TrueLife - Psychedelics, Dementia, & Chat GPT- 4

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://spannr.com/https://spannr.com/about/chelseahttps://www.april19.ai/Today we talk about what could be possible. I reference the above article about psychedelics, & dementia. I highly rec one d everyone check out Spanner, Chelsea, & April 19th… all of them amazing. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. Hope everybody's having a beautiful day. It's Friday. I hope that you got to wake up next to your loved ones. I hope the sun is shining, the birds are singing.

What an incredible time to be alive. You know, I hope that everybody who is feeling a little bit down or is for some reason watching the news and getting disturbed or something, just know that there's so much beauty on the horizon. I was sending out some emails today, and I like to put this one in there, and I want to give it to everybody listening. It's something like this. I believe wholeheartedly that we are on the cusp of such a beautiful time,

The time we are almost upon is not only more beautiful than you imagine. It's more beautiful than you can imagine. Think about that for a minute. So today, I decided to do a little bit of a little commentary. I want to read people a little bit of this article that I read. It's about psychedelics dementia and using AI to discover new techniques. It's a fascinating article. It's in this magazine Spanner, and it's by this incredible author named Chelsea.

bring it up right here. I'm not going to read all of it, but I want to read some of it because I want people to go to this magazine and check out this particular author because she did a great job at explaining what's happening and where we are in the world of psychedelics and what is possible. I don't want to go over the fence and tell everyone that this is like a panacea and this can't happen, but I do want people to check out this article because I think that not only is the article great, but the entire magazine that these people are putting up has so, so much incredible information. It's fun to read. The articles are thought-provoking, and it's really fun. So let's just jump into this right here. This is the author. Go check it out.

All her links will be in the show notes as well as the magazine. So let me take it from the top right here. I think it's going to blow your guys' mind. It really is something that just, it kind of blew my mind. So let's just start it off right over here. So the name of this article is doctors, drug dealers, or AI. Who will win the race to treat dementia? Okay, I just want to start there for a minute. Great title, right? Let's think about what doctors are doing for dementia right now. All of us probably have parents. And if you're my age, your parents are starting to get a little bit older. If you're my age, you probably saw your grandparents, you know, go through a sort of mental decline. And for those of us who have seen it, it can be debilitating because this person that you loved,

this person in your life has become a shell of themselves. It's very painful. It's very painful. to watch them begin to lose their idea of who they are and what they remember. And so over the last few years, we have seen doctors trying frantically to come up with ways to to fight Alzheimer's in these neurodegenerative diseases. They've used SSRIs. They have tried different types of medication. And to not not too much, it hasn't done a whole lot. And that's why there is this race to figure this out.

we have an aging population. I think I read somewhere that over 10,000 baby boomers are retiring a day. So just imagine what a society looks like that has 30 to 40, maybe even 47 percent of people over the age of 65. If you think, if you've ever gone to like a care home and you've seen the heartache there, imagine what that's going to look like in 10 years. It's going to be incredible. So we as a society, as a world, as a world of medicine, we need to figure some things out. So the doctors have been trying some drugs.

They figured out some things, but they haven't really been able to figure out. A lot of times they thought it was like this amyroid plaque that builds up in the brain. And we can't seem to figure it out. Drug dealers. Now, what can drug dealers do for people with dementia? Well, you know, if we look at the patterns of drug dealers and people that are suffering trauma, you know, people that used to be on painkillers like oxycotton, they found themselves out. out in the street getting fentanyl. You know, they've, they have moved from the world of pharmaceuticals

to the world of street drugs. And it's, it's interesting because a lot of times the pharmaceutical industry is just a derivative of a natural drug. You know, I think there was an old George, the old comedian skit that was like, hey, don't do their drugs, do our drugs. You know, he was making a reference to the difference between the cartels and Mexico, in the pharmaceutical industries in the United States. You guys should all go back and it's a pretty funny joke.

Now, what does AI have to do with it? Well, for those of you who have been playing around with chat GBT or Open AI, you realize that it's all about the prompts. Like you can ask AI, you can ask chat GPT, a lot of difficult questions. And as long as you word the question in a way that is significant, then you are able to get an answer that is equally significant back. And so the reason AI is so important is that there are some really brilliant people, like the people at April 19th, like Yachim and his Jachim Fever and his team over there. There's a, I think Joshua Turner over at Stanford's doing some great things.

But there's just so many great people out there that are figuring out ways to use AI to understand how the brain works. And so imagine what we're doing with AI now. People are asking it to write code. People are asking it to write software. So why wouldn't you be able to ask it how to develop new drugs? Why wouldn't you be able to ask it? How does the brain work? What is this dementia?

And what if we use these drugs to trigger this particular neurotransmitter, would it connect to this receptor? And we can figure out a lot of things that we couldn't figure out before. So that's what they're talking about when they look at doctors, drug dealers, or AI. Who will win the race to treat dementia? Now, I want to add one other dimension on here before I start going to the article. I think that there's a race between biology and technology. It seems to me that we have, on one hand,

we have this world of Elon Musk and the singularity where people are trying to figure out ways. Like, wow, what if we could get a chip, like a microchip in the brain and we could figure out what exactly is firing and we could figure out how to bypass certain areas that may have gone dormant or have been choked out because of a stroke? So that's one edge. And there's people like the welcome trust,

and there are people all over great institutions trying to figure out how we can use technology, whether it's a swallible, I'm going to butcher this word, a swallowable chip or some kind of technology that allows a doctor to understand when you're having an aneurysm, a heart attack, or when there's something wrong in your body.

But I also think that's the technology side. I think that on the biology side, I think that we are beginning to understand that some things like, and theogens may be there to help us move forward in a biological way. Does that kind of make sense? Like if you look at some of the research or the brain scans that are happening when people that are on mushrooms,

you can see sort of a bypass happening in the brain. The same way a doctor or a surgeon would go in and do a bypass surgery on the heart to get the blood flowing around the blocked artery, so too does it seem to me at least that that is kind of what's happening. happening when people are taking different, like say mushrooms, for example, and they're, they're building new tracks. They're building new neural pathways. They're changing the shape of the dendritic structures so that the brain can work in ways in which it hasn't before. And that's allowing some people to regain cognitive function. So that's what I mean

when I say there's a race between technology and biology. So let's move into this argument. Well, it is kind of an argument. So let's move down a little bit. So the article begins with a gentleman who has a father who has dementia. And I'm just going to scan it because I want everyone to go and read it. Go check out this girl, Chelsea. She's a beautiful author, and I'm sure she's a beautiful person as well. But the article's well worth reading and the magazine's worth reading as well. So the article starts off and it talks about a gentleman that loves his father.

It's really heartwarming and it's heart-wrenching at the same time. But it talks about a son and a gentleman. mom who are losing someone they love to dementia and they see him slowly beginning to lose all his faculties. And it gets to the point where the doctor's like, you know what? It's it, man. There's nothing we can do. And for anybody who's been in that situation, you know how heart wrenching that is. So here's a little blurb from the article. I've seen the carnage left by people, basically dwindling cognitively. It's hard on everyone, the family, when they start forgetting who they are, you care for someone as long as you can, and then getting them into a long-term care

home is not an easy or an efficient thing to do. You watch them slowly die. They eventually lose themselves completely, or if they eventually lose themselves completely, or if they regress to memories of a better or worse time, they can be violent. It's alarming. That's another point, too. For those of us who have seen this, sometimes this person that you love so much because they're frustrated or because they can't remember, they begin lashing out at the only people around them. And unfortunately, that's usually the people that love them the most.

And it's just like this self-perpetuating cycle because they become lonely, they become isolated and they become more angry because they're trying to communicate. They realize there's something wrong and there's nothing they can do about it. It's the ultimate frustration to see a problem every day that you can't solve. And you know what's getting worse and you know you're pushing people away. It's so destructive. And so the article continues to go on. And it talks about this kid named Adam who is really struggling with what to do.

And he's struggling with what the doctors are telling him. And he's really struggling with seeing his father get to a point where he can't do it. And he has done an incredible amount of research. And he has decided to, after reading the research papers and speaking with his family members, he took it upon himself. And then of this is medical advice, by the way. This is just an article everybody should read. The gentleman goes on to look at all these different studies that show that some psychedelics

are allowing neuroplasticity. Some psychedelics are allowing for cognitive impairment to be somewhat repaired. And the study is not 100%. So I'm not saying everybody should go do this. But I am saying you should read this article. And so this gentleman in a. in his ultimate love for his father and his ultimate diagnosis from the doctors that say your father's dying, he's losing himself and this is it. There's nothing we can do. Well, he doesn't take that.

He says, no, there are things you can do. There's always something you can do. So he reaches into the information that's available to everybody. He reaches out to the doctors that have studied this stuff. He researches it. And he talks to his mom and he says, look, there's plenty of evidence that shows micro dosing can help people or can help cognitive decline. And he shows all the research to his mom. And because there's nothing left to do and because there's no other options, well, we all know what happens when you're not given, when you don't have options, you don't have any choice.

So he takes it upon himself to move forward with a microdose regimen. And, you know, it's slow at first. It's like everything. Slow at first and then all at once. And they have almost lost hope and they begin micro dosing. And so let me just read a little bit about it because I want to entice you guys to go and check it out. So we've talked about the role of psychedelics and treating neurogenitor of diseases. So it gets to the point where he decides to go and use this course of psychedelics.

He uses Bufo and he uses psilocybin, just really small amounts. And if you want the details, check out the article. the links in there. And over the course of a few months, things begin to change. You know, where his father was kept either in the living room, you know, inundated by television or left to be in his room alone, suffering. Adam comes home one day and he hears the faint sound of a guitar playing. And he's taken back.

He's like, what the hell is that? And he looks for his father, his father. father's not around. And he walks by the room and lo and behold, there's his father playing guitar like he used to. And we just to think about it. Like I got goosebumps thinking about it. Like, imagine someone you love who has almost gone into like a sort of k-hole or a sort of cognitive decline where they can no longer do the things they love. They can't play cards. They can't play guitar, they can't even barely hold a conversation. They've lost their function to be an individual. They can't drive. And they know they're becoming a burden on somebody. So imagine having someone

like that that you love. And a few months, all of a sudden, you begin to see that person come back. There's a great, there was a great movie called Awakening's with Robin Williams. And in that movie, it was a movie about people that were catatonic. And he gives them, I think he gives them like El Thienine or something. or some sort of a dopamine, some sort of a dopamine agonist, and it helps them move through. But it's similar in that this gentleman, Adam, begins to see his father playing guitar.

And he says, Dad, what are you doing? And his dad answers back, I just felt like playing guitar. I hadn't done it for a while. And so you can begin to see the true beauty of what is possible. Now, that's all I'm going to say about the article. I'm going to switch it off now. Like, go check it out.

All the information will be. in the show notes there. So I wanted to bring that up because I think that we are on the cusp of changing medicine forever. And I'm not saying psychedelics are a panacea. I'm not saying that they hold promise for everything out there. They surely don't. But might it be possible?

Might it be possible that we're able to fix neurodegenerative diseases with new novel psychoactive compounds? might that be a better area of exploration for pharmaceutical companies? Might that be a better area of exploration for family members who are trying to take care of loved ones? Might it be something that states, local governments or national governments should be looking at with aging demographics? Might it be something that insurance companies should be trying to maybe do some research into? Maybe this is an opportunity for those entities to be preparing grants for companies like April 19th or, you know, different Medicare providers or different sorts of conglomerates that are coming together and trying to figure these things out. Because I think we're facing sort of a demographic cliff when it comes to the ideas of neurodeginitri of diseases.

And I think that these could be something. Now, let me just yank the wheel hard to the right over here. Like, let's say that we do find ways in order to help you live longer healthy. And let's say that these new class of compounds are able to do that. How long do you think that you would want to live? How long would you be able to live in a world where materialism is something that is thrust upon you and makes it a necessity to live? how long would you be able to live? I mean, if your grandfather got a pension and all of a sudden now you're living to 140,

is that pension going to pay you to you 140? Or you got to work until you're 116. So there's a lot of interesting ideas to think about there. And I'm curious, like if you put it in the chat or if you're someone who's out in one of the trucks, if you're one of my listeners on the podcast, just do a little thought experiment. How old do you think you would want to be? There's some people that say, I want to live forever. And then there's other people that are like, you know what?

I've had enough right now. Most of us are probably in the middle of there somewhere. I bet all of you could use your imagination to think about what would it be like to hold your great, great, great, great granddaughter? How much knowledge or how could you maneuver in the world if you had the experience of four or five lifetimes? what would it be like to live in a world where you could have a career that expanded from the age of 15 or 21 to the age of 190? What kind of a master artist could you be if you studied the different types of ways in which you could build things? You could be an architect, an artist, a songwriter, a poet, a businessman, and you could do it all in your lifetime. How would that change the way you live?

How would it change the way you bring up children? How would it change the way we use resources in the world? I think that these are interesting questions, and I know what you're thinking. George, you read way too much science fiction, buddy. And that's true. I do, but it's interesting to see where we are right now. And it's another dimension to the ideas of what dementia can teach us. Some of us have realized the painful lessons dementia teaches us.

It teaches us that you should live here now. You should be in the present moment, that you shouldn't get trapped in the past or trapped in the future, that all you have is this moment. If you read a lot of biographies, then you'll know that no one on their deathbed ever says things like, I wish I made more money. I wish I would have worked longer hours. People on their deathbed say things like, I wish I would have been a better father. I wish I would have spent more time with my kids. I wish I would have taken that out of the vacation. And so what would it be like if the society that we lived in had a life expectancy of 160 or 200 years old?

What would that do to concepts like racism? What would it do to concepts like inclusivity? What would it do to language? Would it give us another dimension into the world in which we live? Would we be able to express our? ourselves in a different way. It's fascinating to think about. And I don't know the answers to these. I really enjoy thinking about them. But if I could tell all of you one thing for sure, I would tell you to go and read this article because it is really awesome. And it's a great article. It's well written.

And that's what I got for today on this short version of the True Life podcast. I love everybody. I hope you're having a blast out there. Remember to try and make everyone around. you a little bit better and that everyone you see is fighting a battle you have nothing that you know nothing about so be nice to them aloha everybody