[Key quotes] Episode 96: Matthew Johnson - The Psychedelic Renaissance

(From YouTube):

Funding Priorities and Scientific Consensus: "It's like if they put out a call for grants, it's like people fall in line. I mean, I've submitted stuff that I thought wasn't that promising, or at least that wasn't at the forefront of what I thought was most significant in terms of NIH grants, because it keeps you afloat."

— Matthew Johnson [00:08:14 → 00:08:33]

Psychedelic Therapy: "It's probably the reflection of that very altered perceptual change, that very different interaction with the world, and one's very perception of oneself and how one is in the world."

— Matthew Johnson [00:24:11 → 00:24:26]

Psychological Transformation in Therapy: "It's people having a different, taking a different perspective on themselves, trying out different models, different ways to view themselves and reality embarking on a different path forward."

— Matthew Johnson [00:25:22 → 00:25:37]

Psychotherapy and Vulnerability: "And it also sets up the potential for the abuses because it is such an intimate, there is such an ability to change somebody that we've really got to keep on a radar screen. We got to make sure clinicians are not developing sexual relationships with their clients, which is, that's a thing. It happens far too often, even in regular therapy and in all of these things, the practice of medicine and in psychotherapy. But it's going to be even more so here because of the vulnerability."

— Matthew Johnson [00:27:03 → 00:27:33]

Treating Depression with Psychedelics: "But then for, say, depression, there have now been a number of studies, but what is typically seen is that in the studies that have gone out this long, one to several months later, people will, you'll get 70 plus percent that are in remission, meaning their levels are low enough into the normal range of the scale, and you'll get even higher numbers of that, even higher numbers that are achieving what's called a significantly clinical, clinically significant reduction."

— Matthew Johnson [00:32:14 → 00:33:01]

UFO Phenomenon and Technological Mysteries: "I think if someone exposes themselves to the data, they will be perplexed, like there's something extraordinary going on. And frankly, I think the idea that some of this technology is somehow China has leapfrogged the western powers by like decades or centuries is, frankly, it's more difficult to pass Occam's razor than the idea that there's some type of, whether it be interstellar or maybe there's been another civilization here that we're not aware of, something truly extraordinary."

— Matthew Johnson [01:08:00 → 01:08:38]

Exploring Psychic Phenomena: "His point is that when people report these phenomenon in real life, at least the stories, whether you buy it or not, they tend to be things that are very person centric."

— Matthew Johnson [01:14:04 → 01:14:15]

Exploring Psychic Phenomena: "But this basic paradigm where you have a certain number of people, like four callers, and at given time points, you randomly select which one of these four callers is going to call the recipient, and they make a guess once the phone is ringing, who was calling before they pick up the phone."

— Matthew Johnson [01:15:13 → 01:15:32]

Pandemic Politics and Fear in Science: "And now we see evidence of kind of things that went on behind the scene with the pandemic, how things just became so politicized and how just even the idea that, well, this virus could have escaped from this lab that was working on viruses, including plans to potentially engineer viruses to have this capability in the spirit of getting ahead of the curve and building ways to potentially defeat that, the whole idea that that was so absurd that it showed up in this area, that it was just scientifically like mums the word."

— Matthew Johnson [01:21:58 → 01:22:40]

Revolutionary Origins of the American System: "This is a system of government that's adaptable and that had human rights at the very. Even though they were a complete contradiction, and even though some of those authors knew that, I mean, Jefferson knew it nonetheless, at least, even if they were hypocrites, some of, like, human rights were baked into the very beginning, and like the Bill of rights, where I guess the first Amendment near the very beginning."

— Matthew Johnson [01:30:59 → 01:31:24]