Summary
➡ Asher, the speaker, is a researcher who uses artificial intelligence to predict protein structures and develop drugs. He uses a program called Alphafold to predict how drugs will interact with proteins, which is crucial in treating diseases. He designs these drugs digitally and then outsources the testing to other researchers. Asher also discusses the idea that cures for diseases like cancer may already exist but are unknown or untested, though he personally doesn’t fully believe in this theory.
➡ The speaker encourages students to pursue their passions rather than just stable jobs. They also promote a comic about Stanley Kubrick and moon landings available at nasacomic.com. Additionally, they advertise durable propaganda packs and unique sticker sheets from paranoidamerican.com. Lastly, they express their thoughts and feelings through a rap, mentioning their struggles and dismissing their haters.
➡ The article discusses the use of MDMA for treating PTSD and depression, which was rejected by the FDA despite strong support from the Institute of Psychedelic Studies. The author shares his fascination with designing psychedelics and his personal experiences with them, including the profound realization that small molecules can alter human consciousness. He also discusses the commonalities in psychedelic experiences, suggesting they may be due to the way these substances interact with the brain’s neuroanatomy. The author remains open to spiritual discussions but currently views the effects of psychedelics as changes in neurochemistry rather than interactions with divine entities.
➡ Humans perceive reality in a similar way due to shared definitions and experiences. The brain produces a small amount of DMT, but not enough to cause a psychedelic trip. Some people may have chemical imbalances that make their normal state feel like a psychedelic trip, but there’s no known way to determine if someone is in a constant altered state of consciousness. The role of the pineal gland in psychedelic experiences is still unclear, and the concept of AI experiencing a psychedelic trip is still in its infancy.
➡ The text discusses the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in understanding and analyzing multiple variables, something humans struggle with. It suggests that AI could be used to make accurate predictions in complex fields, such as how a drug interacts with a protein. The text also touches on the concept of nootropics, drugs that can enhance cognitive ability, and the potential for certain compounds to improve memory and cognitive flexibility.
➡ The text discusses the potential future of treating neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Current treatments can only slow the progression of these diseases, but cannot reverse the damage. However, the speaker believes that future treatments may involve biological methods like stem cell therapy or gene editing, rather than small molecule therapy. They also discuss the possibility of using technology like neuralinks or nanobots to directly stimulate neurons, and the concept of “digital drugs” that could be used in virtual reality to induce experiences similar to taking real drugs.
➡ The text discusses the concept of ego death, where one loses awareness of their physical existence and becomes a free-floating consciousness. This state is often associated with high doses of psychedelics, but the speaker questions whether many who claim to have experienced it truly have. The speaker also discusses the idea of objective reality in psychedelic experiences, suggesting that if many people report similar experiences, it could be considered objective. Lastly, the speaker explores a theory about humans originally having sensory nerve endings throughout their skin, but dismisses it as unlikely.
➡ The text discusses a research project aimed at designing a drug to combat cancer. The drug works by attaching to two different sites on a protein in our cells that, when malfunctioning, can lead to cancer. The researchers have screened millions of molecules to find ones that fit both sites and are now in the process of testing the most promising ones. The text also touches on the unpredictability of new chemical entities and their potential effects on biology.
➡ The text discusses the belief that people can control their neurological processes, especially during stressful situations, through practices like meditation. It also explores the idea of inducing psychedelic states without drugs, a practice more common in Eastern cultures. The text further delves into the power of the mind in health matters, such as fighting off viruses or potentially manifesting diseases. Lastly, it touches on the introduction of psychedelics to the Western world and the potential for new psychedelic experiences.
➡ The speaker discusses their work in creating new psychedelic compounds, using artificial intelligence and known protein structures. They also work on diabetes projects and breast cancer research. Despite their work, they don’t identify as part of the pharmaceutical industry and value the freedom of academia to openly discuss their research. They believe in the importance of specialization in science, where each scientist contributes their unique expertise to a collective knowledge pool.
Transcript
And I just want to show you some of the cool kind of exclusive things you can get by backing this thing early. If you go to nasacomic.com, comma, it’ll automatically bring you to this Kickstarter page. And you can see bam. Hit our goal at the time of recording this 100%. So it’s definitely going to be made. So you’ll absolutely get a copy of this thing if you back it. If you’re listening to this in the future and this page isn’t here or brought you somewhere else, then likely you can just buy it right now so you don’t have to skip all this and just buy the damn thing.
But here’s a couple little previews of artwork. Here’s different variant covers that are for offered. This top left one, I actually have imprint. I got a couple of prototypes printed up just to make sure that it would look good. It looks great. Looks amazing. Full color gloss pages. It’s got a nice hefty weight to it because it’s 40 different pages of all unique art that you haven’t seen before. There’s also going to be a variant cover. There’s going to be a foil, hollow foil cover, and then there’s a little postcard print that anybody that gets a physical copy of the comic in any form, they’re going to end up getting this postcard size print here.
Here’s some different artwork samples from the three different artists that contributed to this book. And then here’s the important part, the rewards. So by backing this project, you’re going to get to pick some different kind of reward tier. The entry level one is this digital deluxe, which has the entire book in digital form. You’ll get a PDF. It’s also going to have an additional eight different pages that aren’t in any of the print versions just because they were maybe somewhere a little too spicy, maybe some were a slightly different art style. But I’m going to give all that the digital deluxe along with some wallpapers and some mp3 s and stuff.
If you want the print one that I was just holding up here, then the entry for that one is $15. With that, you’re going to get that little postcard print I mentioned. You’re going to get a trading card, you’re going to get a bookmark, and you’ll probably get some other stuff. Because I always throw in extra freebies and ask anyone that’s bought anything from paranoid american, I hook it up with lots of extras. If you want the variant cover, which is only available in this campaign, there’s a $19 tier for that. It also comes with an extra sticker.
If you want the holofoil, then that one is 29. These ones are going to be super limited. Like these won’t exist outside of this campaign for the next 30 days. So if you are listening to this in the future, sorry you missed out. You might be able to snag one in an upcoming campaign if there’s extras. But if you really want this hollow foil, and you should, you can get it right now for 29. And then we’ve got a couple other tiers after that. We’ve got a 55th anniversary special for $55 that has the main cover and the foil cover and a sticker sheet and some other goodies.
Here’s the best value. Basically, there’s a dollar 99 cosmic conspiracy tier, over 40% off of all the different things that are included. So this one’s going to come with the main cover, the variant cover, the hollow foil cover, three or four different sticker sheets. It’s going to come with sticks plus stickers. It has the trading card, a bookmark, it has a custom paranoid American. Room 237 keychain. And I think the highlight of this is it’s going to come with this custom embroidered Stanley Kubrick patch based on the Apollo Eleven design. And there’s a. You keep scrolling down, you can see all the other extra reward tiers.
All of the different items are going to be described in more detail. And I want to show you this patch right here, the three inch embroidered iron on patch. You can put it on your molex bag, you can put it on, you know, anything. Hats, backpacks. This is the first time we’ve ever done one of these custom patches. So I’m really excited about that. There’s also a custom fake moon landing playset that you can select as an add on when you go to check out. So speaking of, let’s say that you’re sold. You want to get a copy, you want to help support paranoid Americana.
If you haven’t used Kickstarter before, the easiest thing to do is you just click on this back, this project button on the page. It’s both at the very top of the screen and it’s at the top of the page. So you can click either one back, this project, and from here it’s going to be like a typical checkout. You’re going to select which of these different tiers you want. Again, I highly recommend this dollar 99 cosmic conspiracy combo. It’s going to have every single thing that the campaign has to offer that’s exclusive to this NASA book.
You click on that, you pick the country that you’re in, and then you just click on the pledge button. There’s one extra last step where it’s going to ask you if you want to do any add ons. If you want to throw in like a trading card pack or another keychain or anything else, you can get some huge discounts on the backlog of paranoid american comics. But let’s say you’re done with that. You click continue, and then finally, if you don’t already have a Kickstarter account, you’ll be prompted to make one. You can link it to Facebook.
The rest of the flow is just like any typical checkout online. So I really appreciate if you would take a look, please just back the comic back nasacomic.com. anyways, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Good evening, listeners, brave navigators of the enigmatic and the concealed. Have you ever felt the pull of the unanswered, the allure of the mysteries that shroud our existence? For more than a decade, a unique comic publisher has dared to dive into these mysteries, mysteries, unafraid of the secrets they might uncover. This audacious entity is paranoid American. Welcome to the mystifying universe of the paranoid american podcast.
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Today I’m super excited to talk again, but the first time that you’re gonna be seeing me talk to him with Asher brand, and he needs almost no introduction, but I’ll give him some university St. Joseph’s. He’s the assistant professor of biochemistry. He’s also been working on a whole bunch of cool AI generated protein sequences and psychedelics, and we’re going to get into a bunch of it. We met a while ago when I was still working on a book about a very controversial substance. I won’t even mention the name, just to avoid going on tangents, but you were able to let me get out my, like, layman’s version of things and kind of steer me right, and I had such a great time in it that we’re kind of going to do it again, but with a different set of topics.
So, first of all, welcome. Thank you for your time, Asher. And let people know if I fumbled any of your credentials or if there’s projects or websites or anything that you want people to go and check out, drop them now, and we’ll do it again at the very end. No, I mean, I think. I think the biggest. The biggest attribute. Attribute in my life, I don’t need to honestly plug anything. The biggest attribute in my life now is getting grant money for research projects at the university I work at. That’s where I’m. That’s where I’m trying to excel at, because I’ve.
I’ve realized I need money for research, right? You need money to buy materials. Need. You need money to buy a lot of the drugs. So I develop drugs, right? And in order to figure out if a drug works, you know, you have to purchase that drug and have it tested. And, of course, you need money for purchasing the drugs and having the drugs tested. So that’s. That’s kind of my, uh, that’s where my brain is very locked in right now, is grant money. And before I start asking a bunch of weird, esoteric and. And, like, probing questions, I want to just get my audience a very basic understanding of what it is exactly that you do.
And I know it’s a lot of things, but, like, what, what’s the highlight here? When I say using AI to generate, uh, drugs and cures and things? Like, what exactly are you doing? Let’s do a screen share here. Let’s do a screen share here. Let’s see, because I think that’ll help a lot. All right. Does it pop up? Is there, like, a protein structure? I can see, like a multicolor. There’s, like a pride month protein structure. Yeah, pride month protein structure. It’s not. Yeah, it’s funny that I never thought of it that way, but anyways, it just gives different.
So this is a. So the most recent. Well, I don’t know. This is one of the products I’m working on with a company called. With a company, maybe I won’t mention the company name, but anyways, this is a. So, Google, DeepMind released alphafold version three pretty recently, which basically is a program that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to predict protein structures. And the reason proteins are so interesting in biochemistry is they are the major target for basically any drug. A drug needs to bind to a protein to have a physiological function. So this collaboration, DeepMind put a bunch of structures that already had known three dimensional protein structures into a database, fed it to an AI algorithm, and it actually did a really good job of predicting the protein structure of a lot of different proteins.
For example, this is the serotonin two, a receptor, and let’s just grab a molecule. So let’s do that. Okay, so that’s the protein structure. And these are a bunch of theoretical, theoretically predicted molecules that would bind to and activate a serotonin two, a receptor. So the area that I work in, let me just make this a little bit bigger. It’s the sphere in the middle. That’s the drug that I just highlighted. And the protein is basically a bunch of amino acids that are put together that interact with that drug to hold it inside of a binding pocket.
So what I specialize or work in now is using computational tools like alphafold, which are AI predicted protein structures, and using that to figure out new chemical entities that bind to receptors. I’m very interested obvious psychedelics, but I also work on basically if there’s some sort of problem in the medical space where there’s a known protein target that causes some disease or some sort of misregulation, that protein. I specialize in trying to build drugs or three dimensional organic molecules that bind to that protein, because not a lot of people think about the fact that when you take organic chemistry, you draw drugs in two dimensions on a blackboard.
But a drug is really a three dimensional thing that’s interacting with a protein that’s another three dimensional thing. So it’s really this game in my brain of, you know, for layman’s terms, a key, a lock, and a key analogy. You know, where the lock is the protein, the key is the drug, and the key needs to fit into that lock or, say, correctly complementary to the shape in order for it to activate that protein. So it’s a lot of, I don’t know, just thinking about how very bizarre three dimensional shapes drugs fit into other bizarre three dimensional shapes, which are proteins.
And if you wanted to think about more of the actual three dimensional aspect, you know, this is really. This is called the van der Waal radii, and this is more accurate representation of the three dimensional shape of that small molecule or drug, which is also in the lower left hand corner over here. So the name of my game is, if there’s a protein with a structure, I can design drugs to hopefully bind to that protein. But because I work sort of in the computational space, I outsource a lot of my work to other researchers that can actually test my predictions.
We can buy the drugs, I can send them to their labs, and they can test them. And so when, like, the rubber actually meets the road there. Right. So you design a computational version of one of these drugs. The fact that you can create it digitally, does that mean unequivocally, like, that can be turned into a drug? Or is there ever a situation when you create something that’s, like, hypothetically real but can’t exist in the real world? Yeah, I mean, I think that happens in the ones that I designed. They’re all possible to build. But if you think about the total chemical space, basically, if you think about all of the different millions and billions and trillions of ways you could put together carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, halogens, fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and nitrogen, you can sort of come up with structures that theoretically exists.
In my program, a structure. But in all actuality, like an organic chemist, you couldn’t make that molecule. It’s not possible to actually make that molecule. I avoid that by using something called a real. Well, it’s called a real library. And it’s basically their databases online where you can download millions and millions of structures from. And a lot of these chemical structures are drugs that already exist on a shelf somewhere. You know, a lot of my stuff comes from either China. The drugs come from China. They can come from places in Europe, some of them can come from places in the US.
But basically, the cool idea that I always say to people is the next groundbreaking drug in psychedelic therapy. Or let’s say cancer, or let’s say, I don’t know, specifically, let’s say lung cancer, because that’s a product I’m working on. Or let’s say diabetes. It’s sitting on a shelf somewhere in the lab. But nobody realizes that it has that use case for this particular disease. That, to me, is an interesting philosophical idea. The drug is probably already made somewhere in a lab, but nobody knows that it actually has that mechanism of action to bind to that protein.
So to just jump right into some of the conspiratorial aspects of this, I gotta ask, because you’re doing, you know, cancer drug research. Yeah. How much credit do you give to this? Almost like a stereotypical trope now, but that, like, they found the cure, but that the cure wouldn’t make as much money as the things that treat the symptoms and therefore, like, the actual cure for fill in the blank cancer, diabetes, you know, so on, so on. And that those are like, intentionally being suppressed just to fill up profits. Does that a, does that sound like something that could rationally happen in the world we’re in now? And do you think that there’s any truth to it? I do.
I. Like, I’d say I’m skeptical. I don’t. It’s hard to say. Do I think there’s any truth to it? I wouldn’t say I buy that idea, to be totally blunt with you, I don’t buy the idea that the cure to cancer already exists and it’s sitting in a lab somewhere. Do I think it’s like, of course anything’s possible, right? You know, but I don’t buy the notion. I feel like if it were there were already a cure for a lot of cancers, somebody, it would be an academic that. It’d probably be an academic that would figure out the structure and the function and there would be, the publications would probably be in the literature for that compound or that cure.
So I guess I don’t truthfully buy that idea personally. But of course, like, anything’s possible, right? Yeah, I don’t know. You think about, like, I’m actually not a person that really. That takes a strong stance on a lot of ideas. I’d say I’m pretty neutral about a lot of things, only things that are, you know, scientifically, I’d say supported. I will support those ideas. Right. There’s like. So, for example, there’s. I don’t know if you know about this, but MDMA recently was almost. Was almost approved by the FDA, but it was actually, you probably read about this, but it was shut down by a bunch of panelists that represented the FDA because, you know, there were various reasons to happen, but there was so much push by the multidisciplinary Institute of Psychedelic Studies to get a MDMA approved for PTSD, and also, well, mainly PTSD and veterans coming back from war having post traumatic stress disorder and also depression.
But when all of the panelists and the scientific community that represented the FDA were presented with all of the, let’s say, facts, it was turned down, which was, I think, a huge shock for the psychedelic community. And speaking of psychedelics, and I have heard that, which is ironic because MDMA used to be like a gas station drug that anyone could get, and then it became illegal, and then they’re. Ironically, it’s like the government caused such a large issue with PTSD that, like, okay, maybe we’ll walk back. This thing that we also made illegal, this self referential thing.
But one of the things that surprised me a little bit the first time we talked was that you mentioned a large part of your fascination was designing these psychedelics in this digital realm, but yet you yourself don’t necessarily partake in psychedelics or have an interest in the subjective experience of taking them, which just blows my mind in a way, just because I would think that if you’re making psychedelics, you’re like, oh, I can’t wait to add a carbon atom to that one. That’ll really rock my world. And then you go and try it. So where, like, where do you derive your fascination with psychedelics without actually venturing into doing psychedelics? Well, if I’m being totally honest, I don’t mind talking about this.
A lot of people are. I think a lot of people in the psychedelics community, from what I’ve seen, are very, like, shy or worried about talking about their personal use. But I actually have been using psychedelics recently. Amazing compounds. Yeah, I’ve been using compounds recently, which has been fun. I mean, the start of this whole thing for me was age 19. My friend and I did lsd together. And I had the. What I got from the experience was that molecules, small molecules, have the ability to modulate human consciousness. And I thought it was so mind blowing that a small molecule can change your perception of reality.
And that stuck with me for basically forever. I’m 33 now. That happened when I was 19. I still go back to that story as a reminder of where this fascination come from. It came from that experience. And then recently I’ve been partaking in taking a research chemical called four hydroxymethyl ethyl tryptamine. It’s a derivative of siocin from psychedelic mushrooms. And I’ve been going biking, which is funny. I’ve been riding my, like, road bike, you know, 60, 70 miles with a friend on four h o met. I’m like a, you know, on a pretty, a pretty safe area.
It’s like a paved bike path that goes about 70 miles in each direction. But no, I think. I think a lot of. I think even though if you talk to a lot of the people in the community, especially, let’s say like CEO’s or people that are higher up in companies, they don’t really publicly want to talk about the fact that they’ve done psychedelics. But I mean, let’s be real. They have. That’s why they’re in this space. Anybody, I think anybody at some level who is in this space has had a, we’ll say, cathartic experience from personal use with a psychedelic.
And I guess on that line where you’re like, you felt like there was this molecule that could modulate human consciousness in a way. Do you put any spiritual sort of perspective into that? Do you think there’s like, you know, like this God being that you’re modulating, or do you think it’s all just electrons and neutrons and things bumping up against each other? Like, where are you at on that spectrum? I think I’m a person that still is of the notion that molecules regulating consciousness has 100% to do with how you are changing neurochemistry, not interacting with deity like beings.
But, you know, as people tend to get older, I find they get more spiritual, right? So I think I’m a person that is open to these discussions and open to spirituality, but it’s not a part of my life yet. I’m still very much in the physique. I’d say I’m still very much attached to the physical world in that way. Do you think that, I mean, you just mentioned entities, and that’s a very common claim, right? Like people will go and they’ll see these. So some of that I’ll speculate not on research, but a lot of those are kind of based on people seeing very similar entities or shapes or experiences that there’s enough commonality where people are like, yeah, we saw the same thing, or we saw the same person.
And I’ve looked into this a little bit, and at the very superficial level, there’s this concept of form constants where somebody sat down and they kind of made an index or an inventory of all the different visualization hallucinations that people see. And is where, like, you get the spider webs and the grids and the matrix patterns and all these things. So I guess to turn that into a question, in a way, are those pointing towards, like, objective, abstract archetypes that, like, actually exist? Or is this just showing, like, the limitation of our senses? Like, are the cones in our eyes are arranged a certain way, so of course we see certain patterns.
Do you think there’s something that goes beyond our senses, or is it all within, you know, our input output system? I mean, I saw start with this. It seems to be the case that people do report similar experiences, especially with DMT. Funny enough, if you, I’m sure you’ve read about DMT experiences, a lot of people report the very same geometric patterns. A lot of people report the same entities that you interact with, which Terrence McKenna would have called, would call a machine elf. So I think it’s. I don’t. I don’t actually know what to make of it, to be honest.
I think it’s probably some. I do think it’s probably a byproduct of how these drugs are interacting with the neuroanatomy in the brain. And, you know, let’s say, activating certain pathways within your brain. Or if you’re of the, you know, the Robin Carhart Harris notion that, you know, you have these default mode networks, and those default mode networks connect, you know, let’s say, parts of the brain to other parts of the brain. And then when you take a psychedelic, it sort of stops this default mode network of these connections from happening. And because these connections are, let’s say, more inhibited, they tend to make connections with parts of the brain that wouldn’t have happened before.
So I think. I think I’m of the notion that, you know, when you reduce the integrity of these default mode networks connecting brain regions to brain regions, and you sort of inhibit that ability, you do see sort of similar patterns within experiences because you are sort of causing the same thing to happen to large amounts of groups of people’s brains in a similar way. So I think the truth. Well, I don’t want to say truth because I don’t know. I’m obviously speculating on a work in sort of the MRI scan field of people that do this research.
But I think I’m off the notion that you probably see similar types of entities because you’re activating similar or deactivating similar parts of the brain in every person because they’re taking the same drug, is what I would imagine. Yeah, I am. Just to throw a quick analogy out there, one of my friends that came on here, and he would talk about ancient cultures, and one of the questions, it’s sort of a similar question where it’s like, why do all these seemingly completely unconnected cultures sometimes arrive with the same iconography or the same religious stories? And some of the answers like, well, there was this master culture that seeded them all, or that there’s some kind of akashic records where they’re using woo woo technology to transfer.
But another explanation that might be a little bit more rational in that regard is like, well, all of these cultures are operating with the same machinery. They all have the same kind of human brain and the same limitation pathways. And that goes to explain why there’s commonalities, because they’re all working with the same toolbox, right? Yeah, I mean, I would definitely agree with that. You know, if you think about sort of the, uh. If you think about. I always think I was. I was. When I teach, uh, right now I’m teaching a course in Gob. It’s called general organic and biochemistry.
And whenever we talk about the electromagnetic spectrum, we talk about how the sun emits all types of radiation, being uv light, being visible light being, let’s say, x rays, being gamma rays, being radio waves. All these types of things are emitted, but we only see the visible spectrum. Our brain is organized to only see a certain type of electromagnetic radiation because nobody sees gamma rays, nobody sees x rays, but we see visible light. So our brains are definitely all organized to experience a very similar, I’m going to say objective reality. We do see. We do. We definitely see an objective reality amongst humans.
And you could argue that, well, personal experiences are subjective, but I would argue that overall reality is an objective thing that we can agree on because we have agreed upon definitions of, like colors. We have agreed upon definitions of, I don’t know, distances. We have objective agreeances upon meaning of words. Right? So there is this overarching objective reality that we as humans for sure. Experience. I got so many questions, I’m trying to temper myself. Rick Straussman and his like, spirit molecule and the DMT research. Uh, I don’t know how accurate this. It’s a simplified claim, but one of the claims that comes out of people that cite his work often is that like at the moment of conception or whenever, you know, human consciousness actually starts, that there’s like an injection of DMT.
And that that’s one of the explanations of where human consciousness comes is some sort of like a DMT injection that then gets elucidated into like, your brain synthesized. DMT. Is any of that accurate at all? Does the human brain actually synthesize DMT at any point? If you. This is a funny topic. You know who has a very strong opinion about this? I don’t know if people know. David Nichols. David Nichols was one of the first psychedelic researchers to really take the risk as an academic and do psychedelic research. He spent most of his career at Purdue University in Indiana doing psychedelic research when he was both a graduate student, a PhD student, then had his own lab.
But he’s one of the pioneers and he has a very strong stance about this. His claim is that the amount of DMT that you need to smoke to trip that amount of DMT is so much greater than the amount of DMT that your brain synthesizes. Your brain does make DMT. It seems pretty factual that your brain makes DMT, but the problem is the amount of DMT that your brain makes is a really small amount. And that really small amount of DMT made by your brain is not enough to cause a trip if someone were to actually smoke DMT.
So, you know, of the, of being of the more scientific mind, I would. I would think that, you know, the whole. The spirit molecule thing, it makes sense when you, you. When you smoke exogenous DMT. Exogenous meaning DMT that you’ve purified, acquired, smoked, but not endogenous DMT. Not DMT that your brain actually synthesizes. There is a lot of. There is a lot of speculation about this, as you’re aware. You’re aware of the DMT being synthesized in the pineal gland acting like a third eye. But I think the scientific community, and especially Nichols, who’s well respected in the field, would say that, no, it’s not causing these altered states of consciousness when you are, let’s say sober is what I’ll say.
Are you aware of any interaction that the pineal gland has with psychedelics of any sort? I’m actually not. I haven’t. But I. But I haven’t actually dived into the topic too deep. I haven’t actually dived into it too deep. Like, is there. I guess the first question I would ask, and I don’t know, is, does the pineal gland have a high concentration of serotonin to a receptor? Because if it did, you’d assume that. Okay, well, if the pineal gland has serotonin, two, a receptor and psychedelics bind, there. There’s an obvious interaction between the pineal gland and psychedelics, but there could also be.
There could also be some indirect signaling that activates the receptor upon taking a psychedelic drug. And those. I actually don’t know, to be honest. So I’m not going to claim that I do. Yeah. But I don’t know. I’ve just got a whole bunch of unrelated questions. It’ll start to slowly form a picture. So another interesting topic that I feel like I’ve learned enough about to ask dumb questions, and that’s orthomolecular biology. And my understanding of this is Doctor Abram Hoffer was one of the pioneers. And one of the stories that I latched onto was that he was confronted with this child.
I’ll make up some date ranges and stuff. He finds his child. He’s like nine. And the dad comes home and he’s like, my kid just acts erratic. We don’t know what the problem is. And through a long course of just, like, prodding this kid and asking questions and observing, he comes to this conclusion that the kid has a weird adverse reaction to, I guess, folic acid. So when he eats an apple or he has. He has any sort of folic acid of any kind, he immediately starts having, like, psychedelic trips. It’s like he just does a massive bit of LSD.
And he comes around to that, giving him, I think, b three or niacin all of a sudden neutralizes this effect. And this. He starts building this concept of orthomolecular medicine and that people have weird, like, chemical deficiencies or other issues that are inherent with their genes or their biology or something happened and that their normal state might actually be just constantly tripping. Like their version of sober is them tripping. And that giving them extra niacin, for example, can neutralize that. The same way that if you give someone iron and they’re iron deficient, that that can sort of help them.
So that the reason I’m going down this line is that some people, it seems, might not even realize that they are in, like, an altered state of consciousness as their baseline. Does that sound, like, accurate? Like, is there any. Is there any sort of, like, a token? You know, in the movie inception, they’ve got this little token if, like, it stops spinning, that they know that they’re, you know, in reality or whatever? I. Is there a version of that that if someone were just, you know, on a psychedelic trip as their baseline constantly, that you could be like, hey, here’s how to identify whether or not you’re sober right now.
Is there anything that represents that? I don’t think. I mean, not that I know of. I think it’s a really. It’s a really interesting concept, that one where, you know, a person could baseline be experiencing a psychedelic trip. What this makes me think of is, have you ever seen those? And I’ve seen, like, YouTube clips of, like, people that. People that are schizophrenic. They have people that are schizophrenic. What I’m seeing now is they actually have ways of identifying if something is real or not real, which is interesting. One of the guys who I was watching, he.
His, like, dog will do. If another person is in the room, his dog will. He’s trained his dog to, like, do a very specific action, but if somebody is not in the room, the dog will not do that action. So his way of figuring out if he’s having a schizophrenic hallucination or something is real is by relying on his dog for that, which is interesting, but in terms of something that, like, a physical object or this or that, I don’t know of that, to be honest. Do you have a token of your own? Like, if you were, you know, going to do an experience and you’re like, hey, here’s my.
My escape shoe. If I, you know, say blue dolphin out loud, then I’ll, like, trick myself back into being sober. Do you have anything like that or any tips? I don’t. I don’t have one, to be honest. No. One of the ones that was really. So I’ve, like, been every, like, let’s say two months, I’ve been taking a psychedelic and going biking. And during the most recent trip, it was quite windy. Like, you know, it was. It was really sunny. I was really nice day, but it was kind of windy. And obviously, when it’s windy, they’ll be.
The trees start bending due to the wind. And one of the things I was really struggling with during this trip, well, not. It wasn’t really anything deep emotional, but it was this idea that, like, how do I know what is a sort of, things move when you take psychedelics, right? Things sort of breathe as you know, and things sort of move. So how do I know what’s moving due to the psychedelic, and how do I know what’s moving due to the wind? Right. So you’re sort of, you’re sort of trying to, like, figure out, okay, which part of this is the psychedelic and which part of this is the actual wind.
Blow in the trees. It was funny, it was interesting because it made me realize that, like, it’s hard. It would be hard to have a token. In that case. It’s really hard to have a token. Do you think that AI can have, like, a psychedelic trick? I know there is a concept of hallucination within machine learning. I don’t mean that type of hallucination, but I mean, like, could there be like a version of it? I don’t even know how I would explain it because we’re so, you know, we’re in the infant step still, I think. I mean, I don’t see.
I don’t see why you couldn’t put it into the code of the AI. Like, if you knew, if you knew what types of computer languaging programs caused sort of AI, sort of AI hallucinations. I don’t see why you couldn’t. I don’t think it’s super, that far out of a concept. I don’t know what types of things it would produce, but I think it’s a really interesting concept, right? To have an AI. My very crude understanding of AI so far, and I’ve gotten as far as, like, backpropagation. Like, I understand what the back propagation step is like, where you know where the answer is and you work yourself backwards.
So it’s sort of like how the stable diffusion models will start with a known image and then they’ll blur it, and then they’ll try and figure out, reverse engineer. Okay, how do I unblur this and get back to the thing I started on? And my, also, my crude understanding is that that same process of back propagation of comparing the thing you want with the thing that you’ve got applies to all fields. If you want to make a video, if you want to make an image, if you want to do text, if you want to do audio, all of these things follow the same path.
It just has to do with the input that you’re putting in and reward system that as it comes out. And in my mind, my monkey mind, it almost seems like a version of artificial synesthesia where synesthesia for us would be like I can feel a sound or I can taste the color. And that seems to be an over agitation of just having neurotransmitters that are going a little bit farther than they normally would because your system is saturated in ithood. So now all of a sudden you’re making these new, maybe temporary pathways, but that’s what the default system is for AI.
Like it’s always being synesthesia, like it’s always comparing weird things that we wouldn’t normally compare. Is any of that accurate? Yeah, I mean, I think, like, so, you know, the human brain, I feel like we are kind of archaic in a way where, you know, we’re pretty smart and we know how to build really cool ideas, but we’re not very good. If you think about, like, I see this a lot with students, we’re really good at comparing two variables, right? We’re really good at comparing. We’re really good at comparing, you know, an x input and a y input.
How does one variable affect another is what I’m trying to say, and what humans seem to be really bad at, and I’m not great at this, is when you, when you add more variables, we’re not very good at being able to understand what does it all mean? Even when you try and compare three variables and say, well, what does this mean? How do these all affect each other? We’re not very good at it. And then you think about, well, what is a variable? If you think about an xy graph, an Xy graph is really a two dimensional space.
It’s an x and a Y plane. A three dimensional graph is really a 3d space. It’s an x, a Y and a z. And how you get to these higher dimensions is you just add a 90 degree angle to the previous dimension. And you think about that as your three dimensional variables. Well, you can also have four dimensional variables. You can have five dimensional variables, you can have six. Once you get to these higher number of variables and trying to make comparative metrics. Humans are terrible at this, but AI systems, if you gave an AI system 5100, 200 inputs, it’s going to be much better at analyzing something useful from all those inputs than a human.
Right, right. And I guess in like the latest versions of like the LLMs that are coming out and being released for others to study, we’re talking about 70 billion parameters. So that’s like a 70 billion dimensional thing where I think the human brain, this isn’t a direct quote, but I’ve heard in numerous sources that the typical human brain can keep something like seven to 13 contemporaneous facts, like, without them getting all jumbled up. But once you give someone that 14th one, all of a sudden, like, they can’t rub their belly and, like, pat their head anymore.
It starts, like, breaking down and information seeps through. Does this indicate that human beings are just, like, inferior, like, 1950s mainframe type technology? And I guess one of the ways that I look at this is that people will constantly be like, wow, can you believe how realistic that AI looks? Or look how good the AI sounds? And the way that I hear is like, hey, can you believe how crappy our input sensors are? Like, we are so easily fooled that it only takes, what, twelve frames a second to convince us that something is moving, and that’s really where the end of it is.
Do you think we’re starting to see the limit of human sensory input? Definitely. I think you probably agree we’re not good at being able to handle multiple variables. We’re not good at this. It would be, you know, it’d be cool in my field if people knew how to do this. We talk about, you know, things like affinity, which is how tightly a drug binds to a protein, which is really just, you know, if you think about what that means, it means in this picture, it means sort of how well this drug is interacting with the amino acid residues around it.
And then, you know, people also talk about something called potency and efficacy, which is, after the drug binds to protein with a certain affinity, how much is it turning on or activating that receptor? But those two ideas, how tightly a drug binds to a receptor and the strength at which it’s activating that receptor, these ideas, you can’t really relate them. But if you had enough measurable variables, you probably could make very accurate predictions based on these variables. If you knew, let’s say, 50, 60, 70 parameters about how a drug is interacting with a protein, you might be able to actually tie together affinity and let’s say efficacy and let’s say potency altogether.
But people just are not good at this. We are limited in this way. And that’s where it seems like these newer AI technologies are going to take us to these higher levels where we can deduce how 50, 60, 70, 8100 a million variables is going to collectively affect a system. And in my case, a system is a protein, right? In my world, when we talk about limits, how realistic is the premise of the limitless drug? You know what I’m talking about the movie. And I know that that was maybe inspired by a real thing at a smaller level.
But if you were to take the actual concept of that movie, is that something that is in grasp of humankind? I think so. I don’t know how you would do it, but I think it is within the grasp of the human brain. Obviously, what’s talked about a lot in this space is nootropics, drugs that can enhance your cognitive ability. If you think about the very crude nootropics. Adderalls. Adderall is definitely one of them. I’ve never actually. I don’t have any experience with Adderall. Amphetamines, besides MDMA, which technically, structurally, I’d say isn’t amphetamine structurally. But people perform.
A lot of people perform better on standardized tests or certain tests on amphetamines. It’s obviously not good to abuse amphetamines and do this type of thing a lot, but it seems like for a short term thing, somebody. People do perform better. I’d argue that, like, amphetamines, in a way, are, like a nootropic. It is like, oh. It is sort of a method of unlocking this idea that you can have a higher level of focus. And because you have a higher degree of focus, you can achieve a task to a better degree than you would be sober.
What do you. Do you have any thoughts on, like, memory enhancing drugs? Like, people take, like, lion’s mane, or they’ll take alpha brain and they’ll claim that it can unlock photographic memory, or you can remember things quicker and make connections faster. Is there truth to some of those? I actually don’t know. I haven’t looked enough. I mean, I know, like, I know what they are and I know, like, you know, obviously, Paul stamets is probably, like, a big proponent of these compounds because he’s, like, the mushroom person. Right. So I don’t really know, to be honest, I don’t.
I haven’t read enough about it, but, yeah, I mean, like, I. You know, as you pointed out, a lot of these lions, may, lion’s mane and cordyceps mushrooms, are sold as compounds that can enhance your memory and enhance your, let’s say, cognitive ability or cognitive flexibility, for lack of better words. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead, finish your thought. But I think I was just going to say, like, I think I do subscribe to the idea that there are a compounds that can make you better at performing certain tasks. Right. And. Yeah. And even possible in neurodegeneration. Right.
Perfect segue. Because I wanted to ask, even if we don’t have them at this exact moment in 2024, but when it comes to, like, deterioration or, like, Alzheimer’s or dementia or one of these kind of conditions that right now it almost seems like a slow death sentence in a way, where you can, like, stop it, you can cauterize it, but you can’t, like, regrow it in a way. Is there a chance that, like, the work that you’re doing or the work into nootropics or any of these sort of, like, you know, cognizant drugs, is there a chance that it can reverse Alzheimer’s and, like, make you better than you started? What seems to be the consensus about why? I see if so, my dad has Parkinson’s.
He’s had it for probably close to ten years now. But you. You know, you can see, like, the cognitive decline with a disease like Parkinson’s. People, they, you know, he slows down, he does things slower. You. You eventually lose the ability to walk, and he’s taking l dopa for it. But what I’ve. What I’ve sort of realized from seeing that firsthand experience is a lot of the current medications for Parkinson’s and let’s say, Alzheimer’s, you can’t reverse any of this. There’s no reversal, but it slows the neurodegeneration of, let’s say, for Parkinson’s, you have a degeneration of dopaminergic neurons, a loss of dopaminergic neurons in the brain, which basically control movement.
From my understanding of science now, there aren’t compounds that can reverse any of these processes that have already happened. Once it’s gone, it seems to be gone. I don’t know that in the future that will hold true. Maybe there’ll be some really cool stem cell therapy where you’re injecting stem cells in somebody with perhaps those neurons that can either be regenerated or the stem cell contains the actual neuron itself, and somehow it gets into the brain. I don’t think the reversal process is going to come from small molecule therapy. I think it’ll come from something more biological, like, let’s say, stem cell therapy or gene editing therapy.
I think it’ll come from something of that nature, not small molecule. I don’t think it just makes me think of the back propagation thing with machine learning. You take an Alzheimer’s patient and you take a more cognitive person, and you just say, hey, AI, figure out how I adjust the weights and biases until I get back to this healthier state, I guess, right? No, definitely. And in that vein of technology and the next wave of science fiction, right now, is there a reality when nanobots or neuralinks can replace the need for actual drugs? And I don’t mean that the nanobot can take the precursors and generate them within your system.
I mean, literally, just like zapping a neuron directly without actually manufacturing a real chemical substance. Science fiction. Or is that possible? No, I think it’s possible. I think it’s going to be a thing like, as, as. As you’re aware, a person who’s very disruptive in this space in a good way is Elon Musk. Right. You know, love him or hate him, he’s. He’s having a huge effect on our species. He, you know, as you guys know, he put a neural link into somebody with. I think it was Ms. I think the person that Ms. If I’m.
If I’m. If I’m speaking correct, the person had multiple sclerosis. But I think you are going to see. I think it’s definitely possible. I think it’ll happen within our lifetime. Yeah. You put a neuralink and you sort of induce small amounts of electrical current down particular pathways in the brain that are. That have been destroyed by, let’s say, muscular dystrophy. And if you can sort of send an electrical current down that pathway that enables somebody to walk again. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s. It seems. It seems to be the case. Undoubtedly, that’s what’s going to affect us in the next, even pretty.
Pretty near future, I’d say. I think before, honestly, we’re. We’re long and gone. We’ll see that sort of stuff happening. We’re already seeing it. You know, it’s the very early stages of this. And I think, yeah, like I said, people like Elon Musk are super disruptive in a good way. In the space within your little clicks and your private little community of, like, you know, super nerd brainiacs that are into this stuff. Is there excitement or acknowledgement of the concept of, like, digital drugs where you get the neuralink and you just click, like, the DMP button, or you click the Silasin button? I’ve.
I’ve definitely had these discussions. I’ve definitely had these discussions with people. It’d be very interesting to try. There are now companies that claim you can do it with virtual reality. I haven’t tried one of these pro. I don’t know if you’ve tried one of these programs yet, but they claim you can do it inside of virtual reality. You can take one of these digital drugs to induce an experience. I have no experience with the epidemic, I think there’d be a lot of interest in it because the cool part is about taking a digital drug, unlike a real drug, is you can unplug yourself and get out of the experience if it is too frightening with a real psychedelic, you.
You cannot, you know, unless you. Unless you take something kind of harsh like thorazine or a serotonin to a antagonist. But who has, you know, in the moment of having a bad trip, you know, outside, who has the access to, oh, I have a serotonin two. A antagonist who has the ability to just inject it into their bloodstream, end the trip right away. Not very many people are going to want to, want to do that sort of thing, but taking in a clinical setting, yeah, you could have sort of those compounds on hand. Right. So what.
What do you think and where, I’m asking for speculation here because I don’t know if anyone’s been able to test this, but what do you think it does to the psychedelic experience and that, um, I guess the sense of, like, wonder, for lack of a better word, or like opening your mind up to more possibilities. If you could just like, okay, I’m done with this now. Just the same way as you’re playing a game and you’re just like, okay, I’m done. And you just turned it off and now you’re just back into the real world versus like, oh, no, I bought the ticket.
I have to take the ride. I mean, I know personally if that were the case, if I could just like, be done instantly, I would definitely experiment with way higher doses of psychedelics than I’m going to, you know, like, I’m. I’m not. I’ve never taken a high dose psychedelic. You know, the. The doses of four h o met that I’m taking are. I’d say they’re pretty in the realm of like a normal, typical trip. But I’m not really personally willing to venture into the higher realms, especially on a bicycle. Right. Especially while riding a bike or something.
But even probably at home, I’d be too scared to venture off into that world because one of the curiosity I have now is smoking five Meo DMT or DMT. But the problem is, like, you read all the trip reports of people that break through and it sounds. I don’t know. To me it sounds like it could easily be terrifying to be venturing off into that world. And if there’s no way to unplug at an instant notice, I don’t. I’m not going to say that I wouldn’t do it. I’m saying that I am, I would tread with, I tread with caution in terms of these compounds that I’m curious about, but I’m curious about that particular concept of a breakthrough experience.
And it’s popular in DMT. There’s a version, and again, it’s somewhat subjective. Well, I guess the question that I want to get to is a breakthrough, or is ego death objective? Is it an actual cliff that happens, or is ego death just something that you’re retrospectively adding onto your experience and being like, oh, yeah, that was definitely in ego death, or that was definitely a DMT breakthrough versus, it just made you feel a certain way? I don’t know. It’s a really good question because I’ve wondered about the same thing because you go on Reddit for, I go on Reddit.
I go on Arrow it a lot. And I read Trip Reports and a lot of people talk about, a lot of people will talk about a claim they’ve had, they’ve had ego death, and they explain sort of their experience and this and that. And to answer your question, I don’t know if there’s an, I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s an objective way to measure whether or not you’ve had an ego death. You know, what is like, what is the minimum threshold of dose that you need to take to have an ego death? It’s not really that.
It’d be like more. So what is the subjective experience that we could agree upon? That is an ego death. You know, and a lot of people describe it from my understand, I’ve never had one of these experiences. As, you know, you cease to exist. You are this sort of just, you’re just consciousness. You have no awareness that you are attached to a body. You have no awareness that you are even alive in this physical world that we’re speaking in right now. And I’d say that’s sort of my, like, maybe watered down understanding of ego death is ceasing to have an ego.
You don’t have any attachment to anything. You are just free consciousness floating around. I could see that being terrifying, right? I could see that being absolutely terrifying, for sure. But I, I think my hunch is that a lot of people who claim they’ve had ego death when you read these reports, I don’t, I don’t think that, I don’t think that they have, you know, it’s like to really, to really get so far out that you’ve had an ego death. I almost think you have to do something crazy. Like, you know, I’m sure you’ve heard of the thumbprint thing.
Have you heard of this LSD thing where you take your thumb and you press your thumb into liquid lsd and then you lick your thumb and you take the dose and it’s something like 20,000 hits of LSD and you’re never the same. I feel like you do have to venture, I’m not willing to ever do that in my life. But I think that you do have to go to that extreme to experience something like what people talk about as ego death. You know, this was a really rough concept for me to understand for the longest time, too, because it almost just felt like a humble flex.
Like, oh, yeah, I’m so good at taking psychedelics, or I’m so in tune that I had this ego death and, like, now I’m a higher consciousness person because of it. But when, back when it was legal, I would never suggest anyone do Salvia in a state where it’s currently illegal. But I just think, I mean, I must have done it hundreds and hundreds of times in the late nineties and there was. It feels objective to me just because, like, we were talking about before, where people have, like, the same experience and they think that they’re sharing the same objective thing, but it might just be a form constant.
It might just be us, like, bumping up into the limitations of the rods in our eyes or whatever it would be. But that type of ego death, it does seem that it’s almost like a binary option at some point, or it’s almost like trying to get into a club. Into the club. But then the bouncers, like, you know, this way into the general pop of the club, or here’s like the vip section, but it’s almost as if there’s a separate entity. And I know it’s a charged in this space, some sort of an entity that’s like, no, you’re not ready.
You’re not coming in here versus. Oh, yeah, just this way. And it’s. And in my mind, that’s what someone says, a DMT breakthrough, a salvia breakthrough or all that. But it’s like the bouncer let you into the club, and so many people that I’ve talked to you on various different substances all sort of explain this. This premise in various ways of, like, yeah, I went up to this, like, neutral ground. I went into the white room of the matrix, but I wasn’t allowed to go through that door, or I wasn’t ready, or I felt scared and I ran back away, and I kind of denied it versus, like, yeah, just absorb it.
Is there anything objective to that in your mind, or is that still just, like, you know, monkey brain playing tricks on us? I don’t know. I think if. I mean, I think if you read 100,000 trip reports and everybody reports something of that nature, I think it is objective. It’s like a science experiment. If I do the same science experiment a hundred thousand times and I get a very similar or same result, I think that is an objective reality. But I think objectives due to the neural pathway that you are sending, that. The state that you’re putting that person’s brain into, not objective.
Like, it’s. It’s a. It represents a true, accurate representation of reality. I think it represents a true, accurate representation of a person that took this dose of a drug. I think it’s true in that way, but not in terms of, like, we should extrapolate any deep meaning because you had that experience, if that makes sense. All right, venturing a little bit away from, like, the psychedelic, uh, stuff. This is another out there one. But it was an old book from, like, the 18 hundreds. I think it was like a rosicrucian text, but they were speculating that the original man had nerve endings throughout their skin and that the skin was, like, the main input sensory device for our entire existence, to the point that we could see through our skin, we could taste through our skin.
If you walked, like, right now, if you walk by a bonfire, you can feel the heat off of it. So your skin’s obviously sensing it. But there was almost this implication that the skin would, like, see it. But then once humans invented fire, it was such an all encompassing and overbearing sensation that kind of forced the human body or whatever, some sort of animal amalgamation to, like, okay, let’s go ahead and concentrate visual senses into these eyeball things, and let’s go ahead and create, like, an olfactory system. Just because it was no longer suitable to always be accepting input from all directions throughout the largest organ on your body.
Does that sound like it could have any objective truth in it at all? Does that sound rational? I’ve never heard it before, so I’d say it doesn’t sound rational. But I always point to the fact that, like, I am me, and I’ve only been around for 33 years. How do I know what happened 100,000 years ago? I have to trust somebody’s account of that, right? I have to trust that somebody is telling me accurate information about the past, right? So I always acknowledge that there’s. I think I always acknowledge that there’s room for possibility, but it does sound.
It does sound a little far fetched, though. But it sounds. It’s an interesting idea. It sounds. It sounds more like something that came from a science fiction novel than came from a true reality. Yeah. Yeah. But it is interesting, though. Yeah. Is there anything that you’ve come across in your schooling or research that sounded, like, so counter to what you believe, that you’re, like, this can’t possibly be real, but you were able to prove it through your studies? Does that make sense? One of the most. When I was. When I had switched major, whenever you went to college, I was studying, like, exercise science because I grew up, like, doing a lot of running and athletics, and I want to switch to chemistry.
I took general chemistry for the first time in college, and I remember learning about quantum mechanics in general chemistry, and that was. I was actually. I used to. A study for general chemistry when I took it in college, is I would rewrite all my lecture notes, you know, by hand, the ones that we had in class. And one night, I decided to, like to, you know, smoke weed out of a bong. And then I was, you know, studying after I was smoking, and then I was pretty intoxicated, and I was. Was talking. We were talking about quantum numbers and how electrons don’t travel in a linear motion.
They actually kind of teleport around in a process called quantum tunneling. And I remember studying for, you know, my exam and thinking that, wow, like, this seems so far. This seems like science fiction. This doesn’t seem real. Like, how is this possible that these little tiny subatomic particles are teleporting around the nucleus of an atom and not really traveling linear motion? That, for me, was a really. What you’re describing makes me think of that a lot, that story. And how electrons are quantized energy. They. They stay within certain specific areas, and they need sort of an energy input to either bump up to a higher energy orbital, or they, you know, get kicked down to a lower energy orbital, and they.
They emit light. And it explains a lot of these weird consoles. So I’d say quantum mechanics. I’d say, like, for me. Is that what you’re describing? For sure. Okay. And I want to. I want to get into some of your most recent research that’s maybe tangential to, like, the psychedelic and stuff. And. And I understand things in, like, very simplified analogies. So tell me how close I am to this analogy to, like, what you’re actually working on. So you sent me two papers. One of those papers was about linking ATP and alloc sites to achieve, like this, like binding using.
I’ll call the picture out here. Yeah. So as I read this over, and I had to do a lot of, like, what’s this word mean? And what’s this word mean? And slowly, the analogy that I kind of came up with, which will be very strained, but it’s almost as if, like if you, if you were looking at our cells as like little factories, and inside those factories, we got these little machines that we’ll consider as proteins, and that sometimes those little proteins aren’t working properly, and that youve got another little machine, this EGFR, and that sometimes this thing doesnt work properly and thats what could potentially lead to cancer cells.
And that your solution to this. And this is where the analogy might get a little bit off the rails, but that youre creating these little tools, inhibitors. And the inhibitors are, its almost like a little wrench that you can attach to the EGFR machine, and it kind of stops from causing trouble. But the problem is that this EGFR machine, it’s not just like there’s one screw on it, and you turn that one screw and it fixes it. So it’s like two different bolts. You’ve got the ATP site and you’ve got all the site. So it, my understanding of your research is that you’re almost trying to design like a super wrench that can connect to both of those sites at the same time and tweak them both at the same time.
Um, and it’s almost like that cumulative effect is greater than the sum of its parts. Like, if you can turn those two bolts just the right way, at the same time, using the same energy, then you fix cancer. Is that just how much of that do I have? Race, I think you did a really good job. Honestly. I thought that was a really good explanation. I think that did a really good explanation. Um, but the basic idea of that research is it’s a, it’s, it’s a collaborative project, because I do all computational stuff. And there’s a fellow that I got in contact with at the University of Buffalo.
His name is David Hepter is the fellow’s name. He does a lot of research with designing EGFR anti cancer drugs. And the idea is that I won’t talk about the various specifics, but there are two amino acid mutations that occur within EGFR that lead to, we’ll say, we’ll say cancer in general, but specifically, it’s a lung cancer and it’s breast cancer, depending on the mutation. Um, and he wants to sort of, with me, develop these. They’re called by topic ligands. So if you look at this picture that you can book closely, um, the one on the right is the ATP binding set.
This one in this sort of purple, uh, red, blue cyan color. This is where ATP normally binds. And the one in blue, uh, the one in blue spheres, is the allosteric. Allosteric site. And a lot of his protein structures have separate molecules bound to the ATP site. And they have separate molecules bound to the allosteric site. So our idea, or what I’m trying to, what I’ve done so far, is I’ve taken a library of 30 million molecules, and I’ve looked at how well those 30 million molecules fit into the 18 three binding site and how well those 30 billion molecules fit into the allosteric site over here.
And what I saw, we’ll get another picture. What I saw is this. When you do that, you get something interesting that happens in green is the allosteric site. In the cyan, sort of purple, pink, purple, whatever you want to call it, is the. I guess magenta is probably the red word for that color, is the ATP binding site. But you’ll notice right here in the middle, between those sites, there’s this ring. It’s the same ring in both structures. The ring is over here in this sort of magenta color. The ring over here is in this, as in this green color.
And because those rings are overlapping, it shows how you would actually link these two binding sites together. You basically put a benzene ring there. You basically build a drug that has the left half as this green region, the right half as this magenta region. And the middle of the drug would have the benzene ring. It would be able to link these two binding sites together. There are other, I mean, when you screen 30 million molecules, you end up with, like I ended up with 2000, that bound well to each site and had some kind of overlap.
Not all of them were benzene rings. Some of them were five membered rings. But the key point is a lot of the structures that linked the two sites together are some type of aromatic, some type of ring system in organic chemistry. So the next stage for us is to either figure out if you can buy these compounds, sort of, you take the right half, you take the left half, you put the linker together to make one large molecule, and you figure out if you can buy those molecules to test them, or you need to have an organic chemist synthesize them.
So that’s where we’re at now, is like, we’re figuring out. We’re figuring out how much of the, how many of those are available for purchase. We found 30. We found 35 or 40 of them to purchase. So we’re going to buy 35 or 40 of them, and then we’re going to test them and see if they work. So in trying to wrap my head around this concept that maybe they just already exist out there, is this a situation where some chinese factory is just like, hey, we figured out we can combine these things and get this new compound, and we made it, and we don’t know what it does, but we just put it on the shelf, and then they wait for the market to figure out if they need it, and then they’ve like, oh, hey, we’ve got it in stock already.
That’s. I think that’s, that’s pretty much exactly how it works. Although it’s not just chinese markets, you know, european vendors are doing this, Americans are doing this. People in South America are doing this because the whole, the whole, the whole purpose of organic chemistry, in a way, is to just make a bunch of molecules. I mean, well, in general, the role of an organic chemist is to make molecules. But I think one of the cool sports or things that organic chemistry, organic chemists do is they build a molecule just because it’s possible to build. They just build it because you can build it not because it has any utility, but just exploratory building.
And I think that that, like, that is such an undervalued idea. But I think in the scientific community, you think, well, why wouldn’t, why wouldn’t an organic chemist build a molecule that has utility? Well, if you build it just to build it, someday it will have utility. I think that idea is so undervalued. So undervalued. I mean, is it possible someone could make one of these countless chemicals just because they can? And it’s like they created, like, the ultimate, like, death drug, and just it existing in, like, the same room as you, it just kills you and it starts wiping out people, I guess, the, like.
Yeah. Are there safeguards against that kind of thing? Oh, I mean, are there safeguards against it in the terms of exploratory work? I’m gonna say no. Not because they’re evil and they want people to cease to exist, but because it’s a new chemical entity and nobody knows what it does. You know what I mean? It’s like you build something brand new, and you don’t know how that’s going to interact with biology is what I’ll say. But yeah, I could see where that would go ahead, Evan. I’ll say from your practice on that concept is do you have any tools that you can just look at the chemical compound and aside from being like, oh, that’s a benzene or, oh, that’s going to have, you know, bind to this receptor, can you just look at it and say, oh, that’s going to have this effect because of this structure? Or is it always kind of a crapshoot beyond like the most obvious? Some.
Some things are up. Some things are up. In terms of chemistry, there are some things that are obvious in terms of them being, let’s say, carcinogenic. But honestly, most things. No, I don’t think most things are. Um. Yeah, I mean a lot of, uh, a lot of weird. Most organic molecules, I would say no. It’s very hard to spot that. Like molecules that are made of carbons, hydrogens, oxygens, a lot of halogens, I would say. In nitrogens, I would say no. But when you get into the weird sort of the transition metal part of the periodic table, thats very hard to predict.
Thats very hard. So I wouldnt be able to look at a molecule that has a lot of transition metals, like lets say iron or mobilium, the transition part of the periodic table, and be able to predict that. But like in terms of organic molecules, most of them are probably not going to have an induced imminent death upon somebody. Right. Where are you at on the mind over matter philosophy and specifically? I’ll give two examples. One is like, there’s claims that certain yogis or buddhist monks can put themselves into essentially like a psychedelic state just through like sheer willpower and meditation.
And then like another version of that is that some people that are like tripping out really hard or they’re like going through some sort of an issue that if they can just like center themselves or just calm themselves, that it’ll like, make it all go away. Like, do you believe that that sort of control is possible over whatever neurological process is happening? I mean, I’d say. I’d say 100% definitely. I’d say. I’m very like. It’s hard for me to say, like, whether I believe one thing or not, but that sort of thing I definitely do believe.
You know, I think in a lot of the. It seems like there are definitely yogis and people who’ve practiced eastern philosophy, who grew up with, let’s say, Buddhism or Taoism who were really ingrained within that culture to be able to induce psychedelic states without drugs. But we in the western world, like, you know, we can’t really do that. Most people in the western world just cannot do that. So we use drugs to induce those sort of states of consciousness, for sure. You know, would you extrapolate that to, like, carcinogens and say, like, could a yogi use the.
His mental power to fix his egfr? That’s. That’s. I mean, that would be wild. I don’t know. That. That. I wouldn’t say I have a definitive answer, yes or no, because that is, like, that’s wild. I mean, who. You know, who, like, I’m sure, you know, like, wim Hof claims he can do this, right? Like, you know, you see the documentaries about Wim Hof who claims after use of cold therapy can literally, like, you know, there was. There’s a. There’s, like, a famous video of, like, you know, Wim Hof talking about, you know, they inject him with.
With him with some virus, and through the use. And a normal person’s gonna get sick from some sort of virus. But Wim Hof claims that, like, you know, through the use of meditation, cold therapy, he can fight off a virus, and he’s able to actually do this. So, based on that example, I’d say, yes, there is some truth to it. I don’t know how far you can extrapolate that idea, because, I don’t know, fighting off a. Fighting off a virus, because maybe your immune system is really good and you have some sort of, like, meditative technique that is definitely different from, like, you know, thinking really deep.
And, okay, I’m going to mutate this amino acid back to this amino acid, EGFR, so I don’t get cancer, that would. That sounds kind of far out to me, but I’m not going to say it’s not possible. I don’t know. It just sounds. It sounds far out, is what I’ll say, Evan. Well, how. How about the inverse of that, which is, for example, uh, people that are just constantly thinking, like, oh, I’m going to get cancer one day. I’m going to get one day. And that, like, that manifests cancer in a real way inside their body.
Do you think that there’s any validity to that perspective? I definitely would say I think there’s validity to manifesting negative things in your life. I don’t know about cancer, but for sure, it’s like, if every day you tell yourself, like, I’m depressed, I’m not going to work out. I’m not going to take care of myself. You probably. You probably will die sooner just because you’re not taking. Just because you’re manifesting the idea that you’re not taking care of yourself and you can’t change. So I think in that, like, those concrete examples. Yeah. You know, you can manifest certain things to happen.
Cancer? I don’t know. I don’t. I’m not going to say that. I know that you can manifest yourself to get cancer. Okay. I’ve got a quick little segment that I’m going to run through, and then we’ll start wrapping this up. But I’m going to play a ten second clip here. Hey, conspiracy buffs, I double dare you to take some PCP, the paranormal conspiracy probe. On your marks, get set and go. Okay, the whole premise here is I’m just going to mention a concept or a phrase, and I just want you to give me, like, a one to ten rating on how much validity you give that thing, and it’s going to be wide gambling.
All right, go ahead. Well, if I said the concept of, like, bigfoot, how much credit do you give Bigfoot on a scale from one to ten? I’m going to say, like, zero. Okay, how about flat earth theories? Also zero. How about hollow earth theories? Zero. How about the concept that a human being has stepped foot on the moon in the last hundred years? I’m going to say high probability. Nine and a half. Yeah, nine and a half. Ten. How about the conventional idea of dinosaurs, as we were learned in the nineties? And if you go to the Museum of Natural History and you see the big dinosaur skeleton, how real is that from one to ten? I mean, I think dinosaurs definitely walk the earth.
Probably ten. Yeah. How about fire breathing and flying dragons? At any point in history, I have a hard time differentiating fire breathing dragon from maybe dinosaur, I’d say pterodactyl. So I’ll say five for that one. How about demons? Like biblical demons? Zero. How about the greek aspect of a daemon, like an archetypal energy that has a self fulfilling operation. I don’t know a better way to describe that. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I’ll say three. And just because I don’t want to make assumptions. What about angels? Does angels get the same rating as demonstration? Yeah, I’m gonna give that one.
Like, a one. How about MkUltra mind control in, like, modern day, you know, pop culture, music, movies? Do you think that there’s, like, something implanted that could actually change people’s minds like a subliminal level implanted, not just like, you know, drink Coca Cola, but like, you know, go assassinated president. I’m gonna give that one pretty high, actually. Funny. I’ll say like seven or eight for that one. Only because I know you’re trying to keep this short, but MkUltra was a real project that existed where they tried to use LSD as mind control, and now it’s like alpha.
There’s an algorithm in terms of suggesting that you buy certain things and people do. It’s a little bit scary, right. And I guess I’ll conclude it on. We can. There’s. We can talk for like hours and hours and hours. We’ll save some for the next time. But I. I want to know what your interpretation is of, like, on the tail end of the MK Ultra. It seems that the psychedelic revolution, or at least the introduction of psychedelics to the western world, predominantly came through intelligence agencies. Eli Lilly through the CIA, Robert Gordon Wasson, who’s the one that went and brought like magic mushrooms and salvia divinerum into the states.
Even the concept of amanita mascaria, that kind of also came through a lot of Wasson’s research, which wouldn’t exist in the same way without the CIA kind of footing the bill for a lot of that. Do you think that there was an intentional disclosure of psychedelics by intelligence into the western world? Do you think, like, the cat just got out of the bag? Like, do you think it was orchestrated anyway? I don’t. I think cat gotta the bag. It wasn’t orchestrated. Yeah, I mean, whether. I know, and I think where you’re going with this is of course, you know, central intelligence agencies, they did spread awareness about psychedelics whether or not they wanted to.
Right. But they check onto the bag for sure. And I guess final. Is there any, like, crazy psychedelic on like, the horizon that you know about that we don’t, whether it’s artificially created or real, like some new experience that, you know, humans aren’t used to yet. New, new psychedelics? Yes. Like, I can say that, like, I’ve seen new psychedelics that you wouldn’t have seen or anybody else, but do they induce some brand new bizarre experience? No, they’re just new. They’re just new toolkits for use for possible avenues of therapeutics. But yes, in a lot of new structures and a lot of new compounds that aren’t yet publicly disclosed, do you think it’s possible that there is like a new subjective psychedelic experience that humans haven’t you know, experienced yet? Or do you think that like, we’ve already kind of got all the core components? Man, I.
For some reason I’m. For some reason, I’m going to say the notion that we’ve already got all the core components of what a psychedelic is that we’re not going to have this groundbreaking new psychedelic experience, but we’ll just modify the degree of visual. Visual distortions occurring or the visual. Or the visual field. The perceptual field. I’ll say that. Right. The synesthetic fields. Right. Okay, so. So maybe there might not be like a synesthesia version 2.0 that like blows us all out of the water, like the PS five version? I don’t. I mean, they’ll definitely be psychedelics that feel new and feel different.
But I think we figured out the core experience of what causes a psychedelic experience, which seems to be serotonin two a. So if you can just modify the types of three dimensional shapes that fit inside of a serotonin two a receptor, you can modify the perceptual experience that you would have in the subject and the subjective reality experience that you would have in the psychedelic. But I don’t think there’s going to be some new psychedelic that really just, wow, this is so vastly different. I don’t think so. So we were able to talk about the EfGr or EGFR.
Yeah, we were able to talk about the alpha folds, Google’s AI stuff. We talked about the novel psychedelics that you’re kind of creating in this. Is there anything that we didn’t get into that maybe we should have? None. I mean, the other stuff that I work on that we didn’t get into, not that it’s super important, is diabetes. I work on some diabetes projects and I’ve had. I have ten new compounds that I’m excited about that actually work to treat. Well, they work in animal models. It hasn’t been shown to work in humans yet, but they work in animal models for diabetes.
Um, and then I also work on a. One that’s about estrogen receptor, um, which is a. Which is a protein involved in breast cancer. That’s the other thing that we did touch upon. But you know, to be honest, um, it’s more or less the same thing. There’s a protein structure. Uh, I figure out three dimensional shapes or molecules that fit into that protein and use. I mainly actually, the main, I don’t mainly use artificial intelligence to do a lot of it. I use known protein structures that have been experimentally determined. The AI structures are only used when you don’t have our known protein structure.
Right. Can you self identify as being part of the pharmaceutical industry, what we do? I would say no. I don’t feel like. I don’t think I represent. I think it depends for me, I say no, but from somebody looking in on the outside, maybe judging me, they probably say, yes, you’d represent pharmaceuticals. But I don’t think I do. All right, we won’t. We will make you defend that position, because I. Yeah, it’s. You know, it’s. You see it. People see it how they want to see it. I see it how I want to see it. You know, I think a lot of people would.
Would denote me as a person that does work in that space. Well, you’re always welcome here, although I do have handler, so that’s probably why. What’s making me say that? Oh, I’m blanken. Good. I don’t ever. I don’t ever want to work for a company or something that’s like, oh, you signed an NDA. You can’t talk about research. You do like. I’m not about that. I like. I like what I do. I want to be able to talk about what I do without having those restrictions. That’s why I like academia. Academia? Academia. You have the openness to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
You work for a private pharmaceutical company. You sign an NDA, you can’t talk about it. Right. So I I don’t. I don’t like that. I don’t like that there’s a little bit of a potato, potato scenario, or, like, no to the Rockefeller pharmaceutical industry, but yes to the Rockefeller academic industry, right? Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know. I don’t want to. But I don’t want to be the person that, like, lies about the fact that I’ve taken psychedelics, and I I do currently use psychedelics once every two months and go ride my bike or whatever. I just.
It’s like. But you have to, like, dull down your personality because you’re trying to protect something. Maybe you’re trying to protect, not necessarily your ego, but your reputation. Right. You’re trying to protect your reputation as a person, to be seen as somebody who holds science in the highest degree. And maybe if you use these compounds, you’re not regarded in such a way. And I don’t like that. I just don’t like this. Right. Well, that. That blows my mind so much, because, I mean, from the outside looking in and making all the assumptions in the world, but it does seem that if you were.
Were to walk into a room of academics and, you know, like, chemist, and you were like, hey, you know, I do LSD and I do mushrooms, and I want to also be taken seriously, that would almost, like, come at odds with each other, at least previously. It almost seems like we’re getting into a place now where that’s not the case. Yeah. Joseph Priestley, I think, was one of the original found. Like, he found nitrous oxide and he just, like, went hard in the paint on that for, like, decades afterwards. Right. Like anyone would be willing to come.
He’s like, hey, come off nitrous with me for a few hours. So there very was like, this self exploratory acceptance among, like, early scientists, 18th century, and then sometime in the 19, 20th that got taken away and maybe we’re going back to it in the 21st. I think we’re. I. In my opinion, we’re getting away from it. I think. I think there’s more accept. I think there’s more acceptance towards. People are more tolerant of selfdevelop exploratory drug use. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe. Maybe I’m. Maybe among. That’s amongst my peers, is what I’ll say. Because amongst my peers, that is the growing consensus.
And a lot of my peers are academics and they. And they do use certain compounds, is what I’ll say. Not all of them, but some of them do. Right. Well, if. If I did have to go back through school, that’s the club that I’d want to join. So if there’s someone listening, that’s like, hey, that sounds interesting, and I want to get into that. And let’s say they’re early enough along that they can start taking those choices. Like, what. What’s the path to get on to do what you’re doing? I mean, for me, it’s like I’ve always.
I’ve always been so driven by that, like, experience. I had a 19 where I, you know, the LSD, the LSD experience where I realized that reality is modulated by consciousness. And I’ve always really followed that path. So for me, the. The logical approach was major in chemistry, understand molecules at the most basic level. And then from there, I built up sort of my knowledge in biochemistry. And then when I did my PhD, I did that in, I’ll say molecular pharmacology is what I’ll say my PhD was in. If I really think about the terminology and the things that were like the molecular level in which pharmacology functions.
So I think, like, in terms of my path, if I had to do it over, I probably actually would have not found a program in straight chemistry. I probably would have found a pharmacology program right away for undergraduate degree. I probably would have went there. And likewise for all my CIA handlers that are listening out there that do have the big, deep pockets to fund your research. Like, what’s. What’s your elevator pitch to send Asher some money to do more research? Um, I don’t actually. To be honest, I’m pretty okay. Like, I have enough. I apply for grants, and, you know, I’ll get those grants.
I don’t actually need. I don’t think I really need money from outside sources. Besides, like, the major funding agencies and the. We’ll say the US and Canada, like, the NIH and Health Canada. It doesn’t cost a lot for me to buy a lot of these molecules. You know, the last. The last big expense I had was $3,000 to buy a bunch of different molecules that I thought would bind to estrogen receptor. We bought 38 molecules. Eight of them worked really well, which is actually a pretty good turnout. So, for me, it’s actually not that expensive. It’s very affordable.
A lot of the expensive research comes. You know what it is? It’s clinical trials. Right? Like, there’s no way I could ever afford to put my drugs through clinical trials. I would beat millions of dollars. Takes so much time, you know, and that’s that. But I don’t deal with that stuff. Right. I deal more with the design aspect and sort of, like, if you think about what inspires me about science is we are individuals, but we, as. We as individuals in the academic community have very specific things that we are so good at. Right? And we sort of combine all of our knowledge into this collective consciousness.
To say that, okay, we, as scientists, we have this ability to specialize in one specific field and use our knowledge to push it to a higher level. So I specialize in my computational stuff, and then I pass all my research to somebody that specializes in the testing of these compounds. So we keep kind of, like, we specialize, and that’s how we get things done, and I think that’s really inspiring for me. Right. Yeah. Thank you again for your time, Asher. It’s always a pleasure talking to you. I like being able to throw my layman’s analogies at you, and you’re like.
You’re right on. You’ve got it. It makes me feel like I. Like I actually understand half of what your analogies your analogies are pretty good. I actually like them. I like their egfr one. A lot of. Yeah, yeah. All right. Is there anything else that you want to say before we get out of here? I guess. Okay, so I’ll say something that I say to a lot of my students. A lot of my. A lot of my students, I feel like they. Like, they try and chase practical jobs like nursing or being a pharmacist or maybe they’re chasing.
They’re chasing stability. They’re chasing a job that’s stable. But I think if you really chase passion, you’ll find something stable. Ready for a cosmic conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick, moon landings, and the CIA? Go visit nasacomic.com. nasacomic.com. Stanley Kubrick put us on comic.com. go visit nasacomic.com. go visit nasacomic.com. yeah, go visit nasacomic.com. nasacomic.com. CIA’s biggest, congest. Kubrick put us on. That’s why we’re singing this song about nasacomic.com. go visit nasacomic.com. go visit nasacomic.com. yeah, go visit nasacomic.com. never a straight answer is a 40 page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions. Yeah, go visit nasacomic.com.
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