YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Johnson

lines on the record: 250
first: 2020-12-14
most recent: 2020-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's the closest we can come to making sense of it because I do think what we do know about these psychedelics, one of the levels beyond the receptor is that the brain is communicating it with itself in a massively different way. There's massive communication with areas that don't normally communicate. And so I think that comes with It's casting the nets wide. I think that comes with the insights and helpful novel ways of thinking. I do think it comes with false positives. You know, that could be some of the delusion And so, you know, when you're so far out there, like with DMT experience, like maybe alien is the best way that the mind can wrap some arms around that”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These stories of entities, they might be that stories that are constructed that is the closest, which is not to say the stories aren't real. I mean, I think we're getting to layers where”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we think about stories like our sense of self is basically narrative self is a story. And we think about The world of stories. This is why metaphors are always more powerful than, you know, sort of laying out all the details all the time, you know, speaking in parables. It's like if you really get, you know, this is why as much as I hate it, you know, if you're presenting to Congress or something and you have all the best data in the world. It's not as powerful as that one anecdote as. As the mom dying of cancer that had the psilocybin session and it transformed her life. That's a story that's meaningful. And so when this kind of unimaginable kind of change and experience happens with a DMT ingestion.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Willing to speculate and sort of cast the nets wide with caveat. But, you know, I think of things like archetypes and it's plausible that there are certain stories. There are certain, you know, we've gone through millions of years of evolution. It may be that we have certain. Characters and stories that are sort of our central nervous system is sort of wired to tend to.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you mentioned Young, and I think that's he's particularly interesting and it kind of points to something I was thinking about saying is that I think what might be going on from a naturalistic perspective. So regardless whether or not there are, you know, it doesn't depend on autonomous entities out there, what might be happening is that just The associative net, the level of learning, the The comprehension might be so beyond what someone is used to that the only way for the nervous system, for the aware sense of self to orient towards it is all by metaphor. And so I do think, you know, when we get into these realms as a strong empiricist, I think we always got to be careful and be as grounded as possible. But I'm also.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physically impossible, but yet at the same time self-validating, it seems true, like that they really are figuring something out. Of course, the challenge is to say something in concrete terms after the experience where you could verify that in any way. And I'm not familiar of any examples of that.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people come back with stories that are just astonishing, like there's communication between these entities and often they're telling them. Things that the person says are self validating, but it seems like it's impossible. Like it really seems like, and again, this is what people say. Oftentimes that Really is like downloading some intelligence from a higher dimension or some whatever metaphor. You want to use sometimes these things come up in dreams where it's like someone is exposed to something that I've had this in a dream, you know, where it seems like what they are being exposed to is”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other reality and the nature of that other reality will differ depending on who you ask, but folks will talk often talk about and we've done some survey research on this. Entities of different types, elves tend to pop up. The caveat is, I think, I strongly presume all of this is culturally influenced, you know, but Thinking more about the psychology and the neuroscience, there is probably something fundamental, you know, like for someone that might be colored as elves, others that might be colored as Terrence McKinna called himself dribbling basketballs. For someone else, it might be little animals or someone else. It might be aliens. I think that probably is dependent on who they are and what they've been exposed to. But just the fact that one has a sense that Autonomous entities”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this stuff comes on like a freight train. So one takes a hit. And around the time of the first exhalation, so we're talking about a few seconds in, or maybe just sometime between the first and the second hit, it'll start to come on. And they're already up to what they might get from a 30 milligram or 300 microgram LSD trip, a big trip. They're already there at the second hit, but their consciousness is geared. This is like acceleration, not speed. Of physics, okay? It's like you just those receptors are getting filled like that and they're going from zero to 60 and like, you know, Tesla time. The second hit again, they're at this, maybe the strongest psychedelic experience they've ever had. And then if they can take that third hit, and some people can't. I mean, They're propelled into this.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the common methods for people to use it is to smoke it or vaporize it. And it usually takes, this is a pretty good kind of description of what it might feel like on the ground. The caveat is it's a completely insufficient description and someone's going to be listening. It's like nothing you could say is going to come close. But it'll take about three big hits inhalation in order to have what people call a breakthrough dose. And there's no great definition of that, but basically meaning. Moving away from not just having the typical psilocybin or LSD experience where like things are radically different, but you're still basically a person in this reality to go in somewhere else. And so that'll typically take like three hits.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unlike some other drugs that really throw you far out there, anesthetics and even alcohol, like as reality starts to become different at higher and higher doses, there's this numbing. There's this sort of ability for the sense of... Being the center, having a conscious experience that's memorable, that is maintained throughout these classic psychedelic experiences. Like one can go as far, so far out while still Aware of the experience and remembering the experience”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People will say that, and there's a close relative called 5 methoxy DMT. Most people who know the terrain will say that's an order of magnitude or orders of magnitude beyond, I mean, anything one could get from even a high dose of psilocybin or LSD. I think it's a question about whether how therapeutic, I think there is a therapeutic potential there, but it's probably not as sure of a bet because one goes so far out it's almost like you're not contemplating their relationship and their direction in life. They are like reality is ripping apart at the seams. nature of the self and of the sense of reality. And the amazing thing about these compounds, and same to a less degree with oral psilocybin and LSD, is that”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. In terms of just like what's the most fascinating, you know, understanding the nature of these experiences, if you really want to like wrap your head around what's going on when someone has a completely altered sense of reality and sense of self. There, I think you're talking about the high dose, either smoked vaporized or intravenous injection, which all kind of they're very similar pharmacologically. DMT and five methoxy DMT. This is like when people, this is what I don't know if you're familiar with Terrence McKinney. He would talk a lot about smoking DMT. Joe Rogan has talked a lot about that.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Therapeutically, I'm most interested in psilocybin and LSD, and I think we need to do a lot more with LSD because it's mainly been psilocybin in the modern era. I've recently gotten a grant from the Hefter Research Institute to do an LSD study, so I haven't started it yet, but I'm going through the paperwork and everything.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experimental models where we actually get there a problem solving tasks that we know, for example, that you tend to do better on after you've gotten a good night's sleep versus not. And my sense is there's a relationship there. You know, people go back to first principles, questioning those first principles they're operating under. you know, getting away from their priors in terms of creative problem solving. And so I think wrap those things and you could speak a little more rigorously about those because ultimately if everyone's bringing their own problem, that's more in the face valid side, but you can't dig in as much and get as much experimental power and speak to the mechanisms as you can with having everyone do the same sort of canned problem solving task.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, although it's only part of the story, but we need big studies where we compare people, like, let's get 100 people like that, scientists that are working on a problem, and then randomize them. And then I think you need even more credible active controls or active placebo conditions to kind of tease this out. And then also in conjunction with that, and you can do this in the same study, you want to combine that with more rigorous sort of”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've been working on where you've been stuck for months working on this damn thing, and you're not getting anywhere, like your head's butting up against the wall. It's like come in here, take, and I think it was 100 micrograms of LSD. So not a big session. And a little bit different model where they were actually working. It was a moderate enough dose where they could work on the problem during the session. I think probably... I'm an empiricist, so I'd like to see all the studies done. But the first thing I would do is a really high dose session where you're not necessarily in front of your computer, you know, which you can't really do on a really high dose.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we need experiments, you know, and that's tied to kind of the policy level stuff. And I should be clear, I'd never encourage anyone to do anything illicitly. But yeah, in the future, we could see these compounds used for technical and scientific innovation. What we need are studies that are digging into that. Right now, most of what the funding, which is largely fund from philanthropy, not from the government, largely what it's for is treatment of mental disorders like addiction and depression, et cetera. But we need studies. One of the early initial stabs on this question decades ago was they took some architects and engineers and said what problems have”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“we need more of those and then you need the right balance between that because so many of the you know novel crazy ideas are just bunk and you you need that's what science is about separating them from from the valid paradigm shifting ideas but we need more paradigm shifting ideas like in a big way and i think we could i think you could argue that we've because of the structure of academia and science in modern times it heavily biases against those”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“you know um you know you connect the dots where maybe you shouldn't have connected those dots but it i i think that can be constrained and and so much of our not only our personal psychological suffering but our our limitations um academically and in terms of technology are because of the self-imposed limitations and heuristics these intrinsic ways of thinking you know like those examples throughout the history of science where someone has come up with a rat the paradigm's paradigm shifts it's like here's something completely different you know this doesn't make sense by any of the previous models and”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am influenced by the gosh, the just incredible number of anecdotes surrounding these. I mean, Carrie Mollis, he invented PCR. I mean, absolutely revolutionized biological sciences. He says he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize from it, said he wouldn't have come up with that had he not had psychedelic experiences. Now he's an interesting character. People should read his autobiography because you could point to other things he was into. But I think that speaks to the casting your nets wide and this mental flex more of these general mechanisms where sometimes if you cast your nets really wide and it's going to depend on the person and their influences, but sometimes you come up with false positives.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely think there's huge potential there. And there was some research in the late 60s, early 70s that were, it was very early and not very rigorous in terms of methodology, but it was consistent with the, I mean, there's just countless anecdotes of folks. I mean, people have argued that just, you know, Silicon Valley was largely influenced by psychedelic experience. I remember the person that came up with the concept of freeway or shareware. It's like it kind of was generated out of or influenced by psychedelic experience. So to this, I think there's incredible potential there. And we know really next, there's no rigorous research on that”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years and years and years, like I get it now. And so like that, you know, and even at the psychological, emotional level, like the cancer patients we worked with, you know, they told themselves a million times or the people trying to quit smoking, I need to quit smoking. Oh, I'm ruining my life with this cancer. I'm still healthy. I should be getting out. I'm letting this thing defeat me. It's like, yeah, you told yourself that in your head, but sometimes they had these experiences and they kind of feel it in their heart. Like they really get it.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A high dose psilocybin study, and he's like, I remember him saying, My God, it's like Hegel's opposites defining each other. Like, I get it. I've taught this thing for.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the best arguments is they reduce the influence of our priors. Of what we bring into all of the assumptions that we all that were essentially, especially as adults, were riding on top of heuristic after heuristic to get through life. And you need to do that. And that's a good thing and that's extremely efficient. And evolution has shaped that. But that comes at an expense. And it seems that these experiences will... Will allow someone greater mental flexibility and openness. And so one can be both less influenced by their prior assumptions, but still nonetheless, the nature of the experience can be influenced by what they've been exposed to in the world. And sometimes they can get it at a deeper way. Like maybe they've read, I mean, I had a philosophy professor one time as a participant.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think very much so. And I think there's, I'm a little concerned some of the science is going a little too far in the direction of Around the edges, you know, speaking about it, changing beliefs in this sense or that sense about in particular domains. And I think what really a lot of what's going on is what you just discussed. It's the priors coming into it. So if you've been reading a lot of physics, then you might bring up space-time and interpret the experience in that sense. I mean, it's not uncommon for people to come out talking about visions of the, it's not the most typical thing, but it's come up in sessions I've guided, the Big Bang and this sort of nature of reality. I think probably the best way to think about these experiences is that and the best evidence, even though we're in our infancy and understanding it, they really tap into more general psychological mechanisms.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As much as what we can say about that through naturalistic psychology, especially as much as we can root it to Solid psychological constructs and solid neuroscientific constructs.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The subjective effects can be so broad that for some people it shifts their philosophical viewpoint more towards idealism, more towards thinking of the nature of reality might be more about Consciousness than about material. That's a domain I'm very interested in. Right now we have essentially zero to say about that in terms of validating those types of claims. But it's even interesting just to see what people say along those lines.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do a lot of that with questionnaires, you know, some of which are very psychometrically validated. So lots of numbers have been crunched on them. And there's always a limitation with questionnaires. I mean, subjective effects are subjective effects. Ultimately, it's what the person is reporting, and that doesn't necessarily point towards a ground truth. So for example, if someone says that they felt like they touched another dimension or they felt like they sensed the reality of God, or if they, you know, I mean, just you name it people's ontological views can sometimes shift. I think that's more about where they're coming from. And I don't think it's the quintessential way in which they work. There's plenty of people that hold onto a completely naturalistic viewpoint and have profound and helpful experiences with these compounds.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of people's report of subjective experience, probably one of the most general things we can That range. So many people come out of these sessions saying that they didn't know it was possible to have an experience like that.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything that you see on a particular MDMA session, sometimes a psilocybin session looks just like that. But then sometimes it's completely different with psilocybin. It's a little more narrowed in terms of the variability with MDMA.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet with MDMA, for example, it's very rare to have what's called an ego loss experience or a sense of transcendental unity where one really seemingly loses the psychological construct of the self. But MDMA, it's very common for people to have this, they still are perceiving themselves as a self, but it's common for them to have this warmth, this empathy for humanity and for their friends and loved ones. So it's more, it's, and you see those effects under the classic psychedelics, but that's a subset of what the classic psychedelics do. So I see MDMA in terms of its subjective effects is if you think about Venn diagrams, it's sort of MDMA is all within the classic psychedelics.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true, relatively speaking. That said, at most doses of classic psychedelics, you still have a tether to reality. Changes a little bit when you're talking about smoking DMT or smoking 5 methoxy DMT, which are some interesting examples we could talk more about.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, that, in the sense that you can't kind of push the dose up as high safely as one can if they're in the right setting, like in our research as they can with the classic psychedelics. But probably more importantly, just the nature of the effects with MDMA aren't the full on psychedelic. It's not the full journey, you know. So it's sort of a psychedelic with rose colored glasses on, a psychedelic that's more of, it's been called more of a heart trip than a head trip. The nature of reality doesn't unravel as frequently as it does with classic psychedelics.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relatively little addiction potential. But it's also more physiologically dangerous. I think that certainly the therapeutic use, it's showing really promising effects for treating PTSD and the models that are used. I think those are extremely acceptable when it comes to the risk-benefit ratio that you see all throughout medicine. But nonetheless, we do know that at a certain dose and a certain frequency that MDMA can cause long-term damage to the serotonin system in the brain so it doesn't have that level of kind of freakish bodily safety that the classic psychedelics do. And it has more of a heart load, a cardiovascular. I don't mean kind of emotion. I mean, in this sense, although it is very emotional and that's... Something unique about its subjective effects, but it's more of a oppressor.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continuum of addiction. So it's certainly no cocaine. It's pretty rare for people to get into daily use patterns, but it's possible. And they can get into more like, you know, using once a week pattern where they can find it hard to stop. But it's somewhere in between mostly towards the classic psychedelic side in terms of”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So MDMA is the big one. And I should say that with the classic psychedelics, that LSD is sort of, you can call it a semi-synthetic because there's natural from both ergot and in certain seeds, morning glory seeds as one example. There's a very close, there are some very close chemical relatives of LSD. So LSD is close to what occurs in nature, but not quite. But then when we get into the other nonclassic psychedelics, probably the most prominent one is MDMA. People call it ecstasy. People call it Molly. And it differs from classic psychedelics in a number of ways. It can be addictive, but not so. It's like you can have cocaine on this end of the continuum and classic psychedelics here.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building up the courage to do it and they build up a tolerance or, yeah, they're in college and they do it on a dare. Can you take? Take acid seven days in a row and that type of thing rather than a self control issue You have to say, Oh God, I got to stop taking this. I got to stop drinking every night. I gotta cut down on the Coke, whatever.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And have zero chance for most people if you screen them of killing them. The big risk is behavioral toxicity, which is a fancy way of saying doing something stupid. I mean, you're really intoxicated. Like if you wander into traffic or you fall from a height, just like plain people do on hitos of alcohol. And the other kind of unique thing about classic psychedelics is that they're not addictive, which is Pretty much unheard of when it comes to so called drugs of abuse or drugs that people, at least at some frequency choose to take, you know, most of what we think of as drugs, you know, even caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, cannabis, most of these you can get into alcohol, you can get into a daily use pattern. And that's just extreme so unheard of with psychedelics. Most people have taken these things on a daily basis. It's more of like,”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of these drugs, thinking about, say, cocaine and methamphetamine, you can't give to a regular user. You can't safely give a dose where the regular cocaine user is going to say, oh man, that's like. That's the strongest coke I've ever had, you know, because you get it past the ethics committee and you need approval. And I wouldn't want to give someone something that's dangerous. Go to those levels where they would say that you would have to give something that's physiologically riskier. you know civil cybin or lsd you can give a dose at the physiological level that is like very good chance it's going to be the most intense psychological experience of that person's life”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the ways that where it differs is that you're unlike exercise, you're essentially most exercise to really get to those intense levels, you really need to be persistent about it. I mean, it'll be intense if you're really out of shape just jogging for five minutes, but to really get to those intense levels, you need to have the dedication. And so some of the other ways of altering subjective effects or states of consciousness take that type of dedication. Psychedelics, though, I mean, someone takes the right dose. They're strapped into the roller coaster. And something interesting is going to happen. And I really like what you said about that distinction between the mind or the contrast between the mind effects and the bodily effects. Because I think of this, I do research with all the drugs.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So bringing it back to Goggins, it's like you can do that without even destroying your knee or whatever, or coming close and riding that line.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same person that might be hurt shoveling snow or going up the stairs, you know, that could have a car. They could have a cardiac event because they've taken one of these drugs. But for most people, someone could take a thousand times what the effective dose is and it's not going to cause any organ damage, affect the brainstem, make them stop breathing. So in that sense, they're freakishly safe at the physiological, I would never call any compound safe because there's always a risk. Freakishly safe at the physiological level. I mean, you can hardly find anything over the counter like that. I mean, aspirin's not like that. Caffeine is not like that. Most drugs. You take 5, 10, 20, maybe takes 100, but you get to sometimes the effective dose and it's going to kill you.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Escaline is in the different cacti, so the one most people will know is coyote, but it also shows up in San Pedro or Peruvian torch. And all of these classic psychedelics, they have, at the right dose, and typically they have very strong effects on one's sense of reality and one sense of self. Some of the things that make them different than other, more broadly speaking, psychedelics like MDMA and others is that they're at least the major examples. There are some exotic ones that differ, but the ones I've talked about are extremely safe at the physiological level. Like there's like LSD and psilocybin, there's no known lethal overdose. Unless you have really severe heart disease, because it modestly raises your blood pressure.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, it would be good to kind of define their effects, like how they're different. And so it includes LSD, psilocybin, which is in mushrooms, masculine, DMT.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the major psychedelics work by either acting as a pitcher, mimicking a pitcher or a catcher. So for example, the classic psychedelics, they fit into the same catcher's mit on the post-receptor, post-synaptic receptor side as serotonin itself. But they do a slightly different thing to the cell, to the neuron than serotonin does. There's a different signaling pathway after that initial activation. Something like MDMA. Works at the presynaptic side, the pitcher side. And basically it floods the synapse or the gap between the cells with a bunch of serotonin and the natural neurotransmitter. So it's like the pitcher in a baseball game all of a sudden just starts throwing balls every second.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As far as we know, all of the psychedelics of all the different classes we've talked about, their major activity is caused by receptor level events. So either Acting at the post receptor side of the synapse, so, in other words, neurotransmission operates by one neuron releasing neurotransmitter into a synapse, a gap between the two neurons, and then the other neuron receives. It has receptors that receives, and then there can be an activation caused by that. So it's like a picture and a catcher.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychedelic. And I think with that latter definition, it does fit that definition, particularly if one doesn't have a tolerance”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those all work by hitting a certain subtype of serotonin receptor, the serotonin 2A receptor. They act as agonists at that receptor. Other compounds like PCP, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine, they all are more broadly speaking called psychedelics, but they work by very different ways pharmacologically. And they have some different effects, including subjective effects, even though there's enough of an overlap in the subjective effects that people informally refer to them as psychedelic. And I think what that overlap is, you know, compared to, say, caffeine and cocaine and ambient, et cetera, other psychoactive drugs, is that they have strong effects in altering one's sense of reality and including the sense of self. And I should throw in there that cannabis, more historically like in the 70s, has been called a minor.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can categorize them by their chemical structure. So phenethylamines, tryptamines, ergolines, that is less of a meaningful way to classify them. I think their pharmacological activity, their receptor activity is the best way. Well, let me start even broader than that because there I'm talking about the classic psychedelics. So broadly speaking, when we say psychedelic That refers to for most people a broad number of compounds that work in different pharmacological ways. So it includes the so-called classic psychedelics. That includes psilocybin and psilosin, which are in mushrooms, LSD, dimethyltryptamine or DMT. It's an ayahuasca. People can smoke it too. Mescaline, which is in peyote and San Pedro, cactus.”
2020-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #145 – Matthew Johnson: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source