Modern Wisdom - #268 - Brian D. Earp - The Ethics Of Using Drugs To Fall In & Out Of Love

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Brian D. Earp is a Research Fellow at Oxford, philosopher and writer. Love is a feeling many of us yearn to feel, but the medical developments of the 21st century is moving love out of the personal and into the medical realm. Expect to learn if we can make ourselves fall in or out of love with drugs, whether we can turn a straight person gay, how anti-love drugs can help reduce domestic violence, the ethics of changing your attractiveness with drugs and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Brian on Twitter - https://twitter.com/briandavidearp  Buy Love Is The Drug - https://amzn.to/3bf6uas  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, humans of Podcast Land, welcome back. On to today's guest, I'm joined by Brian David Erp, who is an ethicist and research fellow at Oxford, a philosopher and a writer. Love is a feeling that many of us desire to feel, but the medical development of the 21st century means that love is moving out of the personal realm and into the medical one. So today, expect to learn if we can make ourselves fall in or out of love with drugs, whether we can turn a straight person gay, how anti-love drugs can help reduce domestic violence, the ethics of changing your attractiveness and much more. This is the sort of conversation that I absolutely love having on this program.

It we really get into the nuance of just what it means to fall into relationships and desire somebody who is augmenting who they are synthetically with something that isn't a part of them. Just what does it mean to be us? And some of the discussions around turning gay people straight and straight people gay, orthodox Jews living in a community where they're not supposed to masturbate or have sex for any reason that isn't for pro creation. How can we use drugs? Does it, is it ethical? Does it make their lives better?

Does it make their lives worse? Should we even be talking about this? It's really cool. It's one of my favorite conversations in a long time. And if you enjoy it, go and pick the book up. LinkedIn needs show notes below. But for now, it is time for the wise and wonderful Brian Erp. What is love?

What is love? That's a good question. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and obviously so have a lot of other people and a lot of different disciplines and using different lenses. Most of us, I think, probably start to think about love outside of our own experiences through art and literature and maybe philosophy. More recently, scientists have taken an interest in love and they're starting to figure out what's going on in our brains when we at least report subjectively that we feel that we're in love,

and they start to try to triangulate in and see neurochemically what's happening. So I end up adopting a view that tries to integrate all of these different perspectives. So I think of love as kind of a bio-psychosocial phenomenon. It's something that feels a certain way. So there are subjective components to it and if you report that you're in love and I report that I'm in love, we're kind of comparing notes and trying to see is what you're feeling the same thing is what I'm feeling. And to do that we'll often refer to tropes and scripts and concepts in the culture. So you might say, well, it feels like that thing that's represented in that movie or when I read this poem by so-and-so, it really makes me feel like that's

what I'm feeling. And that's one of the ways in which we compare notes is through cultural artifacts. And then there's also stuff going on in our brains, as I suggested. So at the very least, love is scaffolded on top of things that are related to our nature as a sexually reproducing species. So the reason why we're drawn toward at least some people in this passionate way, and we want to meld with them,

has got to be related to the fact that we reproduce sexually and so we're going to have to have mating partners and love is wrapped up in that. There's some theorists that suggest love has kind of different phases or stages so there's a set of brain systems that are oriented around lust or libido which is just to drive us toward a potentially range of mating partners. There's attraction, which narrows our focus in on a smaller number of people, maybe one in particular, and then attachment, which is this long-lasting pair bond that exists in a lot of different mammal species and in ours.

And that's more of toward child-bearing potentially your long-term relationships. So how all that plays out in a given cultural or historical context? Well, that depends on accidents of history and, you know, prevailing concepts and ideas. So love just sits sits sits at the interface of these kind of biological subjective experiential, psychological aspects and the wider social historical context. That's that's the best I can say of what love is. I've been fascinated this year thinking about the difference between the reductionist standpoint of how our emotions are created, whatever the particular combination of chemicals or neurotransmitters that

have to fire to make it happen, and the phenomenological experience of what it feels like to be in love, because it doesn't just feel like a combination of chemicals, it feels like some sort of blessing or curse bestowed on you by a higher power, right? And I think it justifies a lot, spending time thinking about evolutionary psychology this year. Justifies a lot of why religion came about this sort of narrative personified of what it is that is happening because it doesn't just feel like a combination of chemicals, it feels so powerful. Yeah, I mean, so because we have to mate to reproduce, it makes sense that just like our hunger drive is very strong, so as our drive to be close

to certain other people, and then as you say though, it isn't just down to some sort of reproductive drive, it has, it's imbued with meaning. And so, you know, you talk about the way you can reduce complex feelings like love down to biology, but, you know, the other thing is, is the values that are woven into love. So for example, somebody might feel obsessively drawn towards someone, but you know, the other thing is, is the values that are woven into love. So, for example, somebody might feel obsessively drawn towards someone, but in a really unhealthy or reckless way, where in the grand scheme of their life, they realize that actually, you know, maybe this is an abusive relationship or really toxic connection, but they might justify it by saying, well, I'm in love with a person. So, that's all the explanation you need. And

then you can start to have, imagine an interlocutor saying something like, well, is it really love that you're feeling or is it more some sort of obsession or unhealthy desire to possess the other person? And now you start to realize it, well, I don't know what I was feeling subjectively was this all-consuming thing that was almost self-justifying and felt like a sufficient explanation for why I was tangled up with this person. But now somebody's giving me these value judgments. They're saying like, maybe love should only, maybe love should only count those subjective feelings as love if they're the sorts of things that drive us toward flourishing with other people.

And so then you start to realize that we have some wiggle room about what kinds of experiences we as a society want to christen as counting as love. Because we might want to draw a distinction between somebody who's recklessly drawn towards somebody in a totally unhealthy way, and somebody who has a sort of long-term companion and stable relationship with somebody that brings out the best in both of them. We might want to distinguish between those things conceptually, maybe they don't deserve equally the label of.

Why do we love the people that we do? Is it a function of closeness multiplied by time or something like that? Well, one of the main prerequisites is proximity. I mean, there's this these clichés like opposites attract and you know, absence makes the hard-gruffande and stuff like that. But I remember when I was in undergraduate, I took this psychology course with this leading researcher who works on emotions, including love, named Peter Salovey, he's not the president of Yale. And he said, basically, these things just aren't true. Like, it's not absence that makes the heart grow fonder.

If somebody's far away, it's harder to love them. I mean, maybe you can make that last for a while and some people can make a long distance relationship work for a time. But for the most part, that's not what stimulates the most enduring feelings towards someone. Similarly, people should be pretty compatible. If you have people are totally opposite in terms of their values at least,

it's very rare that you can get a relationship to work over the long run. You might have, again, passionate attraction towards a person or something like that, but that only will last for so long and it's not going to be enough to sustain a healthy relationship. So, yeah, proximity is part of it, but in terms of what draws you to a particular person, nobody really knows. There's all these theorists that say, maybe I something you do with pheromones and it has to do with some particular thing

that's unconsciously drawing you toward the person because of your olfactory system recognizing genetic compatibility through these pheromonal cues. But though it has a very good theory of it, as far as we know, it's like, we can paint and broad brushes. We can say things like, if the person has shared values, if the person has generally seen as attractive,

you'll probably also see them as attractive. Though what makes a particular person seem the most attractive to you, such that you really want to be with them, nobody has any idea of what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for bringing that about. It's a difficult and messy world. Where did drugs fit into this? Well, so, you know, before I was saying, I have this idea of love as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. The biopart of that is the part that can be manipulated with drugs. So, you know, insofar as people have begun to map out what is going on in our brains when we feel drawn toward people in terms of lust. So, I mean, testosterone is well known to have a substantial role in libido. And that's a system that's been manipulated in different ways for a long time. So

as a kind of unpleasant example, people who are in prison for sexual offenses, sometimes in some jurisdictions as a condition of parole, they can agree to take androgen blocking drugs, which will radically depress their libido. So you know that you can interfere with libido. And again, testosterone is complicated. It's not just like a dial, where it's like more testosterone equals more libido and less equals less.

It acts in lots of different systems. But roughly speaking, an increase in testosterone can, on balance, increase this X-Drive. In terms of, you know, attraction, that sort of, you know that early stage of obsessive feeling that you might have towards someone, there's some evidence that that overlaps a lot with the phenomenology and the symptoms

of obsessive compulsive disorder, which is treated through serotonin affecting drugs. So the most common treatment for OCD, besides cognitive behavioral therapy, is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are also commonly prescribed for depression. So there's a couple of studies out of Italy where the researchers have shown that people who are in the early stages of romantic love where they're constantly thinking about the other person and they can't get them out of their mind and they're just obsessively

checking their phone to see if the other person's message them. They have depleted levels of the serotonin transporter going on and when they kind of recover from that phase, their serotonin levels return to normal. So they think that that's something that could potentially be manipulated with a common drug that we already prescribed. And then in terms of long-term attachment, the main chemicals people talk about are oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is involved in all sorts of processes.

So what's involved in childbirth, it's part of what causes contractions to happen. It's released through breastfeeding. So it's heavily a part of the maternal infant bond and what causes a mother and the infant to have a very strong connection. The father infant bond is similarly mediated through oxytocin, which is why they say, should I put the baby on the father's chest so that they can start to release this chemical together and have that same sort of a bond. And oxytocin is now something that you can create in a laboratory.

And there are some studies that will spray this up people's noses and directly into the brain and see what kind of downstream effects it has. A lot of those results don't seem very robust. It's not clear how long-lasting they are. And so I'm not totally on the oxychosen train. We'll see over the long run whether those results are replicable. But the drugs I've been focusing on most recently sort of sidestep a lot of this stuff and act on the brain in a very different way.

And those are the psychedelic drugs and MDMA, which is the drug in ecstasy. And those don't so much directly cause a feeling of love or attraction or attachment, but they will often put people into state of mind whereby they're more open to the signals are getting from another person and their defenses are depressed a little bit. And so some people are thinking about whether we should use these drugs in the context of couples counseling as a way to help people who maybe have been together for a long time. They have these grudges or these patterns that they get into where they're just acting in a very defensive way. And the thought is that if you're in a safe environment with a therapist and you have a drug like MDMA,

which directly suppresses that hair trigger fear response. Over the course of the therapy session, maybe you'll be able to bring up some of the things that are hard to talk about in the relationship and deal with them in a more loving, productive way. And then when the drug wears off, you still have your memories of what you talked about and you can kind of try to bring those lessons into the relationship going forward. So that's a different kind of approach to all this. It's not about directly intervening in these subsystems,

but rather having more of a global effect on your subjective experience that might incline you toward having more productive therapy session. But what you're doing is enhancing the traditional effects of couples counseling rather than trying to allow the drug itself to just directly somehow cause you to love your partner more or something like that. Yeah, it's a biopsychosocial, it's a biological input, but it's actually working mostly on the psychological and on the social area. That's exactly right. A colleague of mine named David Yaden just published a paper today called the subjective effects of psychedelics are necessary for the treatment effects. So it's happening is that normally when you do a clinical trial and you're giving people some drugs for something, called the subjective effects of psychedelics are necessary for the treatment effects.

So what's happening is that normally when you do a clinical trial and you're giving people some drugs for something, you wanna give them a placebo where they don't know whether they're taking the drug and then you measure the subtle outcomes and whether it has some sort of effect on their symptomology, but the problem is psychedelic drugs and MD made them work that way.

You know if you're taking the drug because you're having rather radically changed subjective experience. And so you have some scientists who want to kind of squeeze this into the old model where they're like, well, we've got to control for all that subjective nonsense. Let's try to just get the effect of the drug. And you know, people have been working with these drugs for decades. And especially those who, I guess, think of it in more of a spiritual sense or something

like that, they're like you're missing the point. I mean, the subjective experience is part of the healing process. It's what you, it's the meaning that you derive from what you feel that you see in this altered state of consciousness. It's the lessons that you draw out of what it's like to feel more vulnerable to another person that you've known for a long time. And to try to, you know, recapture that feeling and, and extend those lessons into your normal waking consciousness, it's a subjective experience that's part of the healing process. And so they summon all sorts of data to suggest

that even in these clinical trials that have been being conducted recently at places like Johns Hopkins and King's College London, they're doing it all in the rigorous scientific way, but those researchers have a sophisticated view of these drugs and realize it's not just like, it's totally different from mostly what's used in psychiatry, which is where they try to control for the subjective effects and they just want to have some sort of

targeted outcome here. It has a global effect on how you're feeling and then it's what you make of that. It is, as just as you say, it's the psychological experience and then how you deal with that socially that is going to be most predictive to whether it has a healing effect for you. It doesn't surprise me that it's causing a few predictive to whether it has a healing effect for you. It doesn't surprise me that it's causing a few problems. It seems like a big paradigm shift for stuff like that. So there's two broad sections that you give us, drugs for love and drugs for anti-love. What are some of the situations where someone might want to use an anti-love drug. The first case that we wrote about some years ago was the case of somebody who's in an

objectively bad relationship. And we just wanted to pick a worst example we could have. Somebody who's in an abusive relationship with somebody who they ought not to be with. And unfortunately what happens in many such cases is that partly is a way of maybe rationalizing the abuse. People will form an even stronger attachment to the person. So subjectively, they might be thinking to themselves something like, the person only hits me

because they love me, that kind of cliche. But then partly is going on in terms of their attachment system, is they actually grow ever more drawn toward the person. They can't imagine leaving the person, which just creates an even more dangerous situation. But sometimes you have a case where someone has the awareness of their circumstance and knows that they ought not to be in a relationship

But they find that they're just their emotions are drawing them and clutching them onto the person in a way that they know is really dangerous for them And so we tried to come up with this almost I guess a little stylized example where we said imagine There's somebody who knows that they need to get out of a relationship They desire to get out of the relationship and they find that their first order feelings are so powerful and so strong that they can't motivate themselves to do the things that they know they need to do to actually extricate themselves from their relationship. And so if they could take a drug that would just suppress those first order feelings and allow them then to behave in a way that's consistent with their higher order goals, we thought that might be a kind of a best case scenario because we were very reluctant to think of anybody

forcing these drugs in someone. We wanted to be voluntary, helping people meet their higher order goals. kind of a best case scenario because we're very reluctant to think of anybody, you know, forcing these drugs in someone. Wanted to be voluntary, helping people meet their higher order goals. And a sort of obvious critique is, well, if somebody's in a abusive relationship, you know, adding drugs to the pictures and what you should be doing, you should be, I don't know, calling the police. It's like, you know, especially if somebody's engaged in criminal behavior, it's like the law on social support systems or the things that should be brought to bear. So I think that's right. And also, you know, some people can't leave an abusive relationship not because of their first-order attachment, but because they're afraid of for their kids welfare or they're afraid that, you know,

that we put themselves in danger. And so again, the really wrong way to interpret this is as a kind of victim blaming where it's like if you're in a bad relationship, you need to somehow take some medication to fix your circumstance. Whoever's doing the abusing is the person who needs to change. Nevertheless, you do find that sometimes people who says, every night I wake up thinking about wishing I was back with so-and-so, even though I know that they're really bad for me. And if that persists and persists and persists and you've tried all the other things, we just have a limit case where we say, if you could take a drug like a selective serotonin rib tape inhibitor, which may very well suppress some of these

kind of possessive feelings, that might be a legitimate use for such a drug in certain circumstances when you've exhausted all the other kind of non-drug treatment modalities. Another case that's maybe even more straightforward is somebody who's overwhelmingly and exclusively sexually attracted to small children. So there are as a group of people that are sometimes called self-hating pedophiles, where basically they are sometimes

drawn to suicide because they feel like I can't, you know, they know that they ought not to express their sexual desire. They don't want to harm children, but they don't have any sexual desire otherwise, and they don't know what to do themselves, and they don't want to put themselves at risk of potentially hurting someone. And so because they're the most stigmatized group of society or at least one of them, it's also hard for many of these people to get treatment because I think a lot in the popular consciousness there's a conflation between pedophilia, which is the name we gave to the desire to have sexual interactions with pre-pubescent children and sexual abuse, which is the actual abusing of children. And those things don't always go together.

Some people who don't have pedophilia abuse children for other reasons. And some people who do have pedophilia don't abuse children, but are afraid to get treatment, because they know it's going to be very stigmatized. And so here, there are some people who have already tried to undergo some of these androgen blocking treatments, where they just globally try to suppress their libido.

And it comes with side effects. Testosterone, as I said before, is involved in all sorts of processes. If you have lower testosterone levels, where they just globally try to suppress their libido. And it comes with side effects. Testosterone, as I said before, is involved in all sorts of processes. If you have lower testosterone levels, it can make your bones more brittle, so that you're at a higher risk of osteoporosis, it can lead to depression and so forth.

So none of these interventions right now are clean. They're all messy interventions. But the point is that as we learn more and more about what's going on in terms of our lost and attraction and attachment systems, and the more that we can fine tune these kinds of interventions going forward, we're just going to have to face the question of what do we want to do with these technologies in society. If we have the power to intervene in the neurochemical underpinnings of romantic love and lost

and so forth, we have to decide one way or another what we want to do. Do we want to ban all such technologies so that we can never intervene in our neurochemical systems? Do we want to try to identify some cases where we think it might be particularly useful and then actually lean into some of those opportunities? And then the final point is just that we're taking drugs already that have effects on our romantic neurochemistry. We just don't tend to think of them that way.

So once again, I've mentioned selective serotonin reupti canabiters. That's the most commonly prescribed drug for depression. And when you run a clinical trial on the effects of this drug, you normally are recording things like what are your symptoms of depression? Or did you experience nausea? Or how's your, maybe you'll read about depression and libido, which sometimes comes along with these drugs. But very rarely will they say, and how are your relationships going? Do you still love your partner? And yet, these interpersonal effects,

we have lots of avanicoids of people feeling radically different toward their partners when they take some of these drugs. But it's just not part of what we study scientifically. And we think that's a mistake, which had studied not just the personal effects of drugs, but the interpersonal effects of drugs that we're already using.

There's women who are taking birth control. There's married couples who've been together for a decade or more, and then they take SSRIs, and they fall out of love with their partner. That... Yeah. ...were fed a narrative about love being able to conquer all, because phenomenologically it's so powerful, and also the place, the ritualistic place that it's given a top pretty much every piece of entertainment, you know, like even in the most basic Christmas film there's still a love story going on.

And I think that the love conquer is all narrative. When it comes face to face with stuff like this, there's a lot of difficulty for people, even me, upon reading your book, like there's a lot of responses that I have to question myself. I notice rising like visceral responses to things. I'm very big into personal agency and sovereignty and people being the commander of their own soul and also people learning from experiences that are both good and bad. And trying to kind of swallow that, it's such a messy, messy area, love relationships, attachment, lust. And yeah, it really doesn't surprise me that it's chaotic to try and work through.

Yeah. And that brings us to that kind of social and even social historical dimension of love, which is that how love is situated and celebrated or not within a culture is something that changes over time. So romantic love for long portions of history and in many social contexts was seen as a threat to the social order precisely because it's so powerful. So romantic love is something that might drive you to want to form a relationship with somebody who's not in the right social class or somebody who's of the wrong race, let's say, or the wrong sex. So when you have conservative traditional societies that think that marriage is primarily an economic arrangement and it's something that holds families together within their proper

kind of social hierarchy, love just blows social hierarchies over the waters out of the water. And so when you have a society like ours that's more about individual agency and autonomy and celebrating people for their own will rather than situating them within some particular social hierarchy, we tend to like love because love is something that, well, I guess as you say, it's a bit of attention because love can undermine our agency in some ways and that it makes us feel like it's driving us to do things that we're not sure we rationally want to do, but at the same time love kind of draws us towards people in such a way that can compel us to cross over traditional lines of that constrained relationships like lines

of race and class and social hierarchy and caste and so forth. So we have this paradoxical relationship with love where on the one hand we celebrated as this thing that could be worth dying for. And on the other hand, when we have this very individualistic, agential kind of ethos in the society, love can sometimes feel like it's a power outside of ourselves. It's driving us to do things that we're not sure we reflectively want to do. And then that way it seems to undermine our agency. So I think it's kind of both of those things. What about pro-love drugs? How do they work?

Yeah, so one point to say is just that one in the same drug can be a pro-love drug or an anti-love drug, depending on the context and which couple is using it toward what end. So I'll stick with the example of SSRIs, just because there's a common they use, and they have a multiplicity of effects on different people. So just imagine that you're in that subset of people for whom SSRIs are an effective treatment of depression. Unless you say that you were so depressed that you couldn't get out of bed,

and you certainly weren't engaging in your relationships in any kind of productive, healthy way. So, you know, your partners always tending to you and starting to build resentment because you're just not really engaging what's going on, the relationship is having a bad place. And then you've tried all the different treatments, you know, you've done talk therapy and this and that and the other thing and you've tried all things you're supposed to do. And then you say, well, I guess I'm going to, as a last ditch effort, try to take some medication and see what happens. Now suppose that you're one of the people for whom that's an effective treatment and also

sudden you're able to get out of it and have a conversation with your partner over dinner and go out on a date again and so forth. So you can see how for some people, this drug, depending on how it plays out for them, could be something that could enhance the relationship all things considered. On the other hand, you mentioned the case of the long married couple where one of them goes on a necessary,

and they just don't feel romantic love toward their partner anymore. And that's something that does happen as well. So in addition to blocking for some people libido, it can also have a general blunting effect on their emotions. And part of that is if you're in such despair that just having overall dulled emotions is better than being massively depressed, some people would count that as a treatment effect. They'd say, well, it's maybe the point of some of these SSRIs. But on the other hand, you know, some of the phenomenology of love requires a sense of passion, a sense of being drawn towards someone that you're really into. And if all of your

feelings are sort of blunted and dulled and blocked, then you're going to lose some of that as well. And so you do find some cases of people who say, I just, I had to stop taking the SSRIs because I didn't love my partner anymore and I've been with them for 20 years and that wasn't acceptable to me. And if I have to deal with depression now and then I'll deal with it So you know the the effect is really you know slightly orthogonal to the the actual drug It's more like the drug times the situation times this couples values times what they're dealing with and then you start to get a map of What kind of intervention will likely be helpful for them rather than something that will hinder their relationship is? Viagra a love drug

Yeah, I mean so rather than something that will hindered their relationship. Is Viagra a love drug? Yeah, I mean, so Viagra has sort of low level effects on the body and that it increases blood flow to the penis and so it can help people with penis's have erections. And so insofar as that's an important component of the sexual repertoire of a given couple, then you can see how it can have knock-on effects that would be advantageous in a kind of higher level love sense. So, you know, sex and orgasm are

really oxytocin, which we've been talking about. Oxytocin is something that, you know, undergirds the attachment bond. So, you know, there's lots of ways to be close to a person that doesn't involve penetrative sex. But nevertheless, if that's something that you value, if that's something that you and your partner take some particular joy in, then if you have a drug that enables you to facilitate that kind of activity and that brings you closer together and that causes you to be releasing oxytocin together in a particularly potent circumstance, then you can see how that would have ramifications for the relationship. Yeah.

Can drugs make straight people turn gay? Are we going to have straight conversion therapy happening soon? Yeah, that's very interesting. So, you know, people have been trying to use drugs for a long time to convert gay people into straight people and largely in effectively. And, you know, there's a whole social campaign

and government programs and laws that are being passed to try to discourage this because it's seen rightly, I think, as an unjust pressure that's placed on sexual orientation minorities to try to squeeze them into the majority mold rather than just saying, listen, let's just let people have the sexual orientations that they want to have. There are some cases that we talk about in the book of super religious communities like ultra orthodox Jewish communities where same sex activity and attraction is totally forbidden, masturbation is forbidden, anything that's not

procreative sex within the context of marriage is looked down upon and highly stigmatized. And what will happen is that some of these young Yashiva students will go to their counselors or the rabbis and they'll say, you know, I have these same sex desires and I know I can act on them because of the values of the community and perhaps their own reflective values. And they say that makes me really depressed. And as a consequence of this, the rabbis and the psychiatrists will get together and say, well, if you prescribe a high dose of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, there's a sort of unlabeled purpose for doing that, which is it should treat the depression, but the

idea is that it will also hopefully have the side effect of depressing the libido. And so it's not a conversion drug, and that it doesn't cause the person to suddenly have opposite sex sexual desire, but it does just kind of kill their sexual desire altogether. So it's a sort of quasi-conversion drug and that it's at least meant to dampen or interfere with the naturally occurring same sex attractions that this person has. And you know, that raises all sorts of problems. I mean, in the book, we suggest that certainly anybody who's, you know, that raises all sorts of problems. I mean, in the book, we suggest that certainly anybody who's, you know, any minor shouldn't have any such drug thrust upon them as a way of converting their sexuality.

But this is something where kind of progressive politics comes into conflict with itself. Because we tend to think that there should be freedom of choice, you know, just let people make decisions in line with their own values. But there's some corners of progressive politics that only like people to have progressive values. So you can imagine, you know, let's say you're a 30-year-old, you know, conservative Jewish person, or Christian, or Muslim, and you say, you know,

my relationship with God, which I take to require that I ought not to be involved in same-sex relationships, will be improved if I didn't have these desires. Now, I as a secular progressive person would be like, oh, we need to have a conversation. You shouldn't be thinking that, and maybe there's some better way of reading the Torah than the one that you're reading. But on the other hand, the liberal progressive value says that you can try to persuade people, but you shouldn't coerce them. And so if the person says, I don't want to be gay.

What we say, we say is, wow, you haven't internalized homophobia, and we need to treat you and take care of you. But now we're starting to kind of trip over ourselves because it sounds like we're telling the person that they can't think what they think. And so this is a very touchy area. It's hard to know what to say about this. And then you raise the point of, well,

what if some straight people wanted to be gay? I mean, maybe that's better. You know, these opposite sex relationships are so complicated and have all these issues. They people dress better, they've got cooler hair, they've got a skin. Exactly, men and women don't really understand each other. And so we talk about that in the book.

We say, just to raise a real life example of this, back I think in the 1980s, there was this group of these radical feminists that have leads who call themselves the revolutionary feminists. And their argument was that the main political goal is to fight the patriarchy. And according to their vision of this, men are sort of the enemy in the patriarchy.

And women have to band together, and you shouldn't have to rely on men to have romantic relationships. And so they saw lesbianism as a political virtue. Now, so they characterize themselves as political lesbians. And the issue is, it's not that they were viscerally attracted to other women. They didn't necessarily feel that way.

So either they could go through the motions or consign themselves to a life of celibacy, or you could imagine if they had some ability to actually intervene and tinker with their neurochemistry and clencipal or their goals, and then you think, well, that's a sort of thing maybe we should support. So some colleagues of mine have, we raised this example, and we knew it was going to be controversial, and I still don't know exactly what to think about it, but I am a little bit persuaded by the arguments of some critics of ours who said, you know, in an ideal world, if there wasn't homophobia, sure, people should be able to tinker around with their sexual orientation.

People should be able to be attracted to what they want to be. That should be the sort of thing that you could exercise some agency over, but we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a non-ideal world where we have a lot of people who are asymmetrically pressured to change their sexual orientation. And so it would be better if all things considered if we just didn't have this technology, we just shouldn't even develop it. And so I'm persuaded to some extent by their views that maybe it's better for us to just learn how to, once we can all get to a place in society where we're not, you know, being bigoted and prejudiced toward people because of their sexual orientations,

maybe we shouldn't be tinkering with our sexual orientation so much as fixing the wider political problem. But if we get to some utopia where people aren't, you know, hating on each other because of who they want to have sex with, and people want to engage in a process of self-creation that involves experimenting with their own sexual orientation, I think there's some trends in society that are actually supportive of that. I mean, I think in the really the youngest generation now, I think there's an emerging view about sexuality that why shouldn't be something that's a little bit more fluid. You know, a lot of people are thinking of gender and gender identity as a sort of thing that you should be able to play with rather than something that's this inherent

essentialist thing within you. And I think that's started to affect some people's views about sexuality too. They're like, well, why should I think of sexuality as this, you know, inborn, immovable thing that isn't subject to any kind of modification by my own desires or values? And so, you know, this conversation is never going to go away, but it's certainly a messy conversation, and that's about the state of it right now. Is there a limit to how much we should step into the programming of the human body? How far can we alter our desires and motivations before we're no longer ourselves?

One general risk in intervening in biological systems is that biological systems came about through a tinkering process of natural selection, not through, well, I guess it depends on reviews. If you're a creationist, you might think God just sat there with his blueprint and created humans according to some particular plan, but you'd probably be opposed to tinkering with God's plan for theological reasons. But if you're a secular science-minded person, you think that our bodies and brains came about through the millions of years of tinkering

through revolution, that means that it's not easy to reverse engineer the blueprint. We don't know exactly how all this stuff works in there. And so it's easy to mess up a complex system. And it's often much easier to mess it up than it is to improve it. And so the general risk when you're putting drugs and technologies in to try to re-engineer something about human nature

is that you may think that you're improving the system along one dimension, but you don't understand the system enough to realize all the off target effects that you're having. And so that's always a risk. Now, somebody who wanted to disagree with what I just said would say, of course that's true, but never the less in psychiatry. We try to do our best.

We have some drugs that we prescribe for certain purposes. We don't always know exactly how they're going to work at which dose, but some people are in a bad enough situation that having access to drugs, even if they might not have a perfect tailored effect, will all things considered improve their situation, even if there's also some side effects that they don't want, and we should continue to try. Unless we think that what we have now is ideal, we have some reason to try to at least keep looking into the question of whether we can improve ourselves, whether we can improve. I mean, just take an example of human beings as political creatures.

We have political turmoil all over the world. We have genocides. We have polarization. We have people world. We have genocides. We have polarization. We have people electing authoritarian leaders and so forth. It seems like something about us humans is not ideal. We could do better than this. And if something about our tribal psychology that we've inherited from the ancient plains of Africa

is something that we could improve if we could, through some means or another, whether it's biologically or otherwise, change our tribalistic tendencies, some people would say that's, we live in a world where tribalism isn't good for us anymore. Maybe it was 10,000 years ago, but it's not good for us anymore.

We've constructed a world for ourselves that's in some ways out of tune with the psychological disposition that we've inherited from our ancestors. And so if we wanna make the most of our lives together in this complicated multicultural globally connected world, we may actually need to intervene at the level of our own psychology and biology

to try to enhance ourselves to meet the the challenges of the time. So people who have kind of more of a transhumanist bent tend to be more open to these kinds of strategies and other people who are more concerned about messing up a complex biological system will be more reluctant, but somewhere between those two extremes is probably a path forward. Is there not something as well that probably is a hangover from our time in a religious society where people feel there is this essence within us, this sort of soul, something ethereal that shouldn't be tampered with to do with our form. And that I think is clashing up against a world in which we have vaccinations. Like the advantage and the reason that most people, most same people don't disagree with

vaccines is because the binary, is this better, is a world better with vaccines than without, is fairly obvious. But then if you roll that clock forward and you just decide to pick this particular drug which has this effect, but the prices, that you need to pay this particular side effect with it as well. And it becomes a value judgment. The suffering of somebody who decides to go to Germany

or Switzerland or wherever it is to go and be euthanized. Like, what's that? You know, we've got a world where you can elect. It's a very difficult process and in some places illegal. But where you can elect to be killed, because the suffering of your life is not worth continuing it, and it would literally be better to be dead. In a world where you've got that, it opens the door for an awful lot of other People to put the hand in the air and so actually I got this pain in my leg and I'd really quite like that fixing and actually my sexual orientation Is against my religious belief or actually like girls are totally like awful and I just can't I don't really understand them

So I just want to have sex with my mates and play Xbox or whatever it might be. You know, we have this kind of full gamut now. And I think that we're seeing the paradox of choice play out a little bit here. And the bizarness of a conservative religiously based society constrained choice in a way that actually made life a lot simpler and a lot easier. And we're now having to ask much harder questions because we're in a meritocracy where you can do whatever you want. There's so many interesting points that are raised by what you said.

So thank you. Thank you, Brian. That's a wonderful compliment from a esteemed philosopher like yourself. Well, so one thing I'm thinking about is people have a concern that technology will be used to override or interfere with human nature conceived of some way. And the way that debate often plays out is you have the bio-conservatives, you say, we just should be tampering with what we've got. It would be much better for us to try to create a better environment for ourselves to live

in, to work on our values, but we shouldn't keep trying to interfere with our biological essence in some kind of a way. And then you have the bio-liberals who say, you know, unless you've- Bio-liberals are such a good bio-liberalist. Yeah, you know, these political disputes play out in so many different areas, and in debates about human enhancement, certainly one of them. You know, the bio-liberals would say, kind of what I was saying before, there's no reason to think that our current blueprint is ideal,

and certainly it's not ideal given our environment, and there's only so much changing of our environment we could do. So at least one of the options that should be on the table is tinkering with our own brains and biology. And then another point that they'll make as a level 2 move in the debate is to say, well, let's think about human nature for a second. What is it that makes us different from all the other animals? Well, one thing is that we're inventors.

We do change our environment. We don't just live in harmony with the trees in some idyllic place that we imagine from the distant past, but we transform our environment, we create technology, we change ourselves. Part of human nature is to be self intervening in certain kinds of ways. Now, you still have some people who have this view that that's all misguided. We should go back to living harmony with the trees. What are we doing? I think you start to see now people who are really concerned about the pace of technological

change, who are concerned about the fact that we're on a computer all the time, who are concerned about the fact we're addicted to our devices and so forth. And I think they have a fair point when they say, maybe that idea of actually simplifying life and living on a farm and living in harmony with nature is not so bad. I mean, why do we think we're going to technologically solve our way out of our own problems? You know, the planets dying and we're devastating holy colleges and so forth. Maybe we should maybe this idea that we can just if we're smart enough, we can, with a technical fix, solve the problems that we've created for ourselves. Maybe that's just a doomed general approach,

and we should get off the technology and stop taking drugs for every different thing and just eat healthier and exercise more and stuff like that. So, I mean, with all these things, I feel like there's usually a good insight in anybody's view. I think it's right that there's usually a good insight in anybody's view. I think it's right that there's probably a lot we could do that doesn't involve high-tech interventions into our bodies, but rather just living better and paying attention to

what we eat and getting good exercise and not being on the internet all the time. Those are things that we should do. On the other hand, I think there are people who go too far in that direction. So when anesthesia for pain control was first discovered, first of all, laughing gas was being tested, the Humphrey Davies, I think, and then eventually that got used with ether that they were using for pain control. A lot of people said, well, this is really unnatural. If you're giving birth, for example, should be painful. That's just part of what it is to be human. It's been that way for millions of years. What all of a sudden we're just going to take out the pain out of giving birth or the pain of surgery. I mean, surgery is too. There's some descriptions of this time where, you know, if you had say a

breast cancer and you had to have a surgery to have that removed, then there was no pain control. Maybe you have some... Bite down on this bit of wood, yeah. Yeah, and it's just excruciating. So there's this one account that I was reading in a book recently of this woman who recorded her story in great detail about what it was like to be conscious and have her breastread move because of a surgery before pain control is available. And you know, some people sort of gave a sense, a sense of meaning to this, where they said, well, this is just part of what it is to be us flawed and fragile humans, is that we're supposed to have certain kinds of suffering.

Now other people would look at this case and say the thought of undergoing a surgery without anesthesia is that's the height of cruelty. And you have all sorts of human rights declarations to say people have a right to pain control. So again, we have all sorts of conflicted values about what we think we should be doing here. And I don't think there's any one size fits all answer.

I think you can be ideological and dogmatic in any direction. You can be the person who says, I won't even use vaccines because they're unnatural. It's like, okay, but all things considered, it's probably worth taking. And then you can have the people who say, you know, we shouldn't even listen to what's natural because, you know, that's just a fallacy. But it's like, yeah, that's true. It's true that what's natural isn't necessarily what's good, you know, pestilence is natural and it's not good, cancer is natural and it's not good. But is natural, and it's not good.

But it's also true that natural systems evolved to solve certain kinds of problems over millennia. And so when we come along with our high-tech mindset on we may think that we've solved that problem or we can outsmart nature, and sometimes we can. But other times what happens is we locally solve a problem and we create much worse problems in terms of the side effects. And then we're constantly trying to catch up with our own interventions.

So, you know, I guess it's good that they're viable liberals and bioconservatives duking out with each other in the literature because I think that somewhere between that dialectic is going to be where the answer lies is we're going to keep doing science and technology and learning about how the natural world works and sometimes we're going to find that it's all things considered best to try to find that it's all things considered best to try to intervene in it. As far as we can predict what we think the downstream consequences are going to be,

and I think it's right that we need to be much better about learning how to develop social systems that allow us to make peace with each other and live in harmony with the world without always looking for a technological quick fix. And so both of these views have some wisdom in them, I think. The problem that I see with regards to implementing the more progressive biological enhancement approach

for relationships is the order of magnitude complexity that you come up against. You've not just got the first, second, third order effects for yourself, and it's a multiplicative relationship between you and the other person, and then it will become self-referential too. So you will do a thing, it will affect you in one, two, three, four ways down the line. That person will be affected one, two, three, four, and then those effects will begin to interact with each other also. I think, yeah.

Of course, that's true, even setting aside biotechnology. So just take, let's say that I go on a meditation retreat for a month and I feel that I've discovered some deep insights into the nature of consciousness or something. And then I come back to my partner who's, you know, really anxious and going to work and has all these different values. We might have something going on between us that we have to deal with just because of a change that I underwent through nonbiotechnologically mediated means. So there's a risk, I think, there's ways that we can have changes to ourselves, self-discovery and just changes in our values.

Watching the wrong YouTube video. Yeah, and then going down, you know, some rabbit hole or having a religious conversion, some people may have. So, I mean, also giving birth to a child is a transformative experience. It totally restructures your valued system and what your priorities are and so forth. And so, a lot of couples when the child comes along find that, whoa, our relationship to each other is very different now. And so, we have to just remember that like something being biologically based doesn't

necessarily mean that it's more radical in the effects that it brings about than things that are non-biologically based. You know, you can have lots of big changes and relationships have to learn how to adapt and adjust and be elastic if a couple wants to stay together through the sorts of changes that life throws at us anyway. And so what you want to do when you're thinking about adding biotechnology to the mix is can you identify that subset of cases where you'll be able to bring about a change that you have reasonably good reason to predict will help the relationship improve rather than deteriorate? And so take the example of if I have PTSD and I see there's this trial for MDMA assisted

psychotherapy and I see that 70% of the people in the trials previous to me have shown radical treatment effects where they no longer have nightmares at night and they're not on 49 different pills to treat symptoms. You have a pretty good reason to think that it's rational for you to undertake this drug mediated experience if you think it's going to improve your PTSD situation, and you have a pretty good reason to think that not having PTSD is going to be good for your relationship. So you're never going to be perfect in your predictions, but biotechnology and non-biotechnology can both have radical effects on our lives. And it's really just how we integrate those effects into our ongoing narrative with the other person and our ongoing sense of ourselves.

I don't know what it is. It might be something to do with this sacred inner ethereal being, feeling feelings is hard, right? Like I get that, you know, going through a breakup is painful, but nothing that cutting off all of the sharp edges of life by deciding to tranquilize yourself away from bad feelings. To me seems first like a cop out. Secondly, it's massively against the philosophy of meritocracy, which I'm massively in favor for. Thirdly, there's learnings to be made.

There's lessons to learn from falling in and out of love. Are we risking losing them? I'll go back to our familiar example of SSRI. It's just because it's a familiar example. I'll try to talk about psychedelics, which tend to work differently. You have two general types of experiences that people will tell you about when they take an SSRI for depression. One type that they'll say is, you know, I was depressed because I was in a bad situation. My emotions were telling me something real about the world, like my job

sucks, and I'm in a bad relationship, and I need to get out of the relationship. And once I took this drug, it just kind of paped over all that emotion, which is not actually helpful because although it allows me to sort of function in my current situation, it disincentivizes me from changing my situation, which is the thing I really ought to do because those initial emotions of despair and sadness and distress were giving me some real signal amidst all the noise. That was some really important information I should have paid attention to. So those kinds of situations, you know, it depends. Sometimes just functioning is the best a person can hope for, but other times you'd say, you shouldn't

really be on that drug man, you should pay attention to the depression, get out of the relationship and change your circumstance. That's what you need. Other people will say, you know, I was going through my life and maybe certain things were good and certain things were bad, but this feeling of depression was so out of proportion to what was actually happening that it was disabling me from being able to participate in life. When I took this SSRI, what it did was it felt like it lifted the blanket of depression off of me and allowed my true self or whatever to actually begin to engage with the world. I can remember being a joyful person when I was a kid.

And from whatever happened where, whatever's going on with me, I was feeling depressed all the time. This drug allowed me to remove that barrier to flourishing and then kind of have my true self come out. So I think you're right that if the effect of a drug was just uniformly to block people's ability to access genuine information from their emotional and intuitive lives, that would be bad.

But some drugs seem to be able to, depending on how they use and the person who's using them, remove barriers between people and their emotional lives. So just to take the PTSD MDMA example, when people come back from the war and they've just seen bloodshed and slaughter and horror and they have just nightmares and deep traumas that they've just had to cover over so they can keep on fighting and then they come home and now, you know, the slightest

sound outside makes them freak out and they're having aggression toward their partner and all this kind of crazy stuff. They go to talk therapy and they say, listen, I've got all these symptoms of PTSD, what can I do? And the therapist says, well, we're gonna have to talk about your time in the war. And the person just shuts down. They're like, I wanna talk about that stuff. So in this case, what happens under these MDMA

assisted psychotherapy sessions for at least the people who so far have gone through these trials is that when the person says, tell me about, you know, the last time you were in Baghdad, instead of flipping out, the person feels warm and soft and safe enough to just go there and they can bring up that memory without having a freak out.

And then they can talk about it with a therapist and then they can actually work through some of these underlying issues. And then what seems to be happening is that after two or three such sessions, again, about 70% of the people in these early trials just don't have PTSD anymore. They don't meet the diagnostic criteria and they aren't taking all these other pills

that they've been taking before. So you found some guy that went from an 80 out of 100 down to an 8 or something. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So one of the people that we talked about in the book was an early in Raleigh in one of these trials, who was, you know, maxing out the scale and had tried everything. And he was suicidal. He'd been on every kind of drug. He was living out in the back woods in North Carolina as I recall, just drinking himself to death basically. And then he heard from a friend about

this study that was going on with MDMA. It's just it's psychotherapy and he figured he had nothing else to lose. So he went into the trial. And again, because, it's just psychotherapy, and he figured he had nothing else to lose. So he went into the trial, and again, because he wasn't just trying to, you know, alcohol is another drug that many people use to avoid dealing with their feelings. I mean, let's just use alcohol, for example. Alcohol can have both of these effects, too, right?

In some cases, you feel like shit, and then you just drink yourself into a stupor so that you don't have to deal with it. But of course, many people have also had the situation being there with your close friend, and it's probably because you're a little bit tipsy that you're willing to kind of bring up some stuff that maybe you otherwise wouldn't have wanted to bring up because your inhibition has been lowered. And so, yeah, it's just, you know, any of these different drugs can have a multiplicity

of effects, including alcohol, including SSRIs. But certainly, in the case of the psychedelic drugs, when they're used in a therapeutic context, and MDMA, it seems to have an effect for many people that they describe as greater authenticity. They feel that all of a sudden they're in touch with their emotions in a way that they haven't been for many years. They feel like all the defense mechanisms they've built up to just get through the social world and to deal with their demons, those start to break down and they actually have to confront, really in a frank way, some of the basic facts of their inner life,

and if they're in a safe environment, they can work through that stuff. For many of them, it can be very positive experience. Some people have that trips, some people face the demons and it's not good. And so that's why it's so important to, really be careful about the circumstances under which these kinds of drug assisted experiences are had.

But yeah, I think that kind of gets at the heart of your question. Yeah. There's something about it that makes me feel uncomfortable. And I think part of it comes from a fear and an understanding that most people don't like facing their feelings, that there is a opiate crisis in America, the only place in the world where you can essentially recreationally get your hands on things that stop you from feeling feelings. And given that choice, I don't think that most people's will powers are, that the average

general public willpower is sufficiently strong to not just take an increasingly complex series of cocktails in order to what I want to find a partner, but actually I'm a little bit obsessive. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a drug that's going to dampen down my excessiveness. Like, if I fall in love with a girl who is augmenting her biology with drugs, has she conned me? Like, who am I in love with? Like, and if she continues taking that for the rest of time, and I don't know, does it matter?

You know, we're getting into some tighter and tighter circles here ethically and morally, but this is the interest in shit. So this is where I want to go. Yeah, so there's questions of like, who is your authentic self? And there's different theories about that. One sort of general type of theory is that when you're having an emotional response to

something and you, upon reflection, would sort of endorse that way that you're behaving, then people think, well, that's an authentic response. The classic example in philosophy is the willing or the unwilling addict. So if you have somebody who's deeply addicted to something, but then when they stand outside of their behavior and they look at it, they're just judging themselves. They're like, this is not what I want to do. You know, I don't want to keep going back to the harrowman or whatever it is. Then some people say that addiction is not an authentic expression of the person's self

because it's something that they're intentioned with and they want to get rid of. Whereas if you have somebody who has integrated their drug use into their very sense of self, and it's their whole way of understanding themselves in the world, it's based around the fact that their friends do drugs with them, and they do it in a certain way, and they love that way that it feels, there's some views that drug use could be part of a person's authentic self, at least as far as they understand it. Another way of thinking about it is sort of, we have memories, we have our dispositions, we have our emotions, we have all sorts of stuff going on in our mental life. And some of those things are easier to dislodge than others.

So take the example of the religious person who has same sex attraction. Josh know of experimental philosopher and his colleagues. It's a really interesting work on this, where this person has two kinds of commitments here. One is their relationship to God as they see it and the other is their same-sex attraction. And if you ask liberals and conservatives, what is their true self? You find that the conservatives are like obviously the Christianity is the true self and the same-sex attraction is just this annoying like biological thing that's getting in the way of the person's ability to live according to their true values. And then the progressives are all like, obviously that Christianity nonsense needs to just get out of the way.

And obviously the same sex attraction, you know, this is a gay person who just needs to accept the fact they're gay. And so you start to see that we have, we have value judgments that, that affect what bits of our inner life do we want to kind of stake a flag in and then build the rest of it around. And some of that can be down to ideological commitment. Sometimes it can be down to just what we find we can't change about ourselves. So that's a good example. If you have a gay person in a small town where everybody's super religious and there's a lot of anti-gay sentiment, and they find that nevertheless, they can't help these kinds

of feelings and that they feel the most safe and truly themselves and in touch with their inner life when they allow themselves to act on their feelings, then you find many of them taking the very difficult decision to leave their communities. And they, but it's not a clean break, you know, it's like imagine you're somebody who really all your friends and your family and, you know, every Sunday you go to the church and that's where you're used to, you know, experiencing really deep emotions. It's not an easy thing to leave all that behind, but for some people they're feeling the same sex attraction is so central to their sense of self and it's so movable and it's so tied up with the rest of the way that they view themselves in the world that that's the trade-off that they have to make and it's conceivable that you can

imagine somebody making a different trade-off. That's the feeling of their relationship to God was precisely. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, because we get back to what we brought up at the very beginning about the phenomenological complexities that we're coming up against here, there is no if this then that objective metric that we can look at. So actually, you're seven gay, but you're only six and a half Jewish. Therefore, gay wins, like go team gay, sort of see what pride. We don't have a way to gauge that. And increasingly this year,

upon reading and learning about self-deception, and just how tiny the sliver of our own motivations that we're privy to, we get to know absolutely nothing. We're like a rider on the back of an elephant who's also got blinkers on going through some of those Kanye West glasses that kind of block out almost half of your vision. You get to see nothing. You don't know why your motivations are the way that they are. So then presuming that you know what's best for you or that anybody else does is almost impossible. you while that anybody else does is almost impossible. Well, I mean, so I'm thinking of John Stuart Mill's concept of experience in living. I mean, it's not his concept. Maybe other people have said that too, but you kind of just have to try. You just have to go out there and live your life.

Like, you know, suppose you're living in a small town and all you know is Jesus loves you and God does want you to be gay or that's what you think you know. But then you get on the internet and you find out that there's some Christian communities that are accepting of gay people. And also, you're like, oh, I don't know, maybe there is a world for me where I could both have my relationship to God and you know, live out my my sexual detractions and the way they're important to me. And so maybe you know, chat with those people online and then you you feel loved by them and you feel like actually this feels like a community. I feel understood. I feel like the whole me gets to exist with these people. And you know, if you didn't have the internet and you didn't have that

experience, you might not have known phenomenologically what it was like to feel fully embraced by a group of people who both accept you as a religious person and as a gay person, let's say. So, you know, or if you've just never had an experience with somebody the same sex and then you do and you find that you finally feel complete for the first time in your life or something like that, that's information. And, you know, it's true that we might really think we're onto something and we think we've harmonized all the different aspects of ourself and then some little stimulus comes in and all of a sudden we're confused again and we know, oh, maybe I don't actually care

about that. But man, that's just living. Like, you know, sometimes we're going to find a pretty stable arrangement for ourselves where our inner life, our set of values, our community, our beliefs, all kind of hang together in a way that feels like it's got some stability to it. And that's kind of the goal, I think. And, you know, one way you can find out what that stable arrangement is for your dispositions, your drives, your beliefs, your values in your community is by living in the world and

by trying out different kinds of things and going with your hunch and your community is by living in the world and by trying out different kinds of things and going with your hunch and seeing what happens and trying to change. And that just is the process of being a person, is trying these things out and seeing, where do I find that I'm the most, you know, at peace with myself? Where do I find that I'm able to engage with others in a way that feels healthy and not toxic? When do I feel like I'm able to engage with others in a way that feels healthy and not toxic? When do I feel like I'm getting lots of good sleep at night? When is my health good? When you find that arrangement of things, and you know, different cultures have different wisdom

traditions that are going to try to nut you in certain directions. It's not like it's totally random. Some things for most people are not good things to do. Some things for most people are good things to do. You know, approaching relationships in a way that's not built around anxiety and mistrust, but around, you know, honesty and trust, those are generally speaking, that's going to be good for most people, with maybe some exceptions. So that's, yeah, I think the experience and living is the only way to approach that. There is, you're right, there isn't one obvious answer, we just sign your name onto some life plan and go with that. And you only know by bumping into stuff and seeing how it feels.

What are the other common criticisms that you're coming up against or the people coming up against when they propose augmenting relationships with drugs? I think the main thing that people are worried about is that the feelings will be inauthentic. I think this very thing that we're talking about, they think, well, isn't whatever I'm feeling without the intervention of a drug, my true feelings, and then whatever I have when I have a drug, is some sort of drug-induced sensation. And I really think that this has to do with a misunderstanding

about what is going on with some of these drugs. So let's take the case of silocybin from Magic Mushrooms. There's different theories now about what exactly is going on with some of these drugs. So let's take the case of silocybin from magic mushrooms. There's different theories now about what exactly is going on when you take the drug, but but one thing that does is it binds to the serotonin receptors in the places serotonin. And it causes what it seems like is a is a dampening down of the global network of neurochemical processes and brain areas that uphold the ego. It's sometimes called the default mode network, but it's basically your sense of self that's just hanging out with you all the time.

That kind of quiet sound. And so this is why some people are thinking of, or will share that they feel at one with the universe, or they feel like the boundaries between themselves and others are breaking down. It's because the model of yourself that you have is just a fiction that your brain is running most of the time to kind of make sense of the world.

You have to have kind of an inner self that maps onto things and is the subject of the experiences that you're having. And, you know, when people have psychotic experiences or schizophrenia or so forth, those are other ways in which the self can break down and that's not a very safe experience to have. But if it's under controlled kind of circumstances, suddenly feeling like, wow, it's not all about me,

and I see that other people are also here, and their experiences are meaningful to them. You know, that's at the heart of many kinds of wisdom traditions and religions and so forth. This is this idea of getting out of your own ego and giving proper weight to the other conscious beings around you. Another thing it seems to do is to kind of flush out some of your belief structures that have become rigid. So I'll just illustrate this with an example. Let's say that you're a little kid and you're walking down the street and you see a leaf

on the sidewalk and you're just are fascinated by it. You're like, this is so amazing. You're just really in tune with your environment because it's new information and you don't yet know what's important and what's not important. And then as we grow up and we get socialized and our parents says, you know, come along, we need to get to school, we learn what's important and what's not important. According to the Dicta of society, we don't know, but leaves aren't important and getting to school is important.

But of course, it's not wrong that leaves are amazing. These are amazing. It's just that we've learned to stop paying attention to them. And similarly, when we get into our relationships, we can often get into a rut with people where we stop seeing our partner with fresh eyes and we just get into these stupid habits where they say something, we get irritated, we act defensively and then they respond defensively and then we have an argument and it's the thousands of time that this happened in the last 10 years. responsibly and then we have an argument and it's the thousands of time that this happened in the last 10 years. Well, by just temporarily washing out that kind of stimulus response loop that we can

get into, it allows us to see the world with fresh eyes. And so again, when people see somebody who's having a drug experience and they make fun of them because they're looking at the wall and they seem to think the wall is so fascinating, I think there's a sense in which that person is not wrong. Why isn't the wall fascinating? Why isn't this flower next to me fascinating? Why isn't the partner that I've been living with for 10 years not miraculous to perceive?

They are. It's just that we've stopped seeing them that way because we've got into a pattern. And so some of what this drug does is it just kind of wipes out some of those patterns for a little bit so we can see things with fresh eyes. And then we decide what we want to do with that. The effect of the drug wears off and there are some long

lasting kind of heightened sense of resilience for many people where they feel for some months they feel a little bit changed by the experience. But you know they have their memories, they have their values, you don't completely become a new person and then you decide what you want to learn from that experience. And again there are lots of ways that we can do this to ourselves. We can go climb a mountain and behold the beauty of nature. We can meditate. We can see a really good film that just totally challenges our preconceptions about what people are like.

And so some of these drug mediated experiences are just other ways of putting ourselves into an altered state of consciousness whereby we don't lose everything that was ever authentic to us. But we certainly have an experience which throws up new information and puts ourselves into an altered state of consciousness whereby we don't lose everything that was ever authentic to us, but we certainly have an experience which throws up new information and puts us into an altered state of mind whereby we're able to engage with that information with a kind of new perspective. There's lots of ways that we can do that, the potent way to do it that's more liable to some of those other ways. Yeah, I don't know.

The naturalistic fallacy in trying to avoid it is something that I found myself coming up against constantly while reading your book. And like, yeah, yeah, okay, like just because it's what's always happened, like it doesn't necessarily need to be that way. Then there's another level to it that the listeners may be feeling, which is some sort of sacredness to do with a relationship that it's something that perhaps shouldn't be beholden to this new world. You know there's there's few islands of purity that are left that haven't been kind of molested and I suppose you could argue while we're living in a world with Tinder and only fans and booty pictures

like how is relationships not being molested by the modern world but at least perhaps not by performance enhancing drugs outside of Iagra. And I'm aware that it's just gradations all the way down, right? It's just what is your particular tolerance level for manipulation or for new stuff, new shit. And I still remain sort of unconvinced on what my own position is here. I don't know. And I'll be fascinated to know what the listeners think as well.

Just leave it as a comment or let me know. But I'm a bunch of personal stance on this. Would you take drugs to enhance your relationship? So from most of my life, just because of my upbringing, I was raised in a very conservative religious household. So when I'm talking about all these religious examples, I'm drawn from my own experience where, you know, that was my sense of the world. It was, you know, there's right and wrong and drugs are bad and God is good. And that was kind of my simplistic worldview for a long time. Since I spent all these years researching these drugs,

I've had to change my view a little bit because I've seen so many counts of people who seem to have had transformatively good experiences on accounts of them. And so my mind's been opened a little bit, but I think I still retain a sense of caution or skepticism or concern. So I share your view. I'm not kind of an enthusiast for biotechnological enhancement. I'm really not. I think that, you know, I like reading history. I like reading philosophy. I think the stoic philosophers from, you know, thousands of years ago had a lot of good ideas about how we can live a good life and they weren't talking about doing a bunch of drugs. They were talking about doing meditation. And, you know, so they were interested in altering your consciousness. And they thought, you know, the judgments that you had about

the world and the sort of responses you had to the impressions that came in was what being a virtuous person was all about. And it was about how to respond to the world in a responsible way. So they were big into something like meditation. So yeah, I'm not thinking that everybody should rush out and try these drugs. And for myself, I think of it as something that I would want to try having deeply invested in laying the right groundwork for making changes that are within my non-drug mediated control. So a conservative way to approach these things would be to say, if you're in a relationship with someone that you value the relationship, let's say you have shared values, you have goals together,

you have a good reason all things considered to try to maintain a relationship and let's just say you've tried all the other things. You've gone on romantic vacations, you've got sexy underwear, whatever it is that they say in the magazines, you've gone to couples counseling, you've done all the different things to try to bring a feeling of excitement back into the relationship and it just doesn't seem to be working. Now one thing you might say is, well, I guess relationship's over. I don't know. We tried all the stuff and it didn't work. And so, you know, that's the signal that we need to break up. And that's one thing you could

do. Sure. No hard feelings to anybody who does that. But you can imagine somebody who says, you know, what if we, you know, supposing that these clinics arise in the next 10 years or so, which looks pretty likely where people will be able to have psychedelic enhanced couples therapy? Let's give it a try. Let's see what happens if we can just go into this place together, put our shared values on the table, talk to the therapist about what we want to accomplish, learn about the effects of this drug, recognize that it will put us into a different state of mind for a while. The effects of the drug won't be permanent, they'll wear it off. But while we're in that altered state of mind, maybe we'll be able to kind of recapture or rekindle or

explore some things together that just because of the pattern that we're in, we aren't able to really do by our own volition and see what happens. And then if it turns out that as some of the people who have been in these trials recently say, I look at my partner like when we first met again, all of a sudden I can see it's not that they aren't there, it's that I stop seeing them. And for some people having the direct influence of a drug to kind of wipe out some of their patterned ways of thinking

and allow them to see what's right in front of them with new eyes does allow them to kind of remember and re-experience why it is that they value the relationship in the first place. And to me, that doesn't seem inauthentic. That just seems like we can get ourselves into inauthentic patterns by falling into habits that aren't good for us. And there's different ways we try to break our habits through trying new activities, going to talk therapy and so on. And the control use of these drugs in a certain kind of

situations is another way in which we can break our habits. And then we can decide what new habits we want to lay down. I certainly think the first area that I'm like prepare, I will be prepared to succeed ground on, is going to be single-time experiences that force a reflective period afterward. I think I have a particular issue with, I'm not just saying just man up like your heartbreak is easy, like no it sucks, but jumping on a course of SSRIs to essentially nerf all of the edges of your experience. You know what I was thinking of while I was reading the book, remember that surrogate's film with Bruce Willis? Do you ever watch that? I didn't see it, no.

Okay, so it's kind of like future world and all of the humans now just exist in these lush apartments in pods and they have surrogates like androids that run around on their behalf and then never get cold and then never get hungry and then never get whatever and they have surrogates, like androids, that run around on their behalf, and then never get cold, and then never get hungry, and then never get whatever, and they're just filled with tubes,

and they're essentially just asleep the whole time. And I was like, think about what most personal development strategies are doing at the moment. They're actually reconnecting us with kind of a much more ancestral, paleolithic experience. Why people doing cold showers and breathwork and high-intensity interval training? Like, what are all of the reasons for these things? It's because it puts you into a state of discomfort in a world which is constantly trying to make you more and

more comfortable. You can Amazon Prime, a TV on which to watch Netflix, the best films on the planet for less than like the price of a cocktail per month while you deliver a rua five star Michelin's, chef's steak to your door, without even having to leave your house. You're like, these are the antidotes to the ailments of modern society. Earlier on, you mentioned about an analogy

to basically the minimalist movement. If you were to think about the cynics, like Diogenies, from ancient times going back to Greece and think about what they were doing. Even that was, look, I will strip away all of the extraneous bullshit that I don't need. I don't even need this pot. When Alexander the Great comes, I'll just tell him that you stood in my sunlight. All of these sort of stories, right?

What are we doing with that? Again, my concern is that by increasing the ability for people to take advantage of a very, very convenient world, I wonder where we lose our humanity along the way, where do we actually kind of drop that off, and the examples you've given that have been like awkwardly robust, sort of dealing with the criticisms I had, of those, I find the most compelling definitely go do something, because I would say to nobody don't go and do a 10-day meditation retreat, but 10-day meditation retreat and a single

time mild MDMA dose are probably not going to have much too dissimilar experiences. You're going to break down a ton of different thinking habits, you're going to come out an entirely new person, you're not going to think in the same sort of patterns anymore. But for one, I would be like, yes, get yourself away, like going enjoy the Northwest of England or whatever at this retreat. And then the other one, for some reason, I'm a bit like, oh, what about the sacred soul and the ethereal, you know, like the untouched relationship? But, you know, so those things are in some ways, I think,

artificially separated because, you know, the use of psychoactive substances for religious and spiritual development is something that goes back thousands of years within our species. I mean, there's even some scholarship now coming out suggesting that some of the early founding of religious movements were probably partly set off by people who were having drug. I've got the book. I've got the what's it called the immortality key? The immortality key literally literally got delivered today. So I've I've got him I've got him coming on in January I'm excited. I can't pronounce his surname. I'm sorry, man. I think your surname's gonna take me a couple of months to prepare to say I mean, I think these movements have been trying to strive for authenticity where we aren't

so bogged down by the patterns of the world. Our imagined hierarchies and our in-group out-group distinctions and all this kind of stuff. There's lots of religious and wisdom and spiritual movements that try to get people to break down some of that stuff. And they do it through different techniques. Meditation is one such technique. Exercise for some people is a way of just getting their mind in a certain kind of different space.

And also the use of like Iowaska and the Amazon basin has been going on for thousands of years, peyote in the Native American church. LSD isn't only been around so long because it was synthesized in a lab, but it's the same kind of an idea. It's just using a substance that prompts your mind to enter into a space whereby many people feel that they are able to clear away the dross and the confusion and the clutter and the socialization and the distinctions and the

stereotypes and get down to the basic fact of the matter and kind of rebuild their perception from there. And so, you know, this is, if you think of it as one of a number of tools that human societies over millennia have developed, including contemplative practices and so forth, to try to get down to the bare bones, then you see it as really part of that same tradition that you're keyed into rather than something that's competing with it. I think you're right, man. I think you're right. Look, love is the drug will be linked in the show not below the chemical future of our relationships. If you bite through that link, you will be supporting

the show at no extra cost to yourself. Of course, Brian, if people want to check out more of your work or any other stuff, where should they go? All my writing academic writing is on accademia.edu slash my name, Brian D. or I think it is, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Research Gate and you can reach out to me in any of those places. So thank you, man. Yeah, thanks for this conversation, this was great.