Sunday Chats 1

Kirk and Trevor chat about future episodes, research on driving, and using AI. Trevor is fascinated with the effects of CBD on the CB1 receptor and plans to interview Dr. Robert Laprairie, a researcher studying CBD's interactions with cannabinoid receptors. They also discuss studies on the effects of cannabis on driving, noting that while the science may not align with the law, it is still important to avoid driving under the influence. Additionally, the speaker shares their experience using AI to generate content, including an open letter to musician Neil Young, encouraging him to be interviewed on their podcast.

Kirk: We should we should talk about Cannabis. Yeah. So what have you been studying lately?

Trevor: Studying? I don't know so much about studying, but one of the ones we've got coming up, they were looking at how. And I won't claim to understand all this. You'll have to tune in with me to Doctor Robert Laprairie. How CBD affects the CB1 receptor. So now this is Trevor's understanding, so this is again listen to the episode coming up shortly. But so CB1 receptor is kind of the main thing that THC hooks on to and does its thing. So those of you haven't this is all alphabet soup. THC is the psychoactive thing or most simply that that's the thing that makes you high. So THC hits the CB1 receptor, does a bunch of things in different parts of the body. But the simplest thing is THC is the thing that makes you high. CBD, which probably everyone's heard of but might not necessarily know what it does. It's sort of the anti-inflammatory, quote unquote, more medicinal. You know, that's some people use THC medicinally, but the CBD is stuff that we think about more medicinally. It doesn't actually hook on to a cannabinoid receptor, which kind of blew my mind when I first thought of what I thought. Of course, it'll hook onto the two main cannabinoid receptors of CB1 and CB2, but there's probably some other ones. But CBD doesn't actually hook onto them the way you would normally think. The lock and key thing. It modulates them, and it probably affects a bunch of other receptors. You know, we had one guest say it affects, you know, up to 30 different receptors, but that's for another time. But in this study with Doctor Robert Laprairie, they they looked at how this is not unknown, but they, they sort of took really good pictures of it is my understanding. In my brain I picture CBD sort of hooking onto the side of the CB1 receptor, and that negative allosteric modulator changes the shape of the receptor a bit, to make, to change how THC fits into the CB1 receptor and thus change what the effects of THC in the body. So, way more complicated than you would have thought or I would have thought. And I'm excited to learn more when we talk to Doctor Laprairie. We talked to them hopefully in about a week and you hear them in sometime later after that.

Kirk: Now you're talking about CBD in the acid form or you're talking about CBD decarboxylized.

Trevor: Really good question. I'm assuming, again questions we'll ask Doctor Laprairie, but I'm assuming we are talking decarboxylated CBD. I am assuming most people most of the time when they're talking about THC hitting a receptor, or CBD hitting the receptor are talking about the the neutral form, the non-acidic form, but I don't know. And I am going to because Doctor Laprairie seems to, him and the teams he's been working on, seem to be looking at how especially CBD interacts with different receptors. I will definitely ask him if there is any difference he's aware of of how neutral versus acidic CBD does its thing.  CB1 and CB2 receptors are in different parts of the body and do different things, but I think the the smart people have always known that CBD has never really. It's not a cannabinoid. It sounds still makes my brain hurt a little bit. It's a cannabinoid that doesn't directly affect a connect cannabis like a CB1 CB2 receptor directly. It's it's an indirect modifier of it. So as usual, the farther we look at, the more weird it gets. Which is good. We we like weird, but it's it's not. Not nearly more. How about more subtle? It's more nuanced than we thought. And yeah, CBD doesn't seem to directly lock and key effect receptor with the way we normally think of things in the body hitting a receptor in a lock and key fashion.

Kirk: Do we still do we still believe that it's an anti-inflammatory effect?

Trevor: Yes, yes. So again my understanding so CB2 receptor is in the what's the word I'm looking for the the the system that looks after infections and stuff.

Kirk: The immune System.

Trevor: That's the one. So still affects the still affects the immune system. So when you activate it that makes sense because the immune system is what deals with inflammation.

Kirk: Right.

Trevor: So it still makes sense that the CB2 receptor affects immune functions including inflammation. And CBD still seems to affect inflammation. But by growing understanding and feel free smart people out there to correct me, I don't think it's because it directly stimulates CB2 receptor.

Kirk: So Doctor Robert Laprairie, we had him as a guest in S2E5, yeah, and that goes back to 2018. So that's how long ago we've talked to him. And it's good. He's good. He's from Saskatoon, is he not? University of Saskatchewan. So that would be a good one. Yeah. I've been I've been reading a lot. I get NORML magazine or NORML email pushed to me, and I can't tell you how many times.

Trevor: You better tell what what NORML is, it's not just, you getting, normal email, but say what NORML is.

Kirk: The Emails get pushed to me. That's National Organization for the Reform Marijuana Laws.  They've been around for quite a while, and but what I try to do is I read a fair bit of their studies, and then I try to get ahold of the academics that have done the study, and it leads me usually to a journal page. And the journal page will have the email of the professor from the college or university that they work at, and I'll send them an email. And I think I've got like seven emails out right now. Ones of the studies I'm looking at right now is impaired driving.  Its another Australian study and the study is "the acute facts of vaporized cannabis drivers hazards perceptions and risk taking behaviors in medicinal patients."  Those people that use cannabis as medicine they're driving seems to be unchanged. This is this study I so I went down deeper and looked at other studies. And yes, I think again intuitively, we know don't drive when you're high. And what we've learned is that those people that are too high to drive don't drive. Because some of the studies that we've read basically say that that we self, we self policed ourselves unlike people that use alcohol. But one of the studies that was done in 22 suggests that there is a real significant difference in and how young drivers drive under the influence of cannabis. Whereas they say in the study, there's not enough information to make a definitive understanding if cannabis affects older drivers, more mature drivers, people that have experienced driving. So so there's a real there's still there's still a rather intuitive, you know, don't drive under the influence of any alcohol or any drugs or anything, even Tylenol 3s. Right. Don't be driving. But yet what we're seeing is that people that use cannabis don't drive anyways. And those that do driving are aware of cannabis. Maybe their their skills haven't changed. So that's that's some stuff that I've been looking at.

Trevor: And that's very interesting. But again, just to, you know, hit the legal thing again, even if, you know, there is a magic study out there that proves that, you know, you are completely fine to drive while high and it doesn't exist and it does not exist and don't drive high. But even if there was, even if we find an interview with someone who definitively proves that, you know, it is perfectly fine to drive high, that's not with the law says the law and the science do not have to agree. So right now, if they find, can you know, THC in your system, even if you could pass up ten different, you know, sobriety road sobriety tests to touch your nose and walk the line, even if you pass all that, even if you have a mountain of scientific proof. If the law says thou shalt not drive with X amount of THC in your system, you still broke the law. So just interesting, interesting is all heck. But just careful.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah of course, of course. It's just a, it's just looking at the cannabis studies that are being done. Oh the web page.  What I've been having a lot of fun with is the AI. A friend of mine, geologist. She purchased the professional level of ChatGPT and she gave me access to the account. So I I've spent the last February basically playing with this, this, this, this powerful tool and then and then learned about the environmental impact of AI, which is horrifying. A simple search of AI

Trevor: More nuclear reactors.

Kirk: Oh, but it it it burns a lot of energy and it burns a lot of water to cool the computers. So I'm almost feeling like I, I live with a very small carbon footprint. But in February. So the results of my studies and playing on AI, it's like it's like Google on hormones, it's just or Google on it's just it's just it just. And if you ask it to cite, to cite the research, like asking a question. You said the research. It gives you back the research its cites. So what I did, Trevor, is I said, please visit Reefer Medness - The Podcast web page and give me a synopsis of it. And it's, you know, a minute later it came back. So my goal was to put Reefer Medness The Podcast into AI. So when other people start searching, cannabis we will come up. So that was that was one of my motivations.

Trevor: I've been playing with it to0. So one to make your your environmentally conscious roots feel a little better. Deep Seek which is sort of made kind of by accident by a Chinese firm is using way less power, which scares the hell out of, you know, the OpenAIs of the world. Because, you know, if they can do it with, you know, a 10th of the power that, you know, maybe OpenAI doesn't have a monopoly on it, but the other is, I weirdly went to a talk on pneumococcal vaccinations like pneumonia shots. And it was a really good talk and learn some more about pneumonia shots. But in the middle Doctor Peter Lynn had a spiel on AI. I'm not quite sure how the two of them went together it because he. But anyway. And the part that. So we're both enjoying it but hallucinations in AI. I still you know I still probably Google stuff more than I ask Claude or ask ChatGPT because, you know, I'd really like the the actual answer. Not, you know, three quarters of the ice in Antarctica is made up of penguin pee, which. But Doctor Lynn was showing how theoretically we think that open AI might have literally reached the end of the internet on its training. So now it's it's AI training AIs. And if they all have about a 2% hallucination rate, the hallucination can start going up exponentially. So I'm having a lot of fun with it too. But it's the hallucinations still scare me and I.

Kirk: Don't understand hallucination.

Trevor: Oh, so you know that just a ballpark number. About 2% of what I tells you is just wrong. Just, you know.

Kirk: 2% of it

Trevor: Yeah, but you can't tell, right? But AI says that with complete confidence, you know, like three quarters of the ice in Antarctica is made up of penguin pee. You go thats Cool. Completely not true. Didn't get it from anywhere. Just made it up and it's not a mistake. It's not a it's not a an error in in the programing. This is how AI works. It's it's a word prediction thing. You know, it predicts the next word based on the last word. And just because of that it will periodically just so Doctor Lynn was saying, you know, if it was a hematology based thing. You know, you say blood. The next thing it thinks is transfusion. But if you're in a thing trained on surgery blood the next thing might be a hemaocrit. So it's just predicting but once you start adding the hallucinations together they they can be real big real fast. Which again shouldn't stop you and I from playing with it. But just everybody out there in general remember that.

Kirk: Yeah.

Trevor: To 2% is hallucination rate, which is both weird and fascinating.

Kirk: It's the word hallucination that got me. My fun I was having, you know, I had to do a bunch of images things. So one thing you'll notice in the next couple weeks, I'm going to be posting different logos that AI had given us. Just for a lark. I've posted the two with the two serpents that look like cobras. The feedback I'm getting is that that just looks too aggressive. I posted that one up. But I also I also asked it because, you know, we've been trying to get some celebrities on board for a while, and I've been trying to get Neil Young to join us because I really believe Neil Young would be a really good interview for if we focused him on cannabis, because being a big fan of Neil, I know that cannabis has been a drug that he has often returned to, sort of like David Crosby did, but so I asked AI. I said, hey, give me a give me reasons why Neil Young should be interviewed on Reefer Medness The Podcast. So it reviewed Reefer MEdness the podcast, and I got this big, long list of reasons why Neil should be interviewed by us. So I said, well shit, why don't I use this? So I did just that. I posted on our blog page, and I posted this as an open letter to Neil Young written by AI. So so there's so you know, Neil, you should really come and join us because I think you should. And that's not Penguin pee. Right. That's that's honest to goodness.

Trevor: That's real.

Kirk: That's real.

Trevor: So and I was going to say and you know what having Neil Young do in our podcast I think is it's a good place. I need to wrap this up because from here I'm supposed to go ice fishing.

Kirk: All right. Man.

Trevor: So that was that was fun. I hope everybody else enjoyed listening to that as much as we enjoyed putting it together. And have a good Sunday, everybody.

Kirk: Cheers.

Trevor: Cheers.