average American. that we were involved with straight up torture stuff that we had executed people for like waterboarding. Right, and we tortured also innocent people. Yeah, because with anything, there's going to be false positives.

And one of any number of reasons why you shouldn't torture people. Even if you were 100% accurate, you shouldn't do it. It's like not right. It's not, it's not, it's not, it doesn't work. But also like, yeah, you're going to have some poor, poor dudes that are just caught up. And I mean, worse than death. Right. I mean, people being tortured. But yeah, we're capable of all of this.

We've always associated chocolate with weight gain. But did you know it's actually shown to be helpful with weight loss? Studies show that cocoa flavinols, the active compounds in high quality cocoa, can support fat metabolism, improve insulin sensitivity and even help reduce abdominal fat. But you'd have to eat so much chocolate to get those benefits that the sugar and calories would cancel them out or worse lead to weight gain. Not to mention the heavy metals like lead and cadmium found in many cocoa products. This is why I drink MorningBeing by Verso.

It's a rich chocolate blend with all the benefits of cocoa and none of the junk. Every batch is third-party tested for heavy metals, so you know you're getting pure high flavanol cocoa you can actually feel good about. Instead of caffeine, it uses thobromine. and natural compound in cocoa that delivers all-day energy without overstimulating your nervous system. Plus, its ingredients are shown to support muscle growth and performance, improve metabolism, and provide micronutrients from superfoods and electrolytes to rehydrate and fuel your body. So yes, chocolate can help you reduce fat, just not in candy bar form.

Since I've started taking morning being, I've turned my morning ritual into something that supports my energy, my metabolism, and my goals. So if you're looking to improve your health with something that's actually backed by research, click the link below or head on over to v-r.s-o-s-o-o-slash-danny and use my code Danny to get 15% off your first order. Again, that's v-E-r.org-S-O-O-S-O-Dany and use the code D-A-N-N-Y to get 15% off your first order. Provigil is the name of that drug. Oh, that's Medafinil. Oh, that's the trade name for Bedaphanel. Oh, really?

Which is an amphetamine-like stimulant. So it's in the general, it's chemically, not the same as the emphetamine structure, but it's in the broader class of dopaminergic stimulants, like cocaine and amphetamine and methamphetamine, and pathanone. He said he used it for, it's incredible in effectiveness for focus and mental clarity,

but eventually stopped because he didn't like the idea of depending on it. So it's sort of, and I think it was Michael Baumann at Nida Intramural that put it this way one time, you know, sort of amphetamine, in the amphetamine class in general is sort of like, you know, pounding your cocaine

and, you know, or I'm sorry, your, your, dopamine, you know, and really pushing it strong. Medaphanol is like you're massaging your dopamine system. So it's a pretty mild stimulant of the, with dopaminergic effects, like cocaine and amphetamine, but much milder, and it's approved for, what's it approved for so like certain things like shift work uh-huh and um jet lag um so it's it's it's the term there is like it's a wakefulness enhancer do you know i could score some of it it's so

it's very common for people to order that i'm not making any recommendations but it it it is very common it's schedule four so it's not so it's illegal to have without a you can get a prescription number one. But a lot of people get it without prescription. They order it from these Indian pharmacies. Really? So it's way easier to get. Again, I'm not telling anyone there's definitely illegal risk to that, but lots of people

and just you shouldn't do illegal things. But a lot of people do that, order it because it's relatively low on the sketch, so there's not as many controls and they're just, how are you going to stop it? How similar is it to Adderall? It's similar. It's milder. Okay. A lot of people prefer modafinil or providual to Adderall and similar drugs like Ritalin, which is mental fendalate.

But they prefer it because they don't, they say it gives you that kind of focus and that wakefulness of being in the flow on task without the jitters. So it's not as forceful, but it's with some of the same effects. In fact, with some of the, there's some data that was collected in the military suggesting that it's even better than amphetamine at reversing the cognitive detriments that you get from keeping people awake. So from insomnia, because you get a lot of cognitive detriments, very measurable, and stimulants in general, caffeine, the amphetamine compounds, metafinol, well, to some degree reverse that or attenuate that, make it not as bad. or get it back to normal state or something at least closer to normal state. But metafinol, as I recall, looked even better than amphetamine. So its mechanism of action is totally separate. It's totally different from Adderon.

It has an overlap. It's a sense. So it has that similar effect on increasing extracellular dopamine, which is the same general effect that in different ways, cocaine and amphetamine, cocaine more so blocks the re-uptake, confederate is more so or release or so all of these drugs they all the important thing is they all ultimately kind of increased dopaminergic function which means they're going to pay for it later yes and i always like to um quote um terence mckenna i quote him on several things it's like emphetamine it's like it just leaves your your axles flopping yeah sort of like there's a

uh they're very hard on the body and especially people at chronically use stimulants. It just, they are rough on people. And so it can deplete your dopamine reserves, basically. Right. And so an answer to that is, well, taking it the next day.

And then, of course, you know, where that, like, yeah. The thing I hate about Adderall, I've taken Adderall before. Very rarely do I take it. If I really need to get something done and I haven't slept, I'll take one, like a little bit,

like a quarter of one. But I hate the fact that it, sucks every drop of creativity out of me. Really? I can't be creative. I can't carry a conversation. I just turn into a robot, like a mechanical robot that can complete tasks.

That's it. Right. So it's like a trade-off. Now, some people will say these drugs can enhance their creativity. Really? And other, but I've heard plenty of people say what you're saying. So if you have something to do,

everything is defined. And yet, as I think of it, there's some experimental evidence for this. Like, you know, if you have your task before you and you know what you need, especially if it's a more mundane task, like yeah, that's where this is really effective.

But perhaps at the expensive. I took one when I had to clean out my garage a few months ago. And it was perfect. Well, which is a classic stimulant thing, like people cleaning. And the way I think about it, and this goes beyond the research, but people tend to go into,

both in conversation and with tasks, cleaning more on stimulants more likely to go into and complete subroutines. In other words, you clean in the sink, you know, whatever. And normally, you know, you do kind of a decent job, 90%, but you know, there's that grime that's kind of like you could, oh, you could get a toothpick and like start getting that extra thing, you know, and you could, well, I can't really get under, oh, I'm going to go get a screwdriver and like, you know, take the faucet off so that I can clean that thing underneath, go into those subroutines, complete the task, and then go back to the main task of cleaning the thing.

It's in conversation, too. So people will, you know, go into a subparagraph and talk about something without forgetting. And so this is where, like, very different than cannabis, where you're more likely to, you know, go into those subroutines, but then you just don't find your way back. Right, right. You're like, then you go off and do another subroutine. Other amphetamines are sort of like, no, you know. Wow.

Interesting. They give that energy and that and really it's more so of a motivation. Dopamine is very much about motivation. I mean, it's very much tied to reward, but I think the evidence suggests it's really about defining what is rewarding. So making things interesting.

And nicotine is very interesting like that too. Because the amphetamine type in cocaine has this too, but they kind of have this primary reinforcing effect that just they just make you feel good. It's euphoric. But then there's also what's called conditioned reinforcing effect, like the things that are associated with it become, you know, the things you do under it become more rewarding. But then there's also this, sorry, this might be too technical, but non-associative, non-contingent reinforcement. In other words, these drugs, and this is where nicotine has. its strongest rewarding effects is making everything else in the environment, not just through

a Pavlov's dog, bell and whistle through association, but through a direct effect in making everything else in the environment rewarding. Which is why nicotine is just this powerful psychoactive, in terms of its addiction potential, in terms of people really enjoy using it, but you ask someone, and I remember when I was young, I was like, what's the thing about tobacco? it's like, you know, people try different things and they understand, you know, they, you know, use cannabis and it's like, yeah, they're intoxicated. They feel the effect. You know, tobacco is like this very subtle thing. People aren't really high. People don't usually use that language. It's a psychoactive effect, but you kind of think about it. You know, what do people talk about with, you know, smoking, you know, you know, it's great after a meal or before a meal and the classic, like a cigarette after sex and like it. And then like with work, you know, making things like writing. paper, the great writers, you know, smoking away, skipping lunch and just smoking. And so it has this sort of, it's, and research with rats suggests this, that even like say,

putting a rat on nicotine will make just this random like houselight, like a red light coming on, like more rewarding. They'll press a bar to get that red light to come on more so after nicotine. Not because the light signals the delivery of nicotine, just because just seeing a red light is cooler when you're on nicotine. So which kind of explains why this drug is so addictive, but it doesn't make you high. Right. Because it kind of makes just subtly every, the world becomes more rewarding. You know, people, it kind of opens aperture a little bit.

Yes. And everything else becomes a little tuned in. And it's working through that acetycholine system, which has a big role in focus. Yeah. Yeah, the nicotine stuff is interesting. because I've heard that I've heard multiple things that you know A it's not necessarily bad for you other than the fact it's vaso restrictive it's very addictive but are there any are you aware of any other negative effects or downsides of using it other than obviously the smoking yeah yeah so the the there's downsides to everything and people might disagree with me on this because there's no you're kind of wets. weighing like all kinds of evidence here, you know, but to me, nicotine outside of smoking or even vaping, which is still probably going to be much safer than smoking, but nonetheless, you know, you're inhaling some, there's going to be downsides. But like, say in like, you know, nicotine pouches, any concern including cardiovascular concern is in the same general category as caffeine. So some people shouldn't use caffeine, especially a lot of caffeine, like if you're at severe risk of heart disease or if you have anxiety, like the first thing your doctor should ask you,

before prescribing Xanax should be like, let's talk about how much coffee and soda you drink. And insomnia, again, before you get a script of Ambien or what have you, first question be like, let's talk about your caffeine because maybe you just need to cut out your caffeine. So, yeah, yeah, the nicotine is sort of in that same category where there's downside, you know, but the cardiovascular effects are relatively, they're there

but more in the caffeine range. I mean a good amount of the cardiovascular downside from tobacco smoking comes from the carbon monoxide that you get from smoking, which is nothing to do with the nicotine. And something that you don't get with vaping

either. You don't get the, you know. Yeah, it's the delivery mechanism, right? Especially with those pouches, the nicotine pouches, those things will eat your gums away from what I understand pretty bad. There's a lot of people who have had serious issues with their gums like having too many having a pouch in their lip all day long yeah and some of that is going to be um we're going to have it's such a new thing that we're going to have to wait to see um i mean to what degrees related to the classic you know like cocaine burning out

the inside of the no another alkaloid um which i think someone has to do a lot of cocaine to get that you know like like what was it stevie nix i think was reported to have that and Fleetwood, you know, like they were doing a lot of Coke. Yeah. You have a lot of money to do that much Coke. That's one of the things about Coke. Like, most people don't have the money to go that far. Right.

The way a rock star does. Yeah. But yeah, like we'll see. And I would say, though, in general, like, there's a risk to everything. But, like, if someone's trying to quit smoke, like, I mean, these pouches are basically the same thing as FDA approved. like nicotine gum, nicotine patch, nicotine lozange. I would say it's probably better technology than the nicotine gum and nicotine lozenges. And because of the pouch, it can give you a little more of a quick transdermal administration.

Orders of magnitude less risk than smoking cigarettes. Yes. And, you know, vaping is still going to be. Again, we're not going to know the final answer. for a few decades, you know, but there's a lot of reason to think that vaping is substantially less risky, not without risk, but compared to smoking. Basically, if someone's smoking cigarettes, any of these things are better options. Yeah. And, you know, nicotine pouches would be the least risky of all of them for vaping or smoking. So I kind of think about this when you see some of the

regulations in California or whatnot, about, oh my God. Can't have any flavors. And it's like, honestly you could have a discussion about should we be subsidizing that i mean the classic thing is and i'm not saying we should but i'm saying that would be a reasonable argument to the degree that it's helping people quit smoking that the classic concern though is like this balance of yeah we don't want kids to use it we don't want to want it to be attractive for kids but we also got to keep in mind those same properties are things that can make it more attractive to a you know 63 year old smoker that's been trying to quit maybe they like that whatever menthol flavor, that cherry flavor.

You can't buy fucking menthol cigarettes in California? That's what I heard. That's probably true. I think that's true. That's so crazy. Yeah. And so you've got to like, yeah. That's a, I heard a clip of, I think it was Kat Williams talking about it.

That's, that's racist because black people love menthols. Black people love Newports. Now you're denying them. They're new ports. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're very popular. It's ridiculous.

Like, what are we babies? Jimmy's not allowed to have a Newport because it's too flavorful or you're not allowed to have a coffee flavored Zen because, you know, that's going to be too dangerous. Meanwhile, you have people literally doing heroin on the streets unregulated, shitting themselves. Right. But, right, it's like California is so fucking crazy. Overregulation. We went, me and him went to, uh, San Francisco. And we were visiting somebody to do a podcast a couple years ago.

and I wasn't, you couldn't buy nicotine pouches that weren't flavored. They were all just unflavored nicotine pouches. And I, I didn't bring my own, unfortunately. So I was like stuck with these unflavored nicotine pouches. Yet we were walking down the street and the guy we were there to meet was like, uh, where's your car? Where's your car parked or whatever? Like make sure you, uh, lock your car because every car gets broken into here.

And there's, there's no, no repercussions for the people that break into cars. And we were walking down the street right in front of his apartment. And there was literally a purse emptied out on the ground. like in front of a car and the laws there are they allow people to do that they can't get arrested for fucking breaking into somebody's car and same thing with uh and i i seem to hear that they're they'd reversed it or were going to but like with shoplifting oh yeah like basically i mean um now what i've heard from folks in the bay area is that their rule is don't lock your car because you can get your window broken out like one don't keep valuables oh don't lock it

right like yeah i'd rather the person open the door check for change there's nothing there's nothing here and you're good. You don't have a broken window. Yes. Yeah, you're right about that. Maybe that's maybe I got the story wrong. Maybe he told us to just leave it unlocked and make sure nothing was left in there. Well, I'm sure there's all kinds of strategies when you're dealing with that type of environment where people just, I mean, it's so pervasive, my understanding that just, you know, and you get this with drug policy in general, and I realize not all of that is related to drugs, but it's a general principle that there are unintended consequences everywhere. And you have to be really, really careful about things that, like, this looks good

on the surface. You know, okay, let's play it out. Let's get as much evidence as we can't. Like, for example, you know, having really high taxes on other nicotine products and eliminating completely all other attractive qualities. Like, you know, you can't get, you know, coffee flavor. It's like, okay, yeah, you're trying to make them less attractive to kids, but also we have the way that against, yeah, the smoker who might have done that as a substitute. Yeah. And therefore is, you know, maybe not now going to die from lung cancer or heart disease. So there's, you know, if you go all out on any one side or the other, just with sort of virtue signaling as the goal, there's going to be harms there.

Yeah. I mean, sort of like, you know, like COVID. It's like, yeah, lockdown. Like if you really only look at the, you know, transmission itself, there's an argument. there, but then as people were warning and they got thrown under the bus, it's like, if we keep kids out of school, there's going to be, you know, developmental delays. Yes, exactly. If we shut down all these businesses, suicide's going to go up.

And there's suicide. Alcoholism is going to go up. Drug overdoses were hit an all-time high, I think, during the, right of the pandemic. And substance use across the board went up in anxiety disorders and depression. And so, and now some of those people and like the new NIH direct. director Jay Batacharya, he got completely demonized for being one of those kind of voices as part of this great Barrington declaration that said, hey, hold on, maybe we should consider more of the Swedish model of, you know, shutting down society itself is going to have consequences.

Maybe we should encourage people that are particularly at risk to isolate and take precautions. But, you know, those people in just the argument that they're more concerned about the economy and this is hot, you know. When the economy goes down, people kill themselves. More so men. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak. Got that right. Exema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with ebbglis.

A once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month- or longer dosing phase, about four and ten people taking ebb glist, achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Ebglis, Librikizumab, LBKZ. A 250 milligram per 2-millimeter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled

with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Ebbglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Ebbglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebbglis.com or call 1800 LilyRX or 1,800 545-9709. Male suicides go up when, and female too, but it's strongly a male effect. You can't provide for your family.

It's the most demoralizing, one of the most demoralizing things in the world. That's one of the things you don't really, that's one of the things that I didn't really understand until we watched it play out. because at first I was like, oh, wow, like the way the media painted it as if like, oh, everyone's so worried about the economy, not people's lives, but like play it out. How does that actually end up for you? Exactly. Yeah, which is what we learned during that whole process. So with drugs, the same principle, there's, you know, the immediate thing that protect the kids. Yeah, we want to protect the kids, but there's usually a balance to be had there.

And we just want those decisions to be as much informed by science as possible. And I would say even beyond science, you know, informed by human rights. Like there's some things you just shouldn't do. Right. Like ban people from attending church. It's kind of in our First Amendment. Right. Right.

You know, despite the data, you know, which is kind of how I feel about psychedelics and religious use. I think it's very clear. These drugs, many, you know, they're a number of religious groups, including some that have religious protection or constitutional protection, the Native American Church, now the UDV, the Santo Dime for using psychedelics. But, you know, there's genuine spiritual and religious use of these compounds by people that aren't part of those, you know, communities. And the Constitution doesn't say anything about drugs. In fact, there was this whole evolution of when we first started to tinker with drugs. And we had to have a constitutional amendment to really fully ban alcohol. But then when the whole cannabis prohibition came up, it was first justified under the Marijuana Tax Act.

The reason it was a tax act, it was like the justification under, I believe, the Ninth Amendment that the federal government can't do things that are reserved, certain rights, unless they've been outlined in the Constitution, the reserve for the state. or the people. So the Constitution doesn't say we can regulate drugs, but the justification was, oh, this is involving interstate commerce. So we can put a tax on it that no one's allowed to actually functionally get the Tax Act, to get the actual stamp that you need

to engage in that interstate commerce. But now, and it's sort of like the president going to war without Congress. Now, at some point, it just became such a precedent that no one even worries about these things. Of course, you could, the federal government can, you know, ban drugs. Yeah. But, you know, but the Constitution doesn't say anything about drugs.

It says a whole lot about religion. It's amongst the very first rights that are outlined. Right. Yeah, in that First Amendment. As long as well as the separation of church and state. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think about these things with the psychedelics in particular. because, yeah, people have, by all measures, legitimate, you know, religious and spiritual

beliefs surrounding their use of them. And that's not to say that most psychedelic use is just for fun. That's true, too. They're also recreational drugs, but, you know, there's a spectrum there. Yeah. So during that study, did you find that... the psychedelic experience that these religious folks were having were amplifying the beliefs they already had. Yes, there was some of that.

Yeah. Yeah. And so people re kind of saying it, they saw the lessons of their faith in the deeper way, as well as folks saying that they were more open to other, less judgmental of other religions, this type of thing. Yeah. Now, Travis, when he was on here, he was talking about. about this idea of perennialism, this common core of all religions? So, yeah, so that's where the study has been, even years before it was published, there are already folks sort of touting the study as like, oh, this is a,

probably not using that word because no one knows it means, like, you know, attest to perennialism. We're showing that there's a common truth to all religions. So perennialism is this kind of tradition dating back to William James, who was very interested, essentially father of American psychology, who was interested in both mystical experiences, but this idea that the world's major religions have, and it can be viewed in two ways. One is that they actually stem from core human truths. And sort of by analogy, the classic, you know, the blind men all describing different parts of the elephant, the elephant being God. But they don't know, oh, no, God is a, whatever, a trunk.

And one, no, it's a big kind of grabbing the foot, you know, along those lines. But, you know, some people, there's different flavors that one is more of a metaphysical flavor saying that they're pointing to a metaphysical, all pointing to the same metaphysical truth. Another, you know, saying that the nature of mystical, of subjective experience, like mystical experience, is a common element that ceded, that that mystical experience is sort of more innate to the human, and that has ceded all of the different religions. Now, these are ultimately probably impossible questions to really address empirically. It's probably more philosophical. It's sort of maybe like the Stone-Dap theory. It's hard to get evidence for, I mean, all of evolutionary psychology is like that. Right.

Or a good chunk of evolutionary biology and psychology. But this study can't test perennialism. I mean, so, you know, 22 Christians, five rabbis, one Muslim, one Buddhist. you know, even if it did include a hundred of each of those groups, I mean, then you'd actually have the ability, or even 30 in each of the, you'd have more of the ability to compare. So we didn't even have the numbers to compare the experiences of those people. But even if you had 100 in each group and they had very similar experiences, that's very different than saying, I mean, that's very different than concluding that therefore the origins

of Buddhism and Christianity, Judaism, etc., all. have this experience at the core. I mean, after all, it was psilocybin that prompted these experiences. And that's a whole philosophical rabbit hole about, you know, is this a legitimate religious experience or spiritual experience or is this sort of mimicking a spiritual experience? But it's, again, to me, it's ultimately philosophical. It's like the hard problem of consciousness. It doesn't appear to be something that you could really provide any evidence over to to say whether all these religions are pointing to the same core truth, simply because the experience with psilocybin is similar across these different religions.

I mean, there have been studies, I mean, the whole, a lot of the excitement or interest in perennialism and the, which has been called the perennial philosophy. Otis Huxley wrote or had an interesting anthology called the perennial philosophy, which kind of really explored these ideas in the 1950s. And, you know, the interest mainly lies outside of drug effects. You know, just the fact that spiritual experiences across these different traditions do share some similarity. So in some sense, you don't need drugs to show that. In fact, it's more compelling if the experiences don't come from drugs.

Sure. You know, because that's sort of like, well, of course they were similar because they all had the same dose of the same drug. So, you know, that's not to say that I'm coming down strong for or against perennialism. I think it's very interesting philosophically, but as a scientist, like this study certainly can't address it. Right. And then there's also questions about, oh, is it a good thing that psychedelics get incorporated into religion? And you could certainly see a downside to that. You can argue for upsides.

Yeah. It seems like there's a movement to incorporate psychedelics into religion to sort of revive these religions. Right. These monotheist religions like Judaism or Christianity or whatever it is. Yeah. And, you know, there would probably be both good and bad that comes from that. I mean, I think about as an example with the Roman Catholic Church, with the, with the, the child of sexual abuse, you know, epidemic, whatever we want to call it, would that have been better or worse had some powerful mind altering drugs been thrown into the mix?

There's a decent argument for worse, right? You know, so, you know, and I've known people of, including former and current members of these various, you know, the UDV or the Santodime. I mean, there's plenty of critiques of those religions, including folks saying they're very, I'm not saying this. I'm just saying some people say this, that, you know, misogynistic. Yeah. You know, people are people. Yes. And that's also some of my critique against some of the psychedelic enthusiasts, like the extreme version of psychedelic enthusiasm.

Like, I've never met an enlightened person. I'm not saying theoretically they don't exist, but I see the same spectrum of humanity amongst people that have used lots of psychedelics. and people who have never. Now can they nudge people? Yeah, I've seen plenty. In terms of actually just being a better person, I think given someone's existing tendencies, it definitely seems like someone can,

with that kind of plasticity infused into the system by the experience, one could be nudged in that better direction. I think that seems clear, but overall, I mean, I think, like Terrence McKenna, again he I mean he was very good about like laying out I think the reality of um and the contradictions and all that

yeah and he would say like look he's like with these like gurus like keep one hand over your wallet one hand over your asshole like I mean it's the classic you know power corrupts like and he's like psychedelics don't I'm paraphrasing here but one of his lectures like psychedelics don't make you a better person he said I just went through a bitter divorce ask my ex-wife what a wonderful

person I am. Like, I keep this stuff in mind when it comes to something, you know, the sort of saving the human species type talk. Yes. Yeah. There's definitely no matter how many of these ego-dissolving experiences you have, some of the people that have done most psychedelics still have huge egos, you can tell. And it would appear that, at least to me, that in many cases, not all, it's worse, not, they have big egos, not just despite having. use psychedelics, but they had big egos because of the psychedelics. Wow.

Well, the whole ego inflation effect that, and sometimes you see this, like, I've seen, I have the answers, and most of these normal folks don't know. It's the Messiah complex. It's interesting. Ram Dass in his book, Be Here Now, had something like this. Like, the difference between an enlightened person, I'm paraphrasing, it's been many years since I read it, but an enlightened person and a crazy person is that, But the, and this is what Ram Dass said, you know, the enlightened person, yes, or the crazy, they both realize that they're Jesus.

But the enlightened person realizes that everyone else is Jesus too. The crazy person thinks only they are Jesus. Oh my God, that's hilarious. Interesting way to look at it, right? That is a really interesting way. The humility is hard with some of these experiences. And a lot of people do a good job with that, I think, you know. I've met a lot of, like, really good people that have been.

deep into psychedelics, like solid, solid, good human beings. And I've also met some wild egomaniacs. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it probably makes you more. I think Hamilton was explaining this to me. He was saying, number one, it's a placebo. And number two, it makes you more of who you already are.

That makes sense to me because of that general plasticity, which is, I think, the main thing, which is why it can be used to brainwash Charles Manson's cult followers. Mm-hmm. And it was probably successful. and to some degree with the CIA's, you know, brainwashing experiments and with the right intent and with the right, you know, preparation and guidance, it could be incredibly helpful for helping someone change the way they view themselves with depression and with addiction and, et cetera. Now, what about, you talk about plasticity. Like, what specifically can psychedelics do as far as plasticity or rewiring your brain? or are there any sort of measurable results? Yes.

Unfortunately, most of those or nearly all of those are going to be in rodents. Uh-huh. So because you can cut up brains and we don't want to do that. The IRBs don't let us do that, thankfully. I wonder if you could do like an IQ test on somebody before and after like a ton of psychedelics. So that's been looked at.

We don't see a general increase in intelligence, Although who's to say that, you know, there's... It could be that it wasn't done in the right way or maybe there's some very narrow, like more particular aspect of intelligence that could be enhanced. But it seems to be more of a personality than an intelligence thing.

Interesting. But the neuroplasticity... First of all, that's a general term. It can mean different things in the brain. So what's been shown in rodents is what's called... dendritic branching. So these, the neuron with the branches like a tree that come off. So growing new branches. Synaptogenesis, which is the connections between the different neurons often with the

branches. So forming new connections. And then probably the least amount of evidence, but some evidence for neurogenesis, which is the creation of new neurons. And so there's evidence, at least some evidence for all of those from multiple labs, at least the synaptogenesis and dendritic branching. But I also remind people that drugs, plenty of drugs like cocaine have shown neuroplastic effects.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. So... The same branch building stuff too? Yeah. Now, research needs to figure out the potential differences. So it may be that this doesn't... And this is where part of my background comes in handy because I'm from one lens. I had to say I'm a comparative behavioral pharmacologist.

So I always think, okay, it's the same thing with the thought of the default mode network, the decoupling of the default mode network being the embodiment of the ego and that the decoupling of that under psychedelics is a key mechanism for psychedelics. Well, alcohol does that, infatamine does that, cocaine does that, THC does that. So that's not a, you would have to, maybe that's more of a signature of just not feeling like yourself, like feeling intoxicated. Right. So you got to watch out for some of these stories and you got to ask, like, ask, like, what do other drugs do? Is this truly unique? Now, it may be, there's a guy that Alex Kwan, I think I saw a presentation where he looks like he's figuring out some downstream effects that might distinguish psychedelics from some of these other substances in terms of the network activity that that neuroplasticity results in.

But it's very much an active. We're going to have to figure out. a lot more to know for sure whether the neuroplasticity seen in animals is part of what's happening in humans. Well, one, is it happening in humans? Probably is. But two, how important is that for the therapeutic effects? My guess is it is, but it is just a guess. I mean, there's also the experience that people learn from and has this impact on them. And so there's a lot to unpack there. And it's a very, so a lot of, there's a lot of threads about how psychedelics work, you know, they make the brain communicate with itself very dramatically, acutely. In other words, when you're tripping,

there's a massive change in brain network dynamics, which are communication patterns across the brain. A key question, and I have a study that's, we haven't analyzed the data, but it's looking at people long term who have quit smoking with psilocybin. The million-dollar question with that stuff is, in terms of the therapeutics, is there a change in brain network dynamics long term. There may or may not be, you know, because of course the brain, and it's very important to know what the brain is doing when you're on the psychedelic, but therapeutically, the most important thing is what's it doing six months later when you're still less depressed or you're still

not drinking or, you know, whatever the therapeutic target of that study was. So that, you know, so there's that, the neuroplasticity, the brain network function, and then there's stuff at the psychological level. and I don't think it's one or the other, psychology or biology, unless you're a dualist, presumably, these are just different levels of analysis. It's not one or the other. They're just two sides of the same coin.

And my presumption is that every psychological change or psychological phenomenon has a biological correlate. Yes. And we're probably just at the limits. I mean, you remember what you, had for breakfast this morning or whatever. We don't have the technology now to go in and read exactly what those brain patterns are that pulls up that that constitute that memory, but one

day we might. But presumably there is that biological side. So with that caveat aside, you know, at the psychological level, I think that's where we have most traction and really understanding how psychedelics are working. It seems when it works, it's like good psychotherapy. It's not like, oh, I just took this pill, like whether it's, you know, antidepressants or whatever. You know, you take the pill every day and it has, oh, no, I'm feeling better. You know, people have a story to tell you. Yeah. Like a life experience, like psychotherapy, or probably more commonly, like a life experience.

Oh, let me tell you about, you know, the first time I visited another country and knew what it was like to be the only person of my race within a crowd of 10,000 people. Let me tell you the first time was like to fall in love or what it was like to have my kid and how that changed everything. Like it seems like it's an experience. Yes. It's a very reflective experience, especially like when you were talking about the bad trips earlier. Because sometimes the bad trips can be the most, you get the most out of those. You kind of like learn the most about yourself or figure out problems or find ways of looking at problems from a different perspective than you're used to. You get off the, you get off of the normal vibration of waking consciousness, you know.

And the research is consistent with that. So in different ways. So scales of mental flexibility. afterwards or increased. And then more kind of molar temporal perspective is personality. So openness to experience multiple labs, including work that I've done,

have shown that openness to experience is one of the big five personality traits that that increases. Not all the studies have found that, which is to be expected. I mean, personality is a tough thing to push around. But it strikes me as credible that, you know, so openness to experience

refers to thinking of a tolerance for different points of view and even holding seemingly mutually inclusive points of view at the same time. Yeah. An appreciation for aesthetics. That's openness to experience. So that kind of this, the perspective taking.

I mean, so people, just countless stories of people having psychedelic experiences and they look at themselves in a different way. And sometimes it's this aha effect. Like, we're just like we're fish like looking at the water. It's like this is our life for someone who's depressed or addicted. And like they zoom out. and they're like holy cow like what in the world and with cancer it's like oh my god i like this is dominating my life i'm not dead yet it's i'm deciding to react like this and let this thing my quality of life is zero

because i'm choosing to view it this way and so much of the suffering isn't the direct effect it's like how i'm choosing my life like i'm not going on vacations i'm not getting out on the sun with my grandkids this type of thing and so even though people had told themselves that stuff before it's just like with depression and addiction you can tell yourself cognitively million times but people have this when it works people can have this deep sense of this very visceral change in perspective taking and they're like my god i've been doing this for like cigarettes smoking for decades i'm been telling myself like i don't want to do this like this isn't who i am i go to the gym i do blah blah try to eat healthy.

I'm trying to set an example for my kids. Like, what the hell am I doing? And it really can hit them hard. Like, this is like, doesn't fit. Right. And somehow just when you're doing it every day, it's just habituation. And same thing with, like, depression, like thinking about yourself is this failure. And it's like you just get so used to this.

And it's just the normal thing. But somehow Sagia Dogg zoom people out where they could see it for what it is. And like, what in the world? Right. And it's so, because I think it can touch on ground truth. Like, you know, it's, and that's why it lasts the next day. Yeah, they're not tripping anymore. But they're like, it was so compelling.

And it seemed so self-validating, which is part of the mystical experience, the self-validating aspect of the experience that the next day, they're like, yeah, that wasn't just some drug effect. Maybe it opened a window for me or whatever. But like, the way I looked at it then, that was the right way to look at it. Or people with PTSD who just like, I remember one Marine given a talk about his treatment with MdMA and just say, like, he just viewed himself as a monster. Because he accidentally blew a little kid up and just like shattered him. And like how he finally like stepped outside of that. Like he saw himself as something different. And he like was able to sleep for the first time in like years.

you know like in you know it's very you know like I think the real action is that stuff we just we're nowhere close to understanding at the brain level like you know in terms of like how that manifests like how these dark pits that we fall into like with PTSD and anxiety and depression and addiction like how that's so distributed mentally and presumably like throughout the brain. Right. Physiologically, how it affects your body. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a top because the brain is tied to everything and just like they're the way they're existing in the world is just there's the tentacles are everywhere.

And how they can when they go to the root of these things, like it can have these manifestations like that are broad. Now for someone, for example, like that soldier who accidentally blew up a kid and thought was viewing himself as a monster and couldn't sleep at night, what how do you determine which type of psychedelic to use for somebody like that whether we mdMA or psilocybin or even i don't know dm t is ever used like how do you determine we don't really know and not a single study yet has looked at that now that guy was in the study that was mdm a for PTSD one of the map studies okay um and you know my the idea is that mdma was viewed as sort of maybe for PTSD as

maybe the right place to start because it's a gentler. You don't have the reality-shattering effects, the full bad trip of just not even knowing one as a person anymore. They've got permanently insane. Like, that's the flavor of the bad trip on psilocybin

or LSD. The flavor of a bad trip with MDMA is like more of emotional, going to those emotional dark places. And so I think that was the rationale, but I've recently finished a survey study where we we asked people have you used psychedelics any number of them in the mace psilocybin ketamine blah blah

like have you used it intentionally for therapeutic reasons not in a clinical trial but just like whatever whether it's underground therapy or you just took it with a buddy or whatever um and whether you took it to treat PTSD or depression or anxiety and we actually found similar rates like if you chalk it up to like how many say they it helped and how many said it didn't make it worse, didn't make it better, how many is it, it made them worse. That distribution looked remarkably similar no matter what the psychedelic was

and no matter what the disorder was. Interesting. So, you know, it's an open question, but that would suggest it's almost like you could play the old Madlibs game. Like give me a random adjective, give me a random noun, give me, it's like pick a random like MDMA for cocaine addiction.

Yeah. Probably could make it work. I mean, we needed to test all this, but that would be consistent with these very general mechanisms, though. It's not like, you know, the drugs that are treat these, the typical drugs used to treat these disorders, which are treating surface level symptoms. They're treating like these core psychological issues that are really all in common. Like all of these disorders have one aspect of people being stuck in some suboptimal pattern. Yeah. And I kind of view it all as an addiction because therapeutically most of my work,

has been with an addiction. But even if you can view depression and PTSD is a form of addiction, like you're addicted to this suboptimal pattern of thought. So the pattern isn't like grabbing the cigarette, grabbing the drink, grabbing the coke. The pattern is thinking about myself that way. When I'm, you know, when I get some ambiguous data from the world, someone doesn't look happy. Oh, it's about me. Rather that, you know, there's this negative attribution.

It's like there's an addiction. there's a stuckness that's self-reinforcing too. Once you're in there, it's hard to get out, just like with a drug. And I think the same thing with PTSD, there's this kind of stuckness.

Robin Carhart-Harris calls it a canalization. And so he very much focuses on the brain and the way the brain activity gets entrenched in certain patterns and that psychedelics can... Unwind all of it. Right, like shake up the snow globe. Wow.

Or the way Mendel Kalin, a Dutch researcher, did work in London with Robin, but said it's like you're sledding or skiing down a slope. And if it's a well-worn track, like you fall into the grooves of the previous sleds or skis. But like psychedelic experience is like a big blizzard that just blasts the mountain with fresh powder. So now you're like, oh, yeah, I kept following those tracks like into the trees there and hit those moguls that like screwed me up. Like, right. And I was like, oh, I could just kind of turn more easily and take that fresh powder into this area.

And you still have to make the decision yourself, but you're a little bit less stuck. A little more ability to get some traction. And what, so it's interesting to me that like one of the key, this is obviously these therapeutic effects that we're discussing now are, our effects that you get from psychedelics that last a while where you're like forced to like be reflective. Now, how do you contrast that with things like DMT, where it only laugh, it's like, it's not- And five methoxy DMT, yeah. Or I've never had five methoxy DMT, but like DMT is so much different than those because it's like, it's not, you're not even in your body, you're just, you're gone, you're solely JECs. And then when you come back, often people don't remember a lot of the things that happened. Yeah.

So it's an open question. Yeah. But it does appear that there are plenty of therapeutic reports from DMT experiences. So I think there's, it's such a complex thing, psychedelic treatments, in terms of like what's the mechanism. I think there's a lot of mechanisms. Part of it is that kind of deep reflection during the experience where that's where something like even LSD can be better perhaps than psilocybin. You just have more time. like hours and hours and hours like to be in the thing

because sometimes in a psilocybin session you're like it's like three in the afternoon and the person says you know like being in the room with the person as a guide like oh I think the effects starting to wear off I'm getting a little I just kind of like it was rough at the beginning and now I'm just starting to get into it and you say oh don't worry you know there's plenty of time just sink into it just relax but you're thinking like oh no that's totally right man it's like I hope the magic keeps happening.

This drug's wearing off. You got another half hour maybe. But with LSD, it'd be like, oh, man, just, yeah. Like, yeah, keep your seatbelt on, you know. Yeah. We got another five hours. But so, yeah, on the other side, DMT, you know, to the degree that there's that conscious, and get, all of this is speculation.

It's not there hasn't been studies comparing DMT to LSD to psilocybin. It's controlling for all the other variables. but educated speculation. So yeah, DMT, it's like deep immersion. Just if there's the conscious thought is like, how do I get through the next microsecond without being shredded to bits? Like just breathe, you know, just there's not the time

to contemplate, oh, that thing I said to my wife or girlfriend last week. Was I too insensitive about that? Like, but, you know, like maybe I should call my mom more often. you know that like yeah but that stuff can happen in the aftermath of DMT so we don't know how much the therapeutic impact like a lot of that comes after psilocybin too like what do you mean the aftermath well just the it was called afterglow even the old LSD papers back in the 50s but like the next day where someone feels yeah the drug effect is gone but like someone's still like they're psychologically

reeling they can be euphoric it's not necessarily euphoric but it can be but they're just still and There's some sense, like if it is the plasticity that's unfolding, that's part of the therapeutic equation, that where it may be a lot of the magic is happening. And that might be why the so-called integration seems to be important. Like just the idea of like talking with the therapist. And we could probably do a lot more with that because that's all it's ever been done is talking. Like what if you have homework during that time? Oh, yeah. And I think like what if the experience was one of empathy and how, okay, all right, now what if for the next month you volunteer at the,

nursing home or whatever. You know, it's like, let's do like some homework during that time. Right. To actually concretize like those lessons. But people, there is this sense of often there is an afterglow. Sometimes it's fleeting. Sometimes it lasts for several weeks where the aftermath is more visceral. And certainly people are contemplating the experience.

Yeah. You know, about what it means. And so I think that happens with any of these. That can often happen with any of these drugs. So, you know, how much is that actual, the thought process during the experience, the trip, and how much of it is that contemplation afterwards? We don't know. My sense is there's value in both.

And if DMT has therapeutic impact, which I believe it does, there's probably, it's probably weighted towards, you know, your integration after it. Right. But some of the lessons like, okay, you don't have the time necessarily to have the deep, you know, contemplation about your relationship with your brother, but at this just like mystical experience, unitive level, just this idea of having your self-identity absolutely shredded and at least having some experience of just beyond words of existing beyond the story you've told yourself for a lifetime. Yeah. Like that can be there with D&T. Yeah. And so just in the aftermath of that, taking that as fuel for looking at things with a fresh lens.

Right. And just the sense of the awe of like, oh, reality can be, like, I thought reality was this. Like, reality is like, I don't even know the edges. Like, what in the world was that? Like, some sense, again, there's a lot of speculation here. To some degree, I think part of the value in psychedelics is that sort of existential shock, just sort of like panning out to be like, dude, like, you're probably. problems are here and like like you're alive and like just all reality just this big miracle

and you're a part of it I'm feeling a lot of myself this stuff personally to like it's like you can't explain like sometimes with these experiences even with DMT or like come out's like this is weird like just this kind of like facing this idea of like we don't even know why this is existing this is weird and how cool Like, God, thank God. Thank God. Thank whatever. Yeah. Like, and I don't want to mess it up.

Like, you know, like, you know, some people just so thankful for the miracle of existence. So DMT can do that. Yes. Of just like, yeah. There's also the other things that happened in DMT that seem to be consistent across people's experiences, right? Like people see the Jaguires or Elves. Yeah, Jaguires or elves or code. Some people say they see specific code.

Yeah. And that, I think there's a history of that with a number of drugs of people seeing specific codes. What do you make of that? So I think there's some potential for a reality there, but I'm also highly skeptical. I'm sure that a bunch of it, the question is how much, that a bunch of it is placebo effect. Like if you hear McKenna's machine elves, that kind of nudges the dial up that if you're expecting machine elves, like you may be more likely to see machine elves. Or, you know, self-dribbling basketballs or whatever, or jagwires. So as a scientist, I always want to test this on double-blind conditions and like test different drugs.

Because I've seen things. I remember one great participant that was in a couple of studies. He was like in a dexhamothorfen study, like what Travis was talking. about the robotripping. Oh, yeah. It's a ketamine relative. So it's nothing to, you know, dismiss. I mean, it's a real hardcore drug experience, high-dose dextramathorphin.

And he was saying, man, I've done, like, Yopo down in Columbia, and I've taken, you know, ayahuasca and all these places, and I've taken, like, San Pedro and Peiote. It's like, and it's like, dude, like, I've had my most far-out psychedelic experience on a couch at a hospital in Baltimore on cough syrup. But I remember some people in that study saying they thought, like we actually kept them on their toes said, oh, it could be one of these, I think it was 14 drugs, including like mescaline, it could be an emphetamine, blah, blah, blah.

And I think Travis talked about this. I remember some people saying, oh, I had Aztec imagery, like, you know, so I think it was mescaline. So you see examples under double-blind research that kind of makes you be a little bit. bit skeptical of this stuff, but also I think about the entity thing, which does

seem as distinct, like, I bet the flavoring of entities, like, whether it's an elf or an alien or a basketball, that probably I'm guessing is shaped by what you've heard and what society you're in, if your society talks a lot about gnomes and whatever, if you're in Ireland, or if you're

in the modern world or aliens and, like, whatever. But it does strike me, and we did some survey work on that that just entities themselves of no matter what flavor are just so common with DMT that perhaps that's and we have no idea how this would be working but somehow the DMT is tapping into some basic mental like brain structures or brain function of the self and the other like the assignment like um that's a like theory of mind is a term for it in cognitive psychology like the our modeling of the other.

Like I'm assuming there's a part of my brain that's like doing this kind of like modeling of like, you know, what you're thinking, how you're responding and they call this theory of mind. So my speculation is that DMT probably does something very powerful in terms of tweaking with this machinery

we have for sensing the other and for defining the self and object, you know, the self and other. or maybe they are entities and we're open like Rick Strassman is speculated like I'm open you know I want evidence but like I'm open like maybe there's other dimensions and there's other like I don't see any evidence for that but I'm just saying there's a lot of thought out there on this have you ever heard of Joe Rogan's fart theory maybe if you describe it not off the top of my head he used to talk about this theory he had called the fart theory where basically like if we didn't have smell or a nose and someone farted, you would have no clue. You would just be sitting there basking in someone's fart. The Lincoln Spring Sales event is on now, and there's never been a better time to experience the feeling of driving a Lincoln. Pictures, sunlight through the available panoramic vista roof, music, weather, and maps on the 48-inch panoramic display, and a drive so smooth that inspiration

rides up front. Stepping out better than you got in, that's the Lincoln feeling. Get behind the wheel of the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus SUV and discover exceptional offers only at your local Lincoln retailer. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla,

each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a lingering touch, solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power.

Find your euphoria. Discover the euphoria elixir collection by Calvin Klein. Yes. Right. And most of reality is like that. We don't have senses for most of reality. Right. That's the theory.

Like if we didn't have like how many other things are out there that we don't have, we haven't evolved senses or organs to detect. Right. And if it's not functional, we wouldn't have evolved it. Right. I think about this with the sci phenomenon, which I'm very interested. So the very, you know, whether it's telepathy and whatnot and intrigued by the research. And even informally conducted a little bit of this myself, not as a formal study at university, but just myself having read some of Rupert-Sheldrake stuff and replicated, like his telepathy, like, can you guess who's calling you on the phone in these controlled trials?

And so my guess is that there's something there, but my hypothesis with any of that, okay, if it is real, and we've got to keep our skeptical hats on. But like you're saying, like the fart theory, like we don't know what we don't know. We probably are aware of way less than 1% of reality. If some of these extraordinary phenomena exist, if they're real, these are just ultimately, I would say they're natural. They're not supernatural because there's some level of nature we're just not aware of. Right. I mean, I think everything we know about science should point to that humility. I mean, even with, like, color, like, we see this insignificant fraction of the EM, you know, the spectrum of EM.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and, you know, like, sound doesn't really exist as just our interpretation of vibrations through the air. We can't see infrared or near infrared light, right? So that's an interesting thing. Right. And then there's, like, earthworms. Earthworms only have a very narrow amount of sensory input. So, like, you could, like, touch an earthworm, pick it up.

It would never even know you're there. I didn't know that. Wow. Yeah. And then you get into like, I think Daniel Hoffman or, this isn't a, I think it's Hoffman, but he's been on some podcasts including Lex Friedman. Daniel? I think his last name is Hoffman.

His first name, I'm not 100% showing the Daniel, D. Douglas or anyway. Okay. But his, I believe he's a psychologist, but very much is informed by physics. And he's really very much focused on this idea that time space itself is. just this this illusion Donald I had the D-write

yeah sorry sorry Dr. Hoffman Donald Hoffman but yeah he is a fascinating he has a fascinating account that he says the evidence suggests that there's every reason

to think that just time and space themselves are just kind of part are the gooey or the operating that's the desktop you know and what's underneath we have no idea

it's like ultimately the machine code, the countless billions of on-off switches that creates this, you know, whatever, the menu that we think we're operating on the Mac or the, or Windows, but that were as disconnected from whatever reality really is as far as possible, even to the degree that time and space are just these kind of functional illusions. Right. So I don't know whether that's true or not, but I think we need to have this humility with

So, like, you know, and, you know, the physicists, I mean, they, you know, talk about the potential existence. I mean, string theorists talk about all these other dimensions that might exist that we're unaware of and yet, who knows. But we should have some humility that reality might be so complex that we just. Right. Yeah. And I think that is one of the downsides in science, like, that I've tried, probably not, definitely not totally successfully, but to try to stay open. I feel like the more you learn, the more you become a learned person, the more you kind of dismiss things. And like, unless something's been shown to my satisfaction, it definitely doesn't exist.

That's definitely bullshit. Whereas I think the right balance is like, okay, I'm not going to confirm something or I'm not going to, but I'm also not going to summarily dismiss it. So I think we should kind of think more of a kind of a Bayesian framework instead of saying, Well, unless have lots of strong opinions loosely held. Yeah, be open. And then kind of think more, okay, like, how likely, let you know, maybe you're 95% likely to think that, you know, or maybe you're 60% likely to think that the UAP phenomenon is extraterrestrial. Yeah.

You know, there's another percent that maybe these are advanced military, you know, things, you know, it's like, you don't have to be black or white. You could be open and just say that. We don't know. and I'm interested in more evidence, but not kind of be in this framework that until something's been completely proven, I'm saying it's complete, you know, malarkey. Yes. Because psychedelics were that way. I mean, the whole idea, I mean, when I started working psychedelics, it's like, it sounded absurd to most scientists, most psychiatrists, psychologists, like, that experiences with psychedelics would help people overcome these mental health disorders. Yeah.

It sounds absurd because people say, oh, no, I've seen people in the ER come and tripping on too much acid. And, like, that's, it's not good for you. Like, what do you mean? You know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Going to, like, the idea of, like, Rupert Sheldrake and the morphic resonance stuff and the idea

that there's more out there that we can't perceive, you know, that exists. I mean, there's definitely, there's definitely evidence of this stuff. Right, like the telepathy stuff, the, the Stargate, remote viewing stuff. Like, there is, there is scientific evidence that this stuff is real to a certain degree, right? It's been measured and then there's been tons of money that's been dumped on it with the United States to actually do this stuff and use it for spying or, or all kinds of things. So like, just- I think there's a phenomenon there. There is, yeah.

I think there's very likely. I would put it at 90, whatever, five, plus percent that there's a real and because I've delved into the evidence and I didn't I didn't take any of this seriously until one day

you're probably like 20 years ago where a buddy of mine just dropped one of these telepathy papers on my desk coming down the hall. I was like Johnson take a look at this and I thought it's got to be bullshit I wouldn't learn about it and in graduate school yeah and it's just a very

suboptimal way of thinking I think that humans used to be way more, I think, I think it's possible that we way back millions of years ago were telepathic, like straight up telepathic. And language has actually gotten in the way. Language. Yeah. Language and developing technology, like the written word, like being able to offload our memory.

Right. Like we probably had amazing memory. We could probably memorize everything. So we would have had to to survive, right? We've already seen it in our own lifetimes. Look, our dependence on cell phones from back when I was. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Yep. That. You can't remember. I used to know all the phone numbers. Yeah. Like now. Yeah, I think technology is just making our senses atrophy. I think that makes sense.

And that reminds me of something I've thought about with these kind of extraordinary phenomenon that may exist, that natural selection is going to work on whatever works. Yeah. So if there is, whether it's something we're aware of or whether it's something more subtle, like whatever is behind. the telepathy if it's real you know whether it's some quantum entanglement I don't know I don't think anyone knows but if it can be leveraged by natural selection

as long as there's variation and there's selective advantage and so in other words if this critter of whatever type if it nudged them just a tiny tiny bit to be more likely to find that food or find the

mate had they not somehow had that thing that detected the quantum entanglement that's a random example to be clear I do not know or whether it's some other dimensions that we exist in that we're not aware of like the physicists speculate on

we're going to use it we're going to use whatever natural selection is going to find a way through this seemingly infinite push towards variation yeah And it's going to be co-opted.

So there may be that like, you know, if it helped us survive and, you know, I mean, my dog does things that just. Right. Yeah. Dogs and cats. I can't explain. Right. Like, just seems to know. It seems to know when we're about to arrive at a destination.

She knows. And even when we make stops in the way where we stop at a stop sign, it's like. So it's not about slowing down, but like when we get to the final death, like somehow, again, it's not a controlled experiment. I could be fooling myself. But I'm intrigued by it. Like, it seems like there's some sense and like knowing when I'm going to come home. Right. Like going back to that fart theory.

Like there's, you everyone's heard the story of you walk into a house where there was a murder and like the energy's off. Yeah. Or like just the general idea of bad energy in certain places. that could be something. That could that could be part of this whole thing. I think we should be open to it. Something that we could can't sense or like, like you alluded to,

your dog or or a cat like cats always have weird senses. And they can, they can smell energy on people and like sometimes dogs like people. Sometimes dogs don't like people for whatever reason. What are we, you know, what is that? What sort of an invisible layer or what sort of a fucking energy is there that could be palpable

if you had the senses that they had that we're completely and are invisible to us. And if you take Rupert Sheldrake's research seriously, and this isn't the morphic resonance stuff, it's like the telepathy. He did, he published like a bunch of variations on this stuff and and found that, again, unless you just dismiss it all, like what he reported, unless he made it all up, like it seems that there's a trait. Some people are good at, like bowling. Some people are really, good at it. Some aren't. Even, and no matter how much you practice, some people are just never going to be that great at bowl, or you name the sport. But some people really have a that's both practicable, but also there's an innate talent. And so, in the same thing,

you mentioned the Stargate, like, you know, stuff, like the people that were involved with those programs, they all talk about this. Like some people, they find these superstars that seem to be really good at whatever this is. And that we're good at remote viewing, for example. and that it's not something everyone like maybe everyone can do it but they're not necessarily to the same degree and not necessarily something

it's going to be functional for everyone but some people like my wife seems to be one of those people that just kind of knows things and she kind of has these things in her family I think it if there's something there it seems like it runs in her family like they're mountain people

and there's like just these weird things that have happened that just these stories that just make you wonder. Yeah. And she has a sense for people, like, watch out for that dude. Like, and that turned out to be right that I was just. That's interesting. That's really interesting. Because there actually, there has been people who have studied and done brain scans of people

who have been able to witness like paranormal phenomena or people, I think they took groups of people who witnessed paranormal stuff, whether it be ghosts or spirits or even UFOs. And they did some sort of study of them. And they found out that their basal ganglia had what was really dense with neurons or the Codipatamen. I think that's a similar. Yeah, I don't remember the particular areas. But, yeah, I at least, yeah, I was aware of the headline level of these findings. And I don't remember what the significance of the basal ganglia or the Codapitamin was.

But there was, you know, that would be, that would be interesting to understand, like, you know, is there any implication to that. part of the brain or is there any way you can affect that part of the brain or that that part of the brain is affected by psychedelics at all, I wonder? Like, is there, is there a way that if in a thousand years from now, if we're like on the trajectory human beings are on right now? If the, if it, it is true that we had some sort of more sensory abilities in the past that we've lost now, if you extrapolate that into the future and we lose more of them, because of technology, and technology is like, you know, we're competent. Technology is compensating for all this stuff now, so we're not having it.

Like, I wonder if there's a way to turn the clock back maybe with psychedelics or, or that's not the right, not the right way of putting it or like to, to maintain some of that stuff with psychedelics. Well, it reminds me of a title of one of McKenna's books, The Archaic Revival. I mean, he very much viewed them in that sense. It's sort of like an ability to kind of, you know, kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of kind of. Yeah, perhaps. And it's, yeah, it makes sense.

I mean, it's sort of like, you know. It's a different way of looking at it because like, like, obviously the traditional way of studying psychedelics is you have to get funding to treat things like that are serious issues like depression, PTSD and yeah. And things like this. but can we, at what point will we be able to study psychedelics and do serious research on it for enhancing the human experience or upgrading human consciousness? So that's what I'm most interested in. And we've done some of that, even the older work with,

and you would say, you know, with the religious professionals that could be described in that fashion. But I'm kind of more interested in, I think, along the lines that we're talking here. and like for example if these are learning enhancers how how radical can we push that like i've heard some interesting stories about people changing their like in a in a different culture where they speak of a foreign language and that like psychedelics help them really like adapt to that like in a single evening on i don't know could be could be baloney but but i know enough to take that seriously like could you learn a language more rapidly

with psychedelics. Could you and I mean this, again, if you take any of this sort of call it whatever you will the sci phenomenon seriously,

can psychedelics? I mean, psychedelics have a history. Those basically researchers went two separate ways after the 60s out of mutual self-preservation. Right. This guy in Britain, David Luke,

has very much has been focused on the connection between psychedelics and and sci phenomena. Okay. So, I mean, that, you know, these far, and I think Franz Volandviter, the Swiss researcher, has done some, I think he was doing, I don't know, I don't think he's published anything, but Belivia was doing something with, with whether people could have a shared experience when they're in different rooms. So basically something along these lines of telepathy. Oh, really?

On psychedelics. Yeah. I believe that. have you ever it was the case and I don't know that it was ever completed or maybe

it's ongoing or have you ever heard any anecdotal stories oh yeah like countless stories of like people like doing

DMT together or something oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and people even being in different locations

and knowing something weird happened and there was some survey work that suggested that

these types of abnormal experiences are really high with dexter orthorphine, which is, the, the, the, the, the robotripping. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Um, which is really interesting because, again, it's a ketamine relative and the wild

stories, for example, John Lilly with the alien communication, I mean, people get weird. I knew a guy actually, a university, not at any place I've worked, I don't, I want to keep squarely anonymous, but a university professor who, I believe started taking dexham morphorphine pretty frequently before depression, just on his own. And he, really smart guy, really interesting guy, but he started, as he described it, like living in multiple timelines at the same time. Like the dissociative, you get some wild stuff.

So I don't know how much you know about, like, Lily with his dolphin research. And he started believing like there was a solid state intelligence. It was funded by NASA. Yeah. And you get really smart people on really high. frequent dissociatives and you get some wild stuff. So who knows how much of it is like, you know, is somebody, is their brain just able to go deep, deep, deep into delusion and create post hoc stories?

Or is there something fundamental about how dissociatives can kind of tap you into some, who knows, speculative, like, you know, other dimension or something that might underlie these abnormal, paranormal phenomena. I don't know. We always had to keep both in mind. Maybe just like the highly intelligent, crazy people are always like very interesting

because they're able to go further into like the wild shit. Yeah, I always wonder what came first, the drugs or that personality type because the people I know that have done the most psychedelics, they are, they seem to be the most interesting, intelligent people.

people to begin with. So was that there first or were the psychedelics part of that? I'm guessing it's just it's some of both. Like a lot, it's usually the cop out at an interest psychology textbook. And it turns out it turns out to be both. You know, like, you know, it's both. Yeah, they start out. The uninteresting answer.

Yeah, they start out with a little nudge to be more in that. That's part of why they chose to use psychedelics because they're a little more on the edge, a little more interested in the stuff out there, a little higher risk taking. Yep. And then they go even further once they start. getting some acid in their system talking to the aliens. Yeah, what were you saying about John Lilly

with the solid state? Yeah, he thought he was in communication with like he had this bizarre language. I won't be able to recreate all of it. But like this highly complex alien civilization that was sending signals. And he was like going crazy on ketamine towards the end.

Yeah. And almost drowned a couple of times. His wife pulled him out of a pool apparently once he just felt face down. and on dissociatives like Matthew Perry died in a hot tub on ketamine. Like you got to watch out with like a lot of drugs. Like the dissociative people can drown in like a few inches of water

because you're just anesthetized if you take too much. And you don't have that basic instinct of, you know, getting jostled up when you need to take a breath of air. Yeah. Yeah. that Lily's experience reminds me a lot of, I don't know if you know, the author Philip K. Dick. Oh, yeah. So maybe my favorite book ever is Vailas.

Okay. So it's like that was, and this was a true story. It was fictionalized, but it was about his life experience of thinking that he was contacted by this super godlike alien. it's never clear. And from one dimension, it's clearly he described, it's a psychotic break from one lens. But from his experience, it was like he was, he had this religious sort of alien intelligence download of information

that just changed the course of his life. And he actually read, that was a book about the story. It's called Vailas. The most psychedelic book I've ever read, but he also wrote something that I haven't read. I think it's called the exigenesis of Philip K. Dick, where I think it's thousands of pages, but it's about the actual download.

It's the direct information. It's the, yeah, what he felt like he downloaded it from the alien god slash whatever intelligence. He was doing tons of Coke, wasn't he? I think he was doing everything. and he ended up being very anti-drug I mean A-Scanner Darkly Had a very anti-drug

Glad of his work ended up having Very much sort of like This is sort of 70s post-60s Like watch out with for the drugs kids Why you can go overboard Why are some of the best artists Musicians and writers Why were

What is the connection between them And tons of like alcohol and coke Yeah Like there's a there's an obvious is pattern here. The disinhibition from alcohol, like the loosening the bound, and then the, you know, the stimulation from the cocaine to kind of counteract the downside of alcohol, you know, like the sedation.

Right. So, I mean, and, I mean, cocaine and alcohol together, they actually, they, alcohol changes the metabolism of cocaine. So you actually get, um, it changes the metabolism. Yeah. So you get another psychedelic, I'm sorry, not psychedelic, but another stimulant. comment cocaine derivative from the metabolism when you're also consuming alcohol and so you actually get a synergistic effect wow yeah um sort of like with cannabis for people that take it orally

one of the metabolites that you don't get when you smoke when you take it orally is one of the metabolites when it's broke down the liver is also a cannabinoid that has very potent psychoactive effect so kind of a similar thing but uh alcohol will so they go to hand-in-hand coke and and and and and alcohol and I don't know that and you have like famous artists like musicians specifically that once they go sober their art just starts to suck yeah yeah I mean I think there's some examples to the contrary but yeah I think that's a real thing too yeah I think there's some examples in the like it's like yeah person's burning themselves out of course you can't do it forever stars would say like I finally had to give the stuff up and like but you have to look back and

you're like would the I don't know these like bands that were just like would they be who they were without wild drug use and probably not and it's not always just the second you know what you know cannabis and the cycle sometimes oh yeah it's like crazy coke and alcohol you know Metallica they're a really really really heavy drinkers. of the early days and like to what to guy? Eddie Van Halen. Like all of those classic like all of those first several albums like

Coke and alcohol. Like he was drunk all the time apparently and just like how could he do it? And is it just that it's amazing that he did it and wasn't held back by those or did they actually enhance? I don't like

you have to be open to it. It seems like it's people to do these. They're very damn. dangerous doing a bunch of coke and alcohol. Yeah. But it just seems like there's an enhancement. It seems like there's some sort of, it seems like it strengthens some sort of a connection to something to some sort of like it unlocks some sort of creative thing that may not be

inside you that they could be tap. I don't know. Maybe they're tapping into it. I don't know what it is. I'm sure you're familiar with that book, the War of Art by Stephen Pressfield where he talks about the muse. Yeah. It's all this idea that like, you know. if you can meditate and focus on writing,

or he was a writer. So he would, like, write for X amount of hours. And all of a sudden, like, this weird sort of consciousness would start to flow through him. And he called it the muse where just, like, everything would start to click. Like, the creative, like, all the creative juices are just flowing instantly. And, you know, maybe there's a shortcut to that. Maybe you just do a ton of blow and, you know, get blasted on vodka. You could just immediately tap right into that.

So maybe part of it just thinking behaviorally. people talk about the muse it's like well you got to be in front of the typewriter or the computer or whatever I have pen and paper in hand it's just like you got to make yourself available for the muse so that may be where the Coke comes in handy just like and the alcohol to take the edge

off the Coke or vice versa they sort of complement each other but that providing that fuel to be just like okay no I'm going to sit down and throw some cigarettes in there and that like and just You're just spending more time at the typewriter.

Yeah. Like whether it's Hunter S. Thompson or any of these. Like there's all these cases of like wild drug use. He wrote all his fucking books on. Was that alcohol or coke? Alcohol and coke, I think. Yeah. Another.

I think when he wrote Kudra, he was just doing mountains of Coke. Wow. And bands, I mean like the MC5 talked about plenty of bad days. They just come to mine. I remember reading an article years ago about, I'm saying Coke was a huge part of their creative process, which is you know and some people say with stimulants they're more tunnel vision it reduces their creativity but they can focus but then others say like no man that was you know made me incredibly creative right maybe that and this is all speculative like but maybe that's where the alcohol comes in to

yes you know create that synergy yeah and we know very little about like drugs themselves individually so there's almost no drug i mean there's some drug interaction research but certainly nothing along the lines of creativity for anything. So we don't know that scientifically I'd love to point to, oh, well, the 1979 study by so-and-so just doesn't exist. I was reading this story the other day, this article, where they interviewed somebody from the Rolling Stones, and he was talking about how back in the day,

when they would perform their live shows, they're like, go to festivals and perform all day, like do multiple 40-minute sets, that they would just, just have a giant pile of cocaine behind the subs, like the subwulfers and stuff like that. You know, they have massive stacks of speakers and sublovers. And like just right behind it,

they wouldn't have to go backstage. They would just walk behind the speakers and they would get cocaine manufactured from Merck. Yeah, so it's 100% pharmaceutical grade. So they were, and the way they were explaining it in the article, and maybe you could confirm or deny if this is possible, but they were saying that you would not get the come down from Coke because from this merc cocaine they're saying like typically when you do cocaine just like you do

any stimulant that like hammers your dopamine receptors there's going to be a price to pay at the end of there there's like a come down effect where you start to go through hell and he was saying that that didn't happen with this murk so i'm skeptical because you know they mean just like pure like you get a come down from caffeine you know and you're going to get a come down from stimulants but i'm also open to the idea of just speculating here maybe to the degree that some of the the adulterants and there's a lot of adulterants in most cocaine. What's an adulterant? Oh, just other stuff they throw in there. Oh, okay, like to cut it. Yeah. Okay. And sometimes horribly, you know, just, you know, what, it could be anything.

I mean, which is kind of scary. Whether it be a nerd or something that has some effects itself, you know, that's thrown in there. But to the degree that some of those adulterants, those other things they throw in to thin it out could have negative side effects. Maybe some of those are accounting for. So that could be some truth. You'll probably get some degree of a come down, even pure cocaine.

But maybe it is less so depending on what the street coke is cut with. But it kind of makes sense. I mean, just, not too long ago, I remember watching all of these. I'd seen them before,

but I hadn't really focused on, but there's these videos you can see on YouTube, but it was in the Rolling Stones. It was called Rock and Roll Circus. So there's a live studio performance where they had this whole audience there and the Beatles were in the audience and other bands. And I don't know why I bring it up just a random like performance, but it was like, you know, in the day and like Brian Jones was still alive,

so it was still relatively early days for the Stones. And just, just like Mick Jagger, I mean, he's just, the energy that he put in, I mean, it wouldn't start as, surprised me at all, he was totally coaked up because he was so just like so alive and so just

on the edge. Just such a good performer. And I don't want to send the message you got to be on Coke. Coke is very dangerous. Right. I also want to, it's like, yeah, like, you know, drugs are very

powerful tools, people, good and bad. And it like, it just yeah, it just, it just kind of mind like as you hear this you know like oh yeah Mick Jagger and whatever is 80 years old now and like there was a reason they became who they were

it's like this remarkable just you know the passion and just his performing he takes his shirt off and he's just like so connecting with it and it just strikes me that he's like connecting so strongly with the audience and just is like

he's firing on all cylinders Yeah. But that seems like a total Coke thing. Yeah. You know? Like, a hundred percent. 100 percent. Those guys, I mean, that, I mean, it was just, I think it was just a normal part of life

during probably the 70s and 80s and rock and roll. You know, just rock and roll and drugs were synonymous with each other. And, you know, I don't think it was, I mean, I don't know because I didn't live through it, but I imagine there wasn't the amount of stigma that there's around it today. Yeah. But like, you know, there's always an argument that. to be had is that's like if coke was was legal or if heroin was legal would that be better for society would there be less deaths would there be less people dying from this stuff being cut

with things like fentanyl and and all this other stuff and you know also on top of that you have education people understand what it is they understand what the downside is they understand what the upside is yeah regulated doses so you know exactly you're not accidentally oh whoops, there was a bunch of fentanyl there he didn't know about. Right. Now you're dead. Right. Right.

So, like, what are your thoughts as far as, like, all drugs being legal or, um, I know there's certain countries where you can do like supervised injections of certain drugs? Right. Um, is there any, is there any sort of art, like real argument that that would be beneficial? Yeah. There's certainly an argument. And there, like, um, is there, is there, do you think there should be a limit on like the type of drugs that could be that should be legal it's sort of by analogy it's sort of like if you believe

in the second amendment you probably don't think right people should be able to construct nukes in their basement is okay so where is the right like what's yeah totally you know like there has to be some line um you're going to get good and bad no matter what and so if you if you if you legalize and regulate it and i tend to like to think more in terms of regulation than in legalization because, or legal or illegal because, you know, alcohol for kids is illegal and it's illegal for anyone driving and many prescription, drugs of abuse, they're illegal unless you have a prescription. And even in my studies with psychedelics, they're schedule one, but they're not illegal for us to use in these studies. So, and even, you know, caffeine in the form of coffee or tea, there's no regulation at all.

But even an over-the-counter vibrant or no dose, like, you know, you can't just put whatever you want in there. That's regulated. You can't go over 200 milligrams. So it's like there's a lot of nuance that we don't normally appreciate. And I do think we need more regulation of like we should move more towards regulation across the difference. Rather than just throwing it in the black market and pretending it doesn't exist. So there are strong data for various levels of harm reduction like supervised injection sites and, you know, especially if you have a known supply. I mean, things like opioids, you can reverse almost all opioid overdoses with naloxone, Narcan.

And so it's like, yeah, if you just have a nurse or, you know, medical professional there, like, it's not going to happen. So there's definitely an argument there. At the same time, if you, I wouldn't want highly addictive drugs easily gotten, you know, at the 7-Eleven. But even if there were steps to jump through, it's like, You know, like a, you know, liquor's, well, liquor there's really no, you have to be of age. But, you know, cannabis, you know, stores and legal states, like, you're definitely going to get an increase in people that, oh, I'm curious to try that. And you're going to get some harms. You're going to probably see.

And it would probably be one of those things where eventually, if it was to normalize, like, you'd probably end up with less harm by having everything transparent. regulate it. Right. But you'll probably go through a period where it's going to get really bad because, like, yeah, a lot of people are just going to decide to try opioids or cocaine or methamphetamine, and they're going to really like it. Right. And they're going to do too much, and it's going to destroy their lives.

And there's going to be other, like with all of these drugs, most people who try them don't go on to become addicted, but 10 to 30 percent do, depending on the drug. Right. And we can't dismiss that. So I'm definitely from moving away from treating drug use and possession as felonies and misdemeanors. Like that just seems to me there's just mountains of evidence that suggest the harms outweigh the benefits. And then there's the elephant in the room of cartels and people like smuggling drugs across the border and, you know, all the violence and killing that happened. And human trafficking and everything.

The black market, yeah. Right. And you can't call the cops or sue someone. Yeah, you solve it with murder. I mean, same thing. We did it with alcohol. We tweaked with our Constitution twice in that experiment. You know, like, we created Al Capone and the rest.

And I think it's been a bad experiment drug prohibition. That's not to say that there shouldn't be levels of control that match the drug. I mean, the control you have over a much more dangerous drug is not going to be what you should have over cannabis. Even where cannabis is legalized, it's like it's, kind of absurd that some states put someone on like this list yet they register you you know like whatever it's like well i could go over there and just buy a couple of fists of jack enough to kill me right to show my id like like you're not recording that i did it like it's just kind of crazy yeah you can literally go right across the street and buy enough alcohol to kill yourself for sure but

easily yeah that is not possible by smoking weed unless you're in a room unless you get in your car and fucking drive off a cliff or get a car accident right right right right But the substance itself did not kill you, right? Right. And even with accidents, so it's like people do not drive, please do not drive intoxicated on any of this. But we know through very good behavioral pharmacology research that the intoxication from alcohol is far worse. So your chances of an accident are increased at a 0.08 alcohol level of about 14 times. it doubles with cannabis, which is not good, but it's nowhere near as bad as 14 times.

Right. And the nature of the intoxication is different. We get trouble with alcohol. And same thing. The second biggest drug in fatal accidents is benzodiazepines like Xanax, which is the same basic mechanism of alcohol. It's working on the GABA system in the brain, which is the major kind of gross motor. it's gross motor impairment. It just slows everything down.

Cannabis, where people have troubles with things like divided attention, it's like kind of going into the zone on cannabis, which for certain things, if you're like playing chess or something or like maybe it could be great. But if you're driving,

you know, you can be in this zone, but it's people fail at. Yeah. Yeah, divided attention tasks is what they're called. So if a ball comes out of nowhere in a little kid, you know, like whatever. Right. It's that where cannabis people are screwed up, which is not as bad as the gross GABA impairment.

But nonetheless, it's very clear, which is why people can get, I think, on the ground, sometimes people by these comparisons can get over. Like, I think it's pretty common in cannabis using communities to like, yeah, it's driving, it's fine. It's like if you know what you're doing, don't be a novice. But it's still increasing your chance. It's not, just because it's not nearly as bad as alcohol doesn't mean it's. good. Right. It's like, yeah, if you ever kill someone an accident, man, you're living with that the rest

of your life. Right. You know? Right. So, and I think a lot of people who would never drive drunk, or certainly wouldn't, maybe they did once or twice and then regret it, but like, a lot of people who would never routinely drive drunk and think it's okay would, yeah, drive stone. And it's like, it's not good.

And I think even like a lot of cannabis users were raw as they get older, like, yeah, probably not a good, yeah, like, not so good. Yeah, no, I've met, I have, I have, I've met people and I know people who have been smoking weed their whole life or abusing psychedelics their whole life where when they get older, you notice they're like, their, their world seems a little bit more slippery than mine. Like they seems like they're, they're a little bit more disconnected from the world. You know what I mean? Yeah. Where it's like maybe it's, and I've never heard anyone explain to me. I've never heard of any

situations where someone has used a psychedelic and like not come back or like stayed permatripping. Have you ever heard of anything like this? So yeah, I think that's pointing to something real but it's not that they're permanently tripping. So those are cases

of where people where the psychedelic helped to instigate a psychotic break. Oh, okay. So I think all the evidence points to the the notion that the people that that happens in are people who have either active psychotic disorders and schizophrenia is one type of psychotic disorder. It's the major class of psychotic disorders.

Or they have an identifiable predisposition. So like people, because of the first break typically happens in adolescents or young adulthood when do people play with drugs for the, like adolescents and young adulthood. And so you get cases like Sid Barrett, the first singer of Pink Floyd seems pretty clear. I don't think his family ever admitted it because these are, you know, difficult things. But he showed all the same. He seemed like he was schizophrenic. And he did a lot of acid.

Oh, really? And it seems, but he, he seemed like he, it seems this is all, I'm not, whatever, this is just from the record and, you know, I'm not, wasn't, wasn't alive. It was born in 74, wasn't alive. But like, that he showed those signs and he was. the type of person that the ass had pushed him over the edge. And so I think that's the kernel of truth, and there's other cases of less famous people, you know, where that happened. I mean, I put it this way, if you're kind of dangling, if you're, if you're tethered to reality with a dangling thread, the last thing you need is a strong psychedelic, which at least the whole point is at least temporarily is to obliterate that thread.

and disconnect into the consensus world to explore the mind, to explore ideas, to whatever, explore consciousness. But yeah, so we've never seen a person so far. There could always be a first, but in the hundreds of trials of psychedelics, in both the older era, 50s and 60s and in the modern era for the last 20 years or so, of someone who's been screened out where we do look, and there's pretty easy ways with the psychiatric screening to identify people with that predisposition. Through like structured psychiatric interviews by clinicians.

There hasn't been in a case so far of people being, you know, becoming psychotic because of being in one of these psychedelic trials. It's not to say it's impossible. Maybe if we approved them and we're treating thousands and thousands of people, it could happen every once in a while we don't know. Right. It's certainly not common. what is going on with Elon?

These videos are him? Is he just like in a K-hole or something? I haven't seen, so someone said the other day, and I've been out of town on another trip before I was here, and someone mentioned the stuff with Elon, which apparently there's talk about ladder issues, and I haven't caught up on the recent Elon news. Normally I'm pretty up on the Elon stuff,

but I know, of course, for a while now people have been saying he does a lot of K. I don't know. Yeah, he apparent, well, there's been people that are saying he's like on ketamine, and other psychedelics. And then there's like these videos of him, one of the inauguration, another one like last week where he's in the Oval Office with Trump

and he's just sitting there and he's like, his eyes are rolling back in his head and he's like moving his head around like this. And, you know, the public speculation is that he's just freaking blasted on ketamine. Could be. I don't know. I don't want to defame Mr. Musk.

Lots of great research you could fund. Mr. Musk. Right. Yeah, he should. But joke aside, I have no idea. I do think people need to keep in mind that, I don't know, especially for public figures, like there can be a lot of reading into, like, you know, like he's also not your average person.

Yeah. So, you know, there may be some awkwardness there. I mean, those people are already so much different than us because their, you know, their life is under a microscope. So, so you can't go anywhere without people chasing you. down, taking photos of you, and imagine that. And then when you introduce psychedelics into that, I wonder what the fuck that.

Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Oh my God. Yeah. You know. So would you have interviewed Kanye? I know he kind of went on a podcast circuit.

Yeah, that's one of these interesting questions about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what about now? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So you really are like all conversations. Yeah. I'm not, I mean, I'm not like, I'm not like actively pursuing it. But yeah, of course, if the opportunity arose, I would fucking love to talk to him. That's interesting. Yeah, no, I mean, he's, there's something going on with him where I think, I think he's just trying to push the boundaries as far as he possibly can with like this performative art. I don't think a lot of the things he's saying, he's saying. I don't even think he understands what he's saying, nor is he genuine.

He's a performance artist with his life. He's trying just to push the boundaries of the human mind and seeing how far you know, you know. But it's interesting. like the Lex Friedman interview with him. It seemed like he was like bending over backwards to get him to like, whatever, provide some contact. You don't really mean, you know, like, I think even when Alex Jones interview, the same thing. And so then he, you get like Alex Jones begging him to not say the crazy thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's no amount of reason you could present to him that would persuade him to think about it differently, which is, you know, it feels like it's just an art project for him. Yeah. To me. Yeah. You know, I think I was, his interview, Gavin McGuinness did an interview with him.

And he stated in the beginning of the interview. He was like, I'm going to try to persuade him to, to drop the idea of anti-Semitism. He's like, and his whole thing was like, it's just a rut. He's like, you want to blame the Jews because it's raining on your birthday. That's just a pattern that. you can get in to make excuses for everything in your life. You know, it's like, and Gavin's like, this is like the people, the black folks in the inner city blaming Whitey for all their problems.

Now you're going to blame the Jews for all your problems. And, you know, statistically are Jewish people, they're more high IQ, low testosterone. They're better at systems. They're better at operating systems, you know, managing money. building big businesses. Okay. So just because that they're better at you, just because they're better at doing these specific things

and maybe a little bit of, maybe some of that has something to do with the fact that they went through a Holocaust, they were almost extinct. So maybe they're more motivated to succeed and propagate their race. You know, that can't, you can't just blame them

for all of your problems because of that. You know, that's just a, and Gavin did a better job of, explaining this than I can, than I am. But jealousy is a real thing. It's a rut. It's a rut. You can get in and that's a pattern that you can get stuck in for with,

with everything in your life. But yeah, anyways, that was, that was an interesting time. That was an interesting time when Kanye was going through all that stuff. Probably no, no drugs needed. No, he was on a lot of drugs, bro. Oh, he was. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, he was doing, I mean, first of all, he was put on a lot of antidepressants, I think. Okay, yeah, medications. Yeah, lots of medications. And then he was really hooked on nitrous. Oh, wow. Okay.

Yeah, he was doing lots of nitrous oxide. Ooh, that's rough. I mean, that can have some of the, that has some effects like ketamine and dexteram orthorpe. Oh, does it really? Yeah, that's the NMDA antagonism in the brain. But also just side effects, man, the neuropathy. That's something people don't want to get hooked on hippie crack.

You start getting nerve damage Oh really? Yeah, it's something to do with like I think absorption of Yeah, B12 vitamin Yeah, okay That you get nerve damage And it's a real thing

There was another There was another gas That Hamilton was explained to me It wasn't nitrous Is xenon? Zon, yeah I saw that I think that was one of the

You're saying Jordan Peterson did Xenon I think Really I think he said that When you went to I could be wrong So that was not the first, but one of the first

Hamilton episodes. I'd seen clips online and stuff from Vice, but in terms of his show, that was the first one. And I remember thinking he's in a roll, he's a guy about to take, like, you know, essentially an anesthetic, and he's on a rolling chair on a concrete

floor in some garage. Like, dude, you're an expert on drugs. Lay out a mattress, just get on the garage. It's just like, he's just like rolling chair. And then he breaks out a condoms. I couldn't find a balloon, so he's got a condom. I mean,

he's just like, filling the tank over the condom. It's just like, I was just thinking from having run all these countless, like, you know, drug administration studies. It's like, I was thinking, like, you know, like just safety. It's like, my God, you get, you're on a rolling chair on a concrete floor, dude.

That guy is wild. Yeah, man, he's a fucking renegade. Some of his early bystocks are crazy, like going to the middle of the Amazon and getting that toad venom put on him. Yeah. He went to, where did he go? He went to Haiti and he met with the zombie cult.

There's a zombie religion in Haiti. Okay. Did they use like scopolamine and those drugs we were talking about earlier? They get the drugs from the puffer fish that paralyzes you. And they had this powder, this zombie powder where, I mean, Hamilton went out there and there was this guy, forget what they used for the name of the guy who was the head of the zombie cult. But he was basically like, I have this powder.

He's like, if you just touch it, you will be zomified. And if you put too much of it on you, it can kill you. And then Hamilton's like, okay, let's try it. And then he like puts a little bit of it on his arm. He's like, I'm not feeling anything. Then he does a little bit more. He's like, the zombie powder's not working. And then the guy got mad and he like stormed off and they kicked him off because it seemed

to be more of like a psychological thing. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. Yeah. It's like when you grow up, the idea of it is, is that when you, when you, when you are grown, raised and indoctrinated into this belief system that zombies are real and these kind of stuff works. Then these drugs will start to have an effect that bolsters your, that works with your belief system. So your belief system and the drugs reinforce each other. And

they're so intertwined. You don't even know what the difference is between the two. So to some degree, it's like the faith healing effect where I think people legitimately, they get up on the stage with the televangelist and he touches your head and you're just like you pass out. And I don't think people are in snake handling it. People aren't faking that. That's a real if you want to believe, if you really believe something and, you know, so I could imagine with this, you know, zombie drug that there's some effect there that. Yeah. Or like the same phenomenon as the old like 1980s, the karate masters to do all the crazy stuff that would just like barely touch you you'd go down and all the students.

I think most of the students aren't faking that. I think they're just bought into this. I think exorcisms are the same thing. Interesting. Yeah. There's tons of videos online that we were watching a couple weeks ago, these exorcists doing stuff. And then they're like,

I command you from Jesus Christ. They put the cross on their head. These people start like twisting. They're like convulsing and their eyes are rolling into the back of their heads, talking like a demon. I wonder if the phenomenon of exorcism has changed. change it all.

Pre and post 1973, The Exorcist, which I watched again recently. What a wild film. But, like, I wonder if that helped to flavor. Like, if it's a cultural phenomenon.

Right. Like, you were saying, yeah, like, that might have helped to change the flavor of, like people say with aliens, like, once kind of the prototype. That's interesting.

1950s UFO, like, then everyone's experience. Yeah, I wonder if there's any videos or recordings of exorcisms before that movie came out. Yeah.

Because the whole like, yeah, the talking like that. Yeah. Yeah. The head spitting. I had an exorcist on the podcast once. Really? Yeah. And I was out.

We got into a big argument about drugs because he thought that drugs basically were the devil. He was like, if you use drugs, you're going to hell, like any kind of drug. And then, you know, I was kind of asking him, like, well, what if it's you're prescribed cannabis by a doctor? And then he was like, oh, well, in that case, it's. you know, it's different. You know what you're doing here. Stop trying to play these games with me. He's like, only if you're on the street and you're using these drugs in a bad way to get high, then you're going to go to hell.

So if in your living room with a couple of buddies and just kind of having a deep conversation, where is that at? Right, right. You're not on the street. You know, it's just a complete ignorance of the drug, right? Obviously, the guy's never experienced it. He just, you know, came up with his understanding. of the Bible and he's monetized being an exorcist because he charges money for it. He charges like $250, I think, for an exercise.

I mean, he doesn't want Skype. Oh, okay. That is serious grift. Like, uh, next fucking level. That's like exercising by Skype is pretty. Yes. It's, was that a long time ago or is he just like old school? Like he's got Yahoo, not Gmail.

He's like, I'm, no, I'm doing Skype. He still does Skype. He still does Skype. He charges, I think, a premium for the in-persons, but he does, um, he does. I think he says he's done. How many exorcisms did he say he's done? I'm pretty sure it was 10,000. Over 10,000 exorcisms in his lifetime.

So that's fascinating as a personality because he's obviously, like, even within religious folks, like, exorcism is pretty open. He's pretty wild. He's pretty out there. But then, you know, he's like, you do any drug in your, like, going to hell automatically. He would be one of the people that I would like to hold down and get him high.

You know? Because I was explaining to him. I was explaining it. like one of the biggest revelations I have when I get high are things that are like, for example, one of the most common things that happen, that ideas that I have when I get high is that like I need to spend more time with my kids. Everything else is bullshit.

You know what I mean? Like how is that the devil? Yeah. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's looking at like we talked about already. It's,

it's looking at the everything from a different perspective and finding that ground floor. base reality of what's most important to you. And you get that with... And it's clarity. Yeah, with psychedelics and also with cannabis, people will, you know, we'll talk about a perspective change where it's kind of just more obvious what their priorities are, that zoom out effect. Things like that.

Like, or realizing, I don't know, contemplating the time. It's like, oh, like, I shouldn't have talked to so-and-so like that. I should have, like, done. I should have been more patient and this, you know, like, you know, probably less likely people are like, I should have been more of an alpha and just like punch that guy out for that. You know, it's like the opposite. Right. One thing I wanted to talk to you about earlier, but we kind of like got off track, but I wanted to, I wanted to learn more about your actual studies that you did in regards to cocaine. Yeah.

Was that before the psychedelic stuff or did that lead up to it? That was concurrent. That was concurrent with the psychedelic stuff. Yeah. So I always like did the psychedelic sort of like the psychedelic research on the side because like there's hardly any funding for it. So I kind of kept my day job, so to speak, by getting these grants to do research with cocaine, which also found very interesting. How do you get a grant to do research for cocaine? You apply to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

And so what I was for, I did some research when I was a postdoc after I got my PhD on like the interactions between cocaine and nicotine and caffeine. But the more interesting stuff was the stuff that I conducted as principal investigator, got my own grant. I had a line of research where I took behavioral economic model. So a lot of my work has been using like economic concepts and studying human decision making to understand drug use and addiction. And so I developed these, I took this model from behavioral economics called delay discounting, so offering people a choice between smaller sooner versus larger later amounts of money. And people who are addicted to whether it's cocaine or cigarettes or anything tend to be more immediate focus. They tend to take the smaller sooner at the expense of the larger later.

And so I applied that to cocaine and sexual risk. I did this with methamphetamine and alcohol too. drugs that are associated with risky sex which can lead HIV and all kinds of whatever unintended consequences, unintended pregnancy. But asking people hypothetical decisions about if you were in this this content, you met this person

at a get whatever somewhere and first they pick out amongst all these like 60 photos what person they'd have casual sex with as long as they're getting along, you know. So it's kind of, fun for people. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever. Gender is something there for everyone. You could pick one gender, two genders, all of the above, you know, whatever. Whatever you're into. And then from that, we do these tasks of like asking them, okay, so let's say they're down,

would you use a condom or not, just like your likelihood on a scale? And they make the rating. And typically even like high risk people, like cocaine addicted people would say, you know, there's some exceptions, but they'd say, no, I'm very likely to use a condom. But then you say, okay, now you've got to wait five minutes. You're having unprotected sex now or waiting five minutes. And then different delays. Like sometimes it's an hour. It could go up to next day.

You've got to get together tomorrow. But you could see that as you should. You had to wait to use sex with a condom. You would see that would drastically change. Is this? Their function, they would shift towards unprotected sex. And then we got people loaded on cocaine. So we administered cocaine to them.

and it didn't touch those money decisions so whether they'd want to $50 now or $100 in a month but for these sexual decisions that had a strong effect they'd be like no I'm down now like they're on cocaine and so which to me

it opened up a lens of like this is where it's not just this association of cocaine with it's like if you talk to people like they're heavy cocaine users and they'll just do like wild stuff like I remember stories of like one guy in a treatment study I was running was uh

we'd have them talk about context in which they would use cocaine and he's like okay a lot of times they're hanging out with my my female cousin this is a guy and it's like we'd get you know we'd get you know we'd get high and

let's just say we'd move from the kitchen into the bedroom and she wouldn't be my cousin anymore if you hear me like things like this like there's all kinds of things that people and there's a good number of folks that would, you know, they identify as straight, but once Coke's in the

system, it's like, wow. Yeah, that story doesn't hold up. And they start divulging this stuff when they're on cocaine? Well, those stories come from people, you know, not when they're on cocaine, but I see like very credit because they're not like, I see. These aren't things to brag about. Like, yeah, just people I've been able to talk to in the context of these studies because I always like, whether it's cocaine or psychedelics, like.

I've really valued sitting down and really talking to people. And a lot of scientists that do the type of thing I do, there can be a judgment and like, oh, these are cocaine users. These are, you know, like, it's like, no, like, tell me how, like, how do you score Coke in Baltimore? Where do you go, oh, you call it like, ready rock? What's that?

Oh, yeah, it's like, it's a Baltimore thing, you know, like, okay, do you sell like $5 amounts? Like, you know, how do you do it? Like, what would you say? You know, oh, the different types of heroin on east side, west side, Baltimore. Like I want to know, like all these things that people, you know, like, you know, understand like what people are, what's motivating them and like how like just the, the, the sociology of the drug use environment and what's motivating people. And so I've really valued

that aspect. So I'll usually take the time to, you know, really get to know people and try to understand these things. And some of it is in the context, like the guy. with his cousin, that was in the context of of, yeah, as part of the study we're having them talk about the environments that they normally use in. But yeah, so cocaine and sex, though, go like, and same with

methamphetamine, they go hand in hand. You ask any... Oh, with methamphetamine? Same thing? Meth and sex. So any psychomotor stimulant in sex, they are like strong... How do you explain that? Chemically. And I showed for the first time even though, you know, anecdotally like anyone could have told you this

that's been around cocaine a lot but we showed under double blind conditions that just cocaine increases sexual arousal to a substantial degree so people get horny when they're on cocaine or methamphetamine sometimes more so with

cocaine sometimes not always it interferes with the ability to perform right so for the male Viagra right you heard the story of Dan Belzarian I don't know if you heard the story

this is this dude named Dan Bilsarian. He was like a playboy type guy who was always running around on yachts with like tons of women. Yeah. And he had a heart attack in his 20s. And he explains he was in Vegas doing Coke for like three days straight. And he said that like he went to go have sex with this chick. And he couldn't get it up.

So he ate like four Viagras. And he started to have a heart attack and he needed to go to the ER. And he ended up having like two heart attacks or something. Wow. Yeah. Not a good combination. Especially in your 20s. And a lot of people have you, same thing could have.

with MDMA, but like, so Viagra, I think about 25 years ago, at least it was in some headlines, people would call it sextacy, like the combo of like MDMA, ecstasy. So does that have the same effect? Well, yeah, like what just counteract, yeah, MDMA can cause impotence. Oh, really? So it's like one might feel more romantic and cuddling up and everything, but if they want to seal the deal. Right. So same with Coke.

Not always, but it just, it's like heavy alcohol. Like, uh-huh. the will might be there but things may not function totally but nonetheless it's enough of it's not a black or white thing you know because there's plenty of that's one of the issues that's how I got the grant funding to look at these drugs

both meth and coke so hypothetically there's a lot of HIV because of with heroin it's more of injecting with coke and meth it's more of like no I just you know got loaded and did some crazy stuff and a lot of it's like men on the you know there's a thing it was called it was an Oprah decades ago, brothers on the down low

like probably because of stigma, I was like, amongst African American men that didn't want to admit that they occasionally or more than occasionally had male partners that then they didn't tell their they kept it from the female so there was their transmission

of HIV. Oh, wow. Because they were having anal sex with males but then transmitting. Which is higher more chance of getting HIV that way? Much. Yeah. Dramatically. Which is like, and sometimes I think we don't do the public of service because, you know, we're too prudish.

It's like, yeah, like, yeah, unprotected anal sex is like, right. That was always the issue. So if you're gay, doing cocaine, you're more likely to get AIDS because you're going to take the, you know, roll the dice and by not, if you don't have a condom. So the answer is have a condom on you. Right. Like, especially gay coke heads out there. Keep condoms on you. It's not a bad because.

This is Pride Month. We're doing them a service. Yeah, because, you know, you don't know where things. like people I worked with, you know, it's like, yes, and you meet someone at the laundromat, one thing, you know, like, whatever. Like, just, you know, having, I was actually wanted to do some research on, didn't get the funding for it, but just trying to encourage people to carry kind of, like, high-risk populations, and men have sex with men who have a history of sex that they regret, you know, with novel partners, unprotected. but just to like reinforce them like if you if we text you like a few random times a week and you happen to have a condom in your wallet would give you 10 bucks like just to get them in the habit of just like just carry a condom on you right right which would really help because you know you could be moralistic and puritan and say oh no you shouldn't but like okay right like whatever at least because what my research showed me was that Not always, but most of the time when these supposedly high-risk populations, when they had the choice, they would say they'd use a kind of if they had it there. Right.

But when they're rolling, like, and when it's not just the Coke, but also just the, you know, breaking the action. Mm-hmm. You know, biology's happening. And it's like someone's got to stop and say, hold on. Do you have a, oh, no. Right. What's the phrase, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush or something? What is it?

Two in the hands worth? No. Yeah, bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Right. Right. Right, exactly. I'm not going to risk this opportunity right now. Oh, yeah.

Maybe she or he will, whatever, second guess. And just once things are going, you don't want to put the brakes on. Exactly. And you add Coke to that. And it's like even. Gas on fire. Yeah. So hypothetically, not that me or anyone I know would ever do such a thing,

but in a purely scientific laboratory setting, if somebody was on cocaine and their pee-p didn't work, what drug would they use? Well, they would use Viagra. That would be the other, or Cialis. But those are not safe combinations. Well, first of all, cocaine's not safe. Right.

Well, if you... So this is all a relative conversation. And there will always be, well, there's some exceptions, but... Everything's in moderation. Virtually a combination of two things is almost always riskier than taking one thing. Right. Two drugs. Exactly.

It's usually more risk. So, yes, there's risk. But most toxic drug effects are dose and frequency dependent. Meaning, yeah, the guy taken four Viagra's, like, one thinks, well, couldn't he had tried one? Right. Maybe he wouldn't have had a heart attack. He still could have.

Still a risk. But with the, I don't understand, though. So the Viagra is just like a, it's like a vasodilator, right? So like how would that cause, how would that hypothetically, mixed with cocaine cause a heart attack? Do you know? I don't know. Cocaine can be a vasoconstrictor. Right.

I'm not even sure a cardiologist wouldn't. Cardiologist probably would know something about how Viagra calls a cardiac event. Right, right. no one probably knows specifically about the combination together. I mean, we know cocaine. I mean, simply at the level of increasing blood pressure and pulse, like you do that with anything, which is why even to a mild degree,

psilocybin can be a risk for a heart, a cardiac event in people at severe heart disease risk. Oh, really? Because it has a modest effect on blood. But these are the same people that they could have a cardiac event, going up a couple flights of stairs or it's actually pretty common like people having sex right shows up to the ER like having sex with his wife or whoever totally like anything that raises your heart up like you know heart rate up and your blood pressure for people who at

severe risk can push them over the edge so even psilocybin can be a risk and very at which we weed people out and research easy to check their blood pressure but um yeah yeah um wild Yeah, that's a... It must be hard being a drug researcher in America. This is, I bet you this is probably one of the most difficult countries to get that kind of shit done and funded. I don't know. I mean, we're just, we're bigger on research. I know there's been a cutback in the current administration, but we've traditionally been

conducted more research than other countries. Oh, how we really? But yeah, yeah. I mean, the NIH in the U.S. is a big... So, for example, in terms of... drug abuse research, NIDA, which is part of the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the biggest funder of research globally. Oh, wow.

So, yeah, yeah. And, you know, America's always this, like, interesting mix, because, like, yeah, you have all kinds of opinions, and we start at the war on drugs, but we've also, like, we twisted everyone's arm and the rest of the world into it, and then we start, like, legalizing cannabis state by state and the rest of the world, it's like, hold on, dude. We didn't do this for 100 years because he told us we had to. Right. Right.

Right. And he'd block us for all the trade agreements and everything. And now so, but you also get, I mean, I think, you know, America is the best place to be, I mean, whether it's business, science, I just the level of creativity. And I'm biased. I'm an American. But just, you know, the openness. and just that kind of spirit of going into the unknown is kind of, it's a human trait,

but I tend to think culturally it's something that America has an extra dose of. And so in terms of science, I mean, yeah, like we've been killing it, like for a long time, relatively speaking. I mean, certain areas of, you know, science have definitely gotten stagnant. But relatively speaking, I mean, we've, you know, We've been a powerhouse. What is your like ultimate view of like where all of this psychedelic research could take us? Do you have some sort of like ideal goal in your mind to where it could take humanity?

Or like what kind of problem? Like what is like the ultimate problem you think we could solve with it? This is a big one. And I don't know whether it's ever solvable. But if psychedelics could be leveraged to help solve the hard problem of consciousness. or it's explaining why phenomenal consciousness the awareness

itself like there's no scientific explanation for why that exists why is this not just one big system that's behaving you know it's doing its thing like billiard balls and that includes

me like there could be a robot me you know we essentially are like we're biological we're mechanisms we could we seem to be able to explain all the parts, none of that explains why there's an inside experience. So it may be unsolvable by science, but we should be open. But if there's any class of drugs that might play a role in that, the psychedelics seem a good bet. Um, understanding how and, you know, as far as I'm concerned,

there's all, it's all speculation in terms of why, you know, as some of the theory suggests, maybe there's some level of complexity in the brain computationally that all of a sudden then creates consciousness. I'm skeptical of that because that seems kind of magic. And other more panpsychist theories are about, you know, perhaps it's baked into the nature of reality itself. Right. Like some of the basic forces in physics.

I don't know, but perhaps something, you know, if it's anything we can get a foothold in mechanistically, maybe these very altered conscious experiences with psychedelics can be used to help us figure that out, but maybe not. And then ultimately I see psychedelics going down. I think we're going to look back and see basically pharmacology drugs in general is so crude. Like we dump things into our blood system. We eat them, inject them. And there's a like countless off target effects. like eventually I think it's going to be replaced by brain technology where we're going in we're stimulating these specific neurons in these specific ways and even before it may be like much more directed pharmacology like these compounds don't just like flood our system but they go no they go to somehow we're able to make them have effects just in this brain region just on this subtype of neurons and and have this particular effect this receptor and have this

particular post-receptor signaling effect. I just think it's going to get more and more specific and that in combination with brain technologies to... Because ultimately it's just affecting the brain, whether it's through putting in a chemical that has effect on brain receptors or if it's something like, you know, these days like TMS or using magnets, which is just... That's going to look very crude one day as we...

I mean, you have like what, you know, we mentioned Elon, you know, NeurLink. Technologies like that are obviously going to... go. I mean, they're going to advance and probably. So I kind of see drugs in that mix, you know, like as merging with or being one type of or being a more specific form of technology that is able to, you know, change conscious experience in desirable or undesirable ways through this biological manipulation. And everything we're doing now is just, just very crude.

Yeah. With drugs or with whatever you have. Yeah. Cancer treatments and things like this. Yeah, the history of cancer treatment. So I sat through a talk a few years ago of like it was amazing. They were describing all of these drugs that were thrown out years ago. And I were like, oh, now that we genotype people and realize like, for this 13% of people, this is a miracle drug.

And like now we know, like, it's toxic. And these other people and these people it saves their life. And so, I mean, we might be able to, you know, go in and say like with your genotype and with your general history you need exactly like you know this number of milligrams of this drug and this amount of this other drug like more tailor maybe in combination with some of these other technologies like brain stimulation right um but you know i think it's going to be kind of a race between that and AI and which might make all of this a moot point.

And, like, genetic engineering. Like, I think when we think about where we're going in terms of our minds and bodies, like, it's pretty clear, like, very, very, very soon. Like, we're just going to be editing our genes. And we're going to be engineering the course of our evolution. Right. Like, if that doesn't have, if we put mandates in prohibiting it. Like, we can't go through the next couple hundred years,

maybe the next 100, maybe the next 20 years, like, that's going to happen. You outlaw it some crazy dude. There's already been some of this in China where the guy wasn't supposed to do it and supposedly put him in jail. Like, we're going to be doing that. And there's every reason to believe. One of the most fascinating talks I've ever seen is this guy that focuses on intelligence and genetics and said that the same number of genes that code for height, code for

intelligence. I think it was something like 5,000. Really? And there's every reason to believe that through, uh, you know, artificial insemination and selecting the right fertilized egg that we are going to be able to move this out five standard deviations. And everything we know through artificial selection with, you know, everything from horses to dogs to, like there's every reason to believe that we can move IQ up five standard deviations through selective breeding. And he was saying, if you think that there's moral qualms and the people you know about, he's like, and he was ethnically Chinese. He happened to be, he said, let me tell you, there's no Chinese family in China.

You know, we're talking culture, not race, clearly. Family in China that would turn this down, the opportunity. So I think about stuff like that, how do drugs affect that? Like, if we're already moving to this environment where there's going to be this, we don't even know what that means to have an IQ that's five standard deviations above normal. Right. like and what that will result in i mean it's literally um con from star trek thorathic that was his story it was a genetically modified super intelligent human and they ended up trying to take over the world

and every you know so like how do drugs interact with all of these other things like AI and editing the the human genome for intelligence and whatever maybe for alter maybe you want your kids to have yeah, I don't want my kid going through life without mystical experiences. We're going to edit the genome to have more openness and mystical experience, oneness with God, whatever. Wow. And the gene, you know, like, you know, I don't know. Like, because there's certainly, there seems to be genetics to, like, religious susceptibility and interest and, you know, like many human traits.

And so why not code that? And so then how's that going to interact with psychedelic drugs? Right. Wow. Our psychedelic drugs are going to be a moot point with all these other changes. Right. Yeah. Matt Johnson, thank you for doing this, man.

Thank you, Danny. This has been super fun. Three hours flew by like nothing. Wow. Tell people where they can learn more about what you're doing or get in touch with you, any of that stuff. Probably best way on X is drug underscore researcher. Nice. I love it. Is it far enough long? I'd say like formerly Twitter. I could just say X is it.

Yeah, yeah, X. Everyone knows what X is. Sweet, bro. I'll link it all below. Thanks again, bro. All right. Thanks for the opportunity. I've enjoyed it. All right. Good night, folks.