Ep. 80 - The Johnny Appleseed of Microdosing, Paul Austin from The Third Wave

The question is of course, what is our ultimate goal? What are our objectives? What is it that we are trying to accomplish? And I think when you ask those questions, you then get a lot of clarity on what are the next steps to take. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. Welcome to episode 80 of Synchronicity. My guest this week is Paul Austin from a wonderful organization he founded called The Third Wave. And let's just call him the Johnny Appleseed of microdosing. This dude, Paul has gone the world over planting the idea and seeds of microdosing easy for me to say, microdosing being not only a gateway to exploring these substance in a therapeutic sense, but really opening the door for broader acceptance of psychedelics as tools and resources, really just an incredible noble thing he's doing and also just a very pleasant guy.

I've gotten to know him over the past few weeks. So let's talk about microdosing. If you don't know what this is, I'm sure many of you do, it's taking essentially a subthreshold amount of a psychoactive substance, typically psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, or LSD, the active ingredient in LSD. So basically, like a 10 microgram dose of LSD would be considered a microdose. So 150 micrograms would be a psychedelic dose. That is a real, you're going to have an experience there, but 10, you're not. So microdosing is a fascinating concept for me, and there's also many different opinions on it.

Some people say it doesn't do anything. Some people swear by it. There was an article written in The New York Times recently where a woman had essentially attributed to LSD microdosing to saving her marriage. So there's a wide range of opinions. So as any good podcaster would do, I did my research. And let me, you'll hear in this episode kind of my experience, but what I will say is this. After this episode, I continued the microdosing experiment, which is basically every four days. I'm taking a small amount. And if anyone is listening, thinks that this is illegal, I'm making it all up, right? Just purely for entertainment purposes.

But essentially, the second time I had an experience was different than the first one. You'll hear about my first one here was very, very positive, let's say. The second one, I was dealing with some heavy shit. I was dealing with some feelings of frustration, being upset, getting angry, but qualitatively what felt different when going through those kind of states of consciousness, I was able to think about them. I was able to move towards them, not away from them. I was able to deal with them, and I was also able to get over them and really kind of integrate what I was supposed to get out of feeling like that or what was coming up because of it.

And I don't want to say I never do that when I'm not under the influence of microdosing, but it certainly felt very easy. The ease in which I was able to slip into the flow state and also work out quote unquote negative states, it was dramatic, could be psychosomatic, could be totally in my mind, but it didn't feel that way. So it's a very interesting topic. I think it's an incredible area to be focused on as Paul is. I also want to do a shout out, you may notice it's a bonus episode of Synchronicity. The Psychedelics Conference put on by maps is going wrong right now in Oakland, if you're listening around the April 21 mark, April 22, the Psychedelics Conference is going on.

That speaks volumes to where we are as a country and a global community about starting to investigate some of these tools, not just because we want to get fucked up and have a good time, not that they're mutually exclusive, but really this is many of these substances and plants really help people and that's what it's about. That's why so many people are interested in it. It's not some passing fancy. It's meant to help people. And Paul and I get into that a little bit in this episode. So I'm not going to ramble on too much anymore, long enough intro. Let's get to Paul, enjoy this bonus episode of Synchronicity or a reminder if you want to rate and review, that helps the show.

I think I'm going to launch a Patreon soon. I've been, many people have recommended I do this. I've been reluctant to do it, but I think I'm going to do that. Come up with some bonus goodies for fans and listeners of the show, so stay tuned for that. And without further ado, here is Paul Austin. We all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people, have had prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences as is all of these sort of things. These are experiences which cultures deny. Cultures put in place, I'm sure you've heard this word, a paradigm, and then what fits within cultural paradigm is an accentuated stress, and what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against, and we live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism.

We have so much to talk about, so much to talk about, because let's just get started. You ready? Let's start. I'm ready. We're ready. So I wanted to start with the personal experience. So I, let's say I have a friend, and this friend made a microdose solution eight months ago or so around that time, right? I'm getting asked for drug advice, the very first question, I don't know that it will be so much advice. It'll be your perception on my experience. So eight months, yeah, this, this, it was an LSD microdose solution, you know, a thousand micrograms. I, maybe some friend diluted, who knows, someone who isn't me, someone who isn't me.

Let's just go with that. Whenever I say I assume I'm referring to someone who isn't me made a microdose solution. Yes. So, so basically, mid microdose solution had a calibrated, so one milliliter of water is 10 micrograms of LSD. So the pretty standard dose can modulate it had a calibrated, calibrated dropper in water. Good to go. So hadn't taken it for a really long time, was waiting for an auspicious period felt I would know when that was, and it happened to be yesterday. So we're recording this one on the 12th. So it's the 11th, which happened to be a very interesting day. As I found out, I launched my creativity course, which I've been working on for a month.

So it was kind of like an exhale on that. It happened to be Hanuman Jayanti, which I didn't know was happening, but I do a, a chant every day, a 40 stands a chant, 40 verse chant to a monkey god, which I picked up in 2013, called Hanuman, you know, it's like the embodiment of Christ and not that type of energy, selfless service, and somehow long story won't get into that now, but I do that. So having to take this microdose solution then, and had probably, and was also just an incredibly beautiful day. It's been really cold here. And it was like 80 something degrees, like the flowers right at spring.

Oh, this is nuts. Incredible. So it was like a really nice day. But what I noticed, um, took a 10 microgram dose. I didn't notice any, um, perceptual effects, like something, no, no visuals, no, uh, intense come up or, uh, other type of experience, but everything seemed to be a little bit smoother. Everything seemed to be a little bit easier to deal with. I seem to be a little bit, seemed like I could slip into this gratitude realm, which I'm very accustomed to both on and off psychoactive substances. It's not something that I rely on in any way, but it seemed effortless. And as a daily cannabis consumer, um, as I worked that into my regular daily routine, also seemed to be a profound and tremendous effect to the point where I was working on a music, I work every day, I put something together in like 20 minutes that reminded me in past days where it was effortless, like, and it was blowing my mind that it was this effortless.

And I wasn't, didn't want to be too quick to draw conclusions over one anecdotal sense, but I couldn't shake it. Uh, you know, I know the feeling of trying to be like, I don't want the, you know, like let me see if I can get this feeling to go away. Maybe I'm just, you know, psychosymatically creating this perception because I knew I did something that had these effects and it's been bandied about as so profound. But, I mean, I, I can say safely after one test experience, it was pervasive and I have micro dose psilocybin before in various forms, point one to like point three to point four and micro, Michael Donovan, who's someone on my podcast network, gave me one at this mindwave event.

We did. He had a micro dose LSD thing out in LA that shit wasn't a micro dose, man. That shit was like tripping. Like it was probably like, I don't think it was like a full dose, but I felt the come up like I felt like I was in this other world, whereas with this LSD one, it was so, it was such a, I kept saying to my wife, it was like, you got to, you got to try this. Like this is not like doing drugs at all, but I really just feel like I'm slipping into, uh, you know, like really flow states and like I was, I found myself like dealing with situations where I'd normally get angry and I'm, that's my big issue, anger.

Um, and I just wasn't and I could see it and I just, it was nuts. So I start here because you are, you found it something called the third wave, which is the third wave of psychedelics. You are basically the Johnny Apple seed of micro dosing. That's, that's definitely your moniker at this point. You're going all over the world talking about this stuff. You're, you're meeting people who are plugged into the psychedelic community. I would love to hear, and you can unpack this at your, however you want, how you got into this role, um, how you got into, you know, your interest developed in this and also your personal experiences.

And I, maybe we could start with where I left off, which is, does this, my personal experience on the first day of a LSE micro dose, does that hit any other common elements? I don't read about this stuff a ton. I probably come across your stuff, fad, I mean, you know, the people who are out there in the world talking about this stuff, but I'm not like super plugged in. So I don't like actively read about it. It's not like if I before about to do a big psychoactive substance like DMT or something which I haven't done. I'll read about it nonstop. I've done LSD. I've done psilocybin. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts about, you know, LSE micro doses in particular, and then your, your history.

We'll unpack it from there. Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say you're, you're a phenomenal speaker and I was a phenomenal introduction. Sorry. I was, I was mesmerized, it was, it was great. Um, yeah. So that, I mean, so that's kind of something I talk about in the seminars that I've been doing. Right. So I did a seminar this past Sunday in Berlin, we had around 250 people wanting Copenhagen the day before about the same amount. And what I've been starting these seminars with is kind of my story about, okay, how did I get into this? Right. Right. Like how the hell did I end up speaking about a very illegal drug and very public ways, uh, including a website that is getting a lot of attention from people, you know, which is, which is, which is interesting.

Uh, and I think for me, it starts with, you know, many people who are interested in psychedelics who have had an psychedelic experience, uh, they've been impacted in a very, uh, dramatic fashion by them. Not everyone. Right. Um, there are something like, I don't know, 30 million people in the States who have done psychedelics. In fact, I have a lot of close friends of mine from college who we would go out a little and we would trip on trims in the woods, like once or twice a year, take some LSD and then don't really do it anymore. Uh, they're doing the nine to five, the more traditional thing, you know, psychedelics was something they did in the past, but not doing that, which is fine.

No, no problem. But those, you know, there are a significant number who have these mystical experiences with, with psychedelics. And those are so influential then an impactful in what they do that when I even reach out to people to work and collaborate about different things, you know, everyone across the board. Money is not on the table. It is. Right, of course. People have to be compensated, but you, you know, that, that value in terms of people feel a, a sort of, um, connection to this. And so that, and that was the case with me. I did it when I was 19 for the first time. I took some LSD on an early May day.

It was about 75 and sunny and from West Michigan. So there are sand dunes all up and down like Michigan. I was out there with a few friends and it was just this amazing experience of bliss. In fact, it was so good that I went to Tanzania a couple of weeks later and I took some LSD with me on that trip because I was so mesmerized by when I had the substance, what it did to my subjective reality. And I was, remember, I was out in Safari in the Nagora, Gora Crater, which is one of the better known Safari places in Tanzania. And people have been exploring it for many years. In fact, it's too habituated now by humans.

So when you drive around, you can be within about 10 feet of 600 pound lions who are just kind of rollicking next to you, you know, looking at them all, you know, and they're 600 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I just remember Troopian on LSD and being like, wow, like lions, wildebeest giraffes. And what I saw is I experienced this sense of flow, this sense of energy, circulation from the sun to the grass to the wildebeest whose body is made to digest that energy to the lion, whose, you know, jaws and stomach is made to kill the wildebeest like this symbiotic relationship with all of life. And I think for me, that just kind of made me like, oh, you know, this is something we're paying attention to.

And from that point forward, then, I just remember me specifically, I went on this crusade of almost like personal development. And red is much a, this was when I was 19 or 20, red as much as I could. And you know, minimalism and obviously we crossed it for some time and like a really strict diet, like all these, yeah, because it made me want to get it back in touch with that energy, I think, to some degree. And so as part of that decision, I made the decision to not pursue a more traditional job, like after I graduated, I studied at a liberal arts school, I had a, I studied history in business, it was like, you know, very basic, nothing specific.

And I was like, well, fuck it, you know, I'll just go to Turkey, I'm going to Turkey for a year and I'll teach English. So I went there and I taught English, really, really liked traveling. And I wanted to be able to travel more. So I was like, I'm going to start an online business, I'm going to start an online business, I can work remotely, I'll make enough money that I can live in Thailand, or I can live in, you know, Budapest, or I can live in some of these other places. So I lived in Thailand and I lived in Budapest. And when I was in Budapest, I was there with a couple of friends. And this first business was doing okay.

And we were microdosing, of course, in Budapest, walking around and we came upon this idea that there seems to be a resurgence in interest in psychedelics. And we all understood a lot of the research that had been done, but like something was missing. There's a lot of science, a lot of research, but something to humanize the psychedelic experience was missing in a public way. And we were like, well, let's start a website. And we called it the third wave of psychedelics, basically. And when I saw that, when I saw my objectives in creating that, when I saw why I wanted to do it, when I saw what I had in mind in terms of what I wanted to accomplish, which in the end goal is to make these substances available to whoever wants to use them, not even just people who have medical issues.

I think that would be the first PTSD or depression, but everyone, kind of like everyone drives a car. Cars are much more dangerous than psychedelics. You get a driver's license for that reason, we can, you know, we can go through some sort, you know, people can learn how to use these things. And so when I saw that, and that's a very far reaching goal, and that's a goal that a lot of people kind of go like, yeah, like that's ever going to happen. And I go, I think it will. And I saw microdosing as being that key. So that's why I focused on microdosing because microdosing is seen by an external audience, someone who hasn't been psychedelics before as being very low risk, and as then, as well as being very low risk, having all these benefits, which you experience, you know, this sense of patience, this sense of mindfulness, this sense of presence, the ability to drop into flow much easier, like from a creative perspective, you know, we have some ideas about why this is going on when we take even lower doses.

What it's doing is it's activating the serotonin receptor in such a way that it's basically signaling the brain to communicate in ways. And they have research that shows this with serotonin activation on what they call cognitive flexibility, a friend of mine who has a neuroscience program, neuroscience institute in Lisbon. He's American. He has spoken at boom before, I'm going to get him on my podcast, and they just did this research. So I'm like, so I'm starting to kind of pull and tie these things together. And yeah, the sense of creativity, the sense of flow, the sense it's just that's why I got into it as well.

Yes, yes. I started microdosing was for that reason. So let me ask you this, because you started also with this kind of transcendental mystical experience that some of us have experienced, many of us on psychedelics. I started my psychedelic journey for lack of a better term, started when I was 15. And I was at a five week music program for Berkeley College of Music where I eventually attended and graduated from, but I was 15. It was a summer thing. It was like a five week thing. And one of the people I met there brought some sunshine acid with him from San Francisco. And I had, I was, to be clear, for some context, my 10th grade health project was about LSD.

Like there's still a website that exists back then. And from like 1999, Miss Lizzarazzo's health class, where I'm talking about LC, I was avidly interested. I understood the impact it had had on society and culture and just some of the descriptions of what people were going through. So I, I was interested and I wasn't like, this, whoa, what's this? I took it and obviously my mind was just blown. And at 15, you're still putting the building blocks of the world together in terms of your place and your ego structure and all this other stuff. So I, I always describe it as is like, I was pulling my head out of my ass for the first time and I was actually finally having some awareness of what was going on.

So how I wonder this, my question here is basically, there are the physiologically backed up things that we can see now as studies are getting more advanced and more allowed. Most importantly, we're seeing how different parts of the brain are lighting up and how they function together and how neurotransmitters in particular are linking up in ways that, you know, are not typically done by the brain and how this happens. This mystical component is what fascinates me because whether it's been psilocybin for me in LSD, those are the two psychoactive sub psychedelic substances that have dramatically impacted my consciousness in various ways.

And I think they fuse together. But what is that mystical component what's going on? So as a story for this, when Rambas famously gave his guru, who was also my guru, so I had chant the Honda Munchalisa, named Crowley Baba, he, he, you know, famously said to Rambas after he had gone through this whole rigmarole pretending that he was tripping and actually had no impact on his consciousness, he said, listen, this was a medicine that was used by the yogis thousands of years ago, and they took it in high altitude, high altitudes in cool climates. But people don't know how to use this particular thing anymore.

And you know, this is a very limited context back in the sixties, the second wave of psychedelics, you know, this was really the popularization. So my question is, is from your subjective standpoint and having now somewhat of a clinical sense, not in like a medical way, but you're meeting a lot of people who are microdosing you're meeting a lot of people who have had experience with psychedelics, what do you think this mechanism, what's going on with the more mystical side of psychedelics and we can do, we can start, we can approach each one, because I do think there are qualitative differences between all of them.

I've only done two, but I'm, I know DMT and ayahuasca from people who have done them. There's hugely different, but maybe let's start with LSD, since that's fresh in my mind. They're like, what are the components of that mystical experience or like just to clarify your question? I am asking you to dig deep in your own subjective experience. And what do you think? Is it God? Is it some unified consciousness communicating this? Is this Jesus consciousness? Is this Christ consciousness? My impression on mushrooms has been that Christ consciousness is a huge component of mushrooms. It seems to happen, at least in my subjective experience.

I've been tapped into some serious, unconditional love vibes that really just line up perfectly with what Jesus used to teach. And I'm Jewish. I don't, I didn't grow up with Jesus's teachings, but when you start reading some of the things and piece them together and just really tap into it, and it feels like a visceral feeling, I've had that happen on mushrooms and there's the whole Jesus is a mushroom thing, which we don't have to get into, but are we going to go that, yeah, we're not going to go that deep yet. We're going that deep yet, but from LSTME, from your subjective experience on, let's say heavy doses, we'll go back to microdosing because this is a fascinating thing that I now have some real firsthand experience with, but from like a heavy heroic dose level, right?

If we're blasting off with the nine grams, 10 grams of mushrooms or, you know, 500 700 plus micrograms of LSD, we're getting launched into other realms of consciousness, it seems. In your experience, what, what do you think is going on there? And I don't, I'm not pinning you down, just to be clear, like this is a thought experiment, like this is, we're delving into these experiences that we've had, but yeah, sure, sure, sure. I'll give you a few different ways that looking at it. I think one of the first ways to look at it is look at it as the way that Aldous Huxley has written about it, specifically in the doors of perception, where when we take psychedelics, there, you know, there is this, this massive universe of consciousness that surround us.

That, that is us, that is everything, that is oneness, that is the source and from the source blah, blah, blah, blah. But there is this sense of a universal consciousness. And we have, you know, our brains, our minds are basically a filter for that. Exactly. Yes. As a way to limit it. And what they've now shown with research, actual research and neural imaging studies, they've shown that psychedelics do not increase brain activity, but in fact, they dampen certain active, you know, areas of brain activity, which allow these hemispheres to communicate much in a different way, basically creating new neural pathways.

So I think that's, that's part of it is when we take psychedelics, we open up this almost new window in our mind to what was previously unknowable or unreachable, at least for the vast majority of people. Right. I think there's, you know, it's like about 1% of people on, you know, in the world have had some sort of initiatory, mystical experience without any sort of drug inducement, right? And that, that number is surprisingly similar to schizophrenics. There's about 1% of schizophrenics. It's surprisingly similar to the shamans that used to work with. So I think there's some sort of relationship there.

However, we know with psychedelics, we know with visionary plant substances that they basically kind of initiate that in a much more, you know, replicable, like manageable. If we, if we set up this environment, we create this container, we give you this amount of a substance. We know we can have this. And some people say, ah, you know, that's too quantitative for me. That's, that's, that's kind of missing the point. And I think from my perspective, it's more like agreed, but if we can help people recognize these benefits that have depression, that have PTSD, ah, if we can make that very clear for them, more people will be willing to do these things.

And if we accept, if we accept that they are in the vast majority of cases, healing substances, then the more the merrier, when you play the game, so to speak, you play within the confines and the context, right, if you have to play from within to change without. And I think there are, this is something that I, I, um, frustrates me about the psychedelic space. There are a lot of idealists. There are a lot of anti capitalists. There are a lot of, um, people who I don't think are practical or pragmatic about, okay, we have, yes, we do want to make psychedelics available. Absolutely. Yes. We want to enter a post-capitalist world.

Absolutely. Universal basic income. But we're not there yet. Right. And we need to do things to make that happen and, and getting on a, you know, soapbox about these idealist concepts is counterproductive to changing things for real so that people can suffer less and, and have healing, you know, so this is the age old debate between recognizing that a system or a paradigm maybe is broken or not functioning or isn't long term sustainable. Right. Like we recognize that fossil fuels right now, um, are not good for the long term success of the planet. That said, we can't, I live in a place where if I'd just stop using oil, my house isn't heated, my cars, I can't go get groceries.

So like we have to have a bridge from these things. It's not that we're going to double down on making money as the primary impetus behind anything. But I know this as well as anyone from working with nonprofits in primarily in the spiritual sector for the past five years plus, um, that idealism can be very counterproductive. And it doesn't mean that we're not listening. I'm incredibly idealistic. I, I, to the point of naivety, like plenty of times in my life, but I've learned the lessons that when you're in the, it's like someone who looks at money as the root of all evil. Money is not the root of all evil.

Money is an energy transferance platform, right? It's a medium in which we exchange goods and services for this thing we've ascribed value to. We're doing, you learn this lesson with, you know, any type of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. You learn the malleability of money. Money is not the root of all evil. What you do with your money, what you do with your resources, what you do with your attention, that dictates the value of it. So if you use money to fund black water and missiles and shit like that, it's not a great use of your money. But if you use money to help someone who's homeless to donate to a worthy cause, to help a family member, a friend who's going through a rough time, it's a wonderful tool.

So it's a neutral thing. So to be anti-capitalist, which should be quite clear, I think capital is probably a pretty shitty system, the way it's evolved in our culture. Absolutely. Maybe not. Yeah. I mean, we're not arguing that, you know, we're ultimate capitalists, like we're trying to turn a buck on psychedelics. What we're saying is you play within the confines. Here's another little allegory I'll give. I had a very intense transcendental psychedelic trip in my early twenties that completely radically altered my consciousness. It was essentially like getting a download of just like cosmic information that I was not ready in any way to process.

Years later, I've been able to unpack it and kind of understand the meaning and context of what was going on. But what happened was is I was talking to everyone about unconditional love, non-fucking stop. I got such a heavy dose in blast and saw the ultimate reality of everything that I couldn't shut the fuck up about. It was like, if I saw an alien come down and I was talking to everyone, like, oh, I saw a fucking alien, people didn't give a shit because I wasn't working from within their paradigm of understanding to be able to evoke the things I was trying to communicate. Over the years, you learn like you don't just run up to everyone and be like, takes like it else.

Takes like it else. It's going to open your mind. It's going to open your mind because not everyone wants to hear that. Some people want to go at a different speed. And what you're trying to do here with the third wave and all this stuff is make it create a spectrum of entry points for people who understand that, yes, these can be radically transformative substances and they can completely help someone's life in a way that you can't even imagine, but we also need to let people take baby steps up into these things. And we need to normalize it in a sense that they can at least appreciate that this isn't like getting fucked up on drugs.

This isn't like, oh, I, you know, I just really love seeing weird shit. So I'm going to take this stuff like, yes, there's always going to be people who want to do that. But as entheogens, you know, entheogens, as they're popularly said, I mean, there is some mystical aspect, whether it's the dampening of brain function, so we can see unfiltered reality, you know, we can see the world as it actually is or what we see now, which is probably what I think is far more of an illusion than we could ever begin to realize in our day-to-day consciousness. I mean, I see you nodding. I'll let you jump. I'll let you jump.

And so I got to the, the materialist reductionist perspective, you know, this is what's going on in the brain, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is what's causing the mystical experience. This is the very Sam Harris esque approach, you know, who is into psychedelics and has written a book called Waking Up a Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, but it still fairly leans toward the more materialist kind of everything breaks down into something and you know, which is, which is good. But I think when it's used too much as a tool of science, again, can be kind of productive. We need, we need to balance.

So I didn't get into the more spiritual side. And I think that's really what we're looking at right now in terms of what's going on in modern culture was starting, we're starting to see the transfusion combination of primitive wisdom, which is based largely in our connection to the earth and in the sense of spirituality with modern technology. And I'm hopeful that we'll be able to integrate both of those lessons and psychedelics will actually be the catalyst to do that. And so when I, when I look at them, the spiritual side is the person who got me interested in basically mysticism and spirituality was Elvis Huxley, who is well known for writing Brave New World.

But of course in, he wrote Brave New World in 1933 in the early 40s, late 30s, early 40s around the time of World War II, he got really interested in mysticism and like super interested. Yeah. And he wrote this book called The Perennial Philosophy, where he takes all the major world religions and he compares their mystical arms. So in Judaism, that's the Kabbalah that they would study in Islam, that's Sufism and Christianity, he looked at the Quakers, Thomas Aquinas. Other Christian mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Other others as well. Buddhism and Hinduism speak for themselves. And looked at all these, these commonalities and for me, that really finally made it kind of wake up to me because originally, you know, I was raised in a very Christian Protestant home.

I went to church every Sunday. I actually went to church twice every Sunday because I also went to youth group. I didn't like it, it was quite limiting as most religious dogma is. And I wanted out. So when I got out, I became an atheist. And it was only through psychedelics and specifically then reading all this Huxley about psychedelics. And so I had read The Doors of Perception and then read The Perennial Philosophy. And then I read his visionary writings, Moksha, which of course means release, which is what you were just talking about. Right. And in Sanskrit, you know, Maya means this is an illusion and Moksha is often used in conjunction with that.

Nirvana. Liberation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the name of the book is Moksha and it's all his visionary writings, all the letters that he ever wrote, all the essays he ever wrote about psychedelics. And I think for me that really locked in that, yeah, okay, there are these things going on in the brain, but there's something more to this that's not reducible to something. For it is this sense of the eternal, it is this sense of everything is coming from the source. It is this sense of transcendence, of non-duality, of oneness. And those states are extremely helpful when you can understand those states navigating life in every way because it's so much easier because the fear of death is removed.

And when you remove the fear of death, all of a sudden doing things like I'm doing, the worst thing that can happen is that you died. That's not so bad. So why not, especially when it's the truth, especially when I'm what I'm saying is what people need. It's based in science, it's honest. Why not? You know, there are a lot of people who are still scared of being open about their psychedelic use. And while in some contexts that make sense, I don't, in many cases, I don't think it, it does. But we, you know, it's interesting, we're growing up in a time where A, this is unprecedented. You know, people may may have been speaking about various psychedelic use or cannabis use or any illegal substance of use in get-togethers in person, but the concept of being able to broadcast this out to people who are interested in hearing it and talking about it is a radical shift in how we get discussions like this out.

But to me, it's the power of podcasts, whatever media it is, videos, whatever it is. That's a, again, right at kind of the apex of what you're talking about, this joining of technology and kind of what you're referring to as primitive cultures, which is the term that I use because Jung typically wrote about it in that those senses and it doesn't be primitive, like, stupid, elementary. It just means early. This is when the kind of modern cosmology of someone, like if you go to an Aboriginal tribe and this happened with Jung when he went to different places in the world, like they don't think like we think they're, they're like dream time, especially, especially the Aboriginal.

That's what I was going to say. They're dream time, like they, they are not using language and symbols in the way that we're accustomed to using and wouldn't think of this reality even as like they really latch on to that this is a dream, you know, and I mean, we're, we're intellectualizing and conceptualizing. Although I really do, I do tend to walk through in my life and this is probably somewhat related to how I use cannabis, but I do try to remind myself more often than not that this is quite illusory and not to the point where I detach and don't become engaged with the world. And if you want to do that, if you want to go to a cave and meditate in the Himalayas, by all means, but I subscribe to the much more tantric approach, which is let's go into the world.

We incarnated as Western people in the United States of America. This is an incredibly benevolent and auspicious opportunity. I mean, I always perk up when I hear Buddhist talk about how precious a human incarnation is. Well, imagine a human incarnation in a shitty place where you don't have opportunities. We're growing up in a society and a culture that allows us to pursue these things and to not seize that opportunity in a way that what you're talking about, speaking about truth, trying to allow people to be, get in touch with who they really are and also to relate it to what you said about how you're doing with the psychedelic movement.

You touched on the key concept, which is how everything works. If you want to make change out in the world, you want to change consciousness, reality, you got to start inside like there isn't you can do it just to be clear. You can change shit on the outside without fucking with your inside. It's just you're going to have no awareness of what you're doing out there in the world. And you could be putting a ton of shit like Donald Trump isn't doing inner work. He's not like sitting there like, what do I want to man if he's just reacting and he's just doing shit in the world, but you see kind of what that brings when that awareness isn't there.

So it does start with us, which is why let's circle back to microdosing. To me, it became very clear yesterday alone. This isn't something I plan on doing every day. I'm probably going to do it, you know, once every four days for maybe a week or a couple of weeks, but I was someone who when I was younger, I was put on dexadrin and ritalin for symptoms of ADHD for a year. And it's just speed for anyone. It's just fucking speed. So I know what speed. Yeah. It's amphetamines. It's just speed. I so I know what that feels like. I know what that's supposed to do for consciousness to make people feel a certain way.

Very familiar with cannabis familiar with altered states familiar with meditation. Microdosing LSD was a completely different thing. It was something that felt integrative in a way that LSD sometimes cannot if you take too much and don't have like the proper whatever is going on. I was shocked by that because my experiences with psilocybin have been far more like there's a come up every time I take a psilocybin microdose. It's reduced. It's a fraction of what it is when you take like a threshold dose, but it's still there. LSD didn't really feel that just kind of slid into what everything else was going on.

And I know it's a could be the LSD, whatever it is, you know, the actual quality of it. But I can see why it's picking up momentum. You know what I mean? It's like, this isn't something that people need to get behind because they are making themselves. It's like the direct experience here, which is the final arbiter of everything in my mind really speaks for itself, which is fascinating. That's why I think, and that's why I think this is going to be a catalyst for the legitimization of psychedelic substances is because of this direct experience. This is also called the familiarity principle. This is what I refer to in some of my talks.

It's like, you can tell people all you want that psychedelics are not harmful and that psychedelics are non-toxic and that they are not addictive and that they, you know, blah-blah. But until they experience that for themselves, you're going to have a difficult time changing minds because as we're now seeing with the ecological crisis, people are not rational at all. We have a lot of fucking cognitive biases and one of the biggest ones when it comes to psychedelics is this idea of a bad trip, right? And this keeps a lot of potentially curious or interested individuals far, far away, partly because of cultural indoctrination and this whole idea that, you know, you're likely to go crazy, but also partly because there's reason to be concerns because bad trips can be very traumatic and stressful things.

And if you don't have the right container for them, they sometimes can be more harmful than good. If you don't resolve those issues that come up with a friend or a therapist or whatever it might be. And so microdosing now, wow, oh, I can do this thing where I take just a small amount. People are noticing all these benefits. It's not addictive. It's not sold to me by a pharmaceutical company who has kept me addicted on SSRIs for years. Every day I have to take one. They're extreme withdrawals. They don't work. They just cover the band-aid symptoms and I can take this natural substance, whether it's mushrooms that grows on the ground or, you know, a semi-synthetic LSD, which is still made from ergot, which is natural.

Oh, I can take this. It's cheap. Oh, okay. Interesting. And it works. Oh, and it fixes the root cause. Oh, okay. So now we're talking. Microdosing is really, really taking off and it's amazing. I mean, I've been doing these seminars and I ask at the beginning of each one, you know, how many typically I will do them with local psychedelic communities. So in Baltimore, I did it with this group psychedelic seminars in Germany, Berlin, the German Circuit's Psychedelic Society, the Copenhagen Psychedelic Society, like all these psychedelic societies. And I always ask at the beginning of the event, you know, how many of you, is this your first time ever coming to some sort of like community event, when you're actually meeting a large group of other people who are doing psychedelics, up, you know, anywhere between 60 and 80 percent of people raise their hands.

Right. Right. That's amazing because this movement can't actually become anything until people start connecting and talking and getting to know one another, when it's just, even if it's just online, like the internet's great and it's helped so much, but it's limited in terms of really the magnitude to which people can build movements. You need things in person and they need to be grassroots. And because we have the internet, you know, things are decentralized and that's easier to do. So it's like, that's why Microdosing, yeah, it's working and yeah, it's helpful. And yeah, but the reason it's so fascinating for me is it's bringing people out in droves to explore psychedelics who had never thought about it before.

It's, it's, you touched on a lot of stuff there. And I see why, hey, you're having success and, you know, that Microdosing is kind of this gateway or foot in the door in terms of starting these conversations. What I think is even more interesting is that you're tapping into this idea whether it's a psychedelic community, whether it's a meditative community, whether it's a creative community. This idea that people are starting to come together more in person. And then this other idea, instead of looking at it as one or the other, whether it's either on in digital or in person, but rather using both tools together, like I'm looking at digital, this is my job.

So this is, I have to think about these things, you know, a few years in advance or how we want to be using these tools. I look at digital media right now, at least social aspect of it. We can talk more technical about search and things like that, which are a little more substantial to me, but social media, which dominates most of our lives. That's where we're spending collectively most of our time now. So just talk about it in that context. Everything is very transient. Everything is very quick. Everything is very fleeting and based on trends, we can probably continue expect that to continue. I don't know how reductive it's going to be.

I don't think we're going to be sitting there only watching three second long videos in five years. But who knows? I said, we do have this same ability to create these imprints into these worlds. Let's just use a podcast as example. If someone sees this podcast on Facebook and they click into it and then they start listening to it and then they listen to it for an hour, they have just gone from something that's a very transient, short, fleeting experience into something that's substantial where they're putting their focus attention. And much the same way, using digital technology to facilitate these, first, you cast this wide net.

When you use social media, you're going to use search engine optimization. You're going to use best practices for building digital communities as the second component to that. You then get people into interest groups, right? So you say, let's start with a broad theme of psychedelics. Then you go into microdosing. So then you have this more focused group of people, which is an excellent one for microdosing because like you said, the barrier is low for people to be interested. It also pulls these people together. You now have this interest group where then you create a movement behind it. You get these people together.

You're going around the world. Like I said, Johnny Appleseed of psychedelics. Over time, I'm sure you recognize this. I'm sure this is a key component of it. You create a web that exists both online and offline. It's kind of like a matrix or touch points where people can communicate. You know damn well when you go do a seminar and you leave there, the people who are still there are still in communication with each other, forming their own webs and their own brilliant ideas. This reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist donkas where they have the one Buddha kind of at the top and then there's these flowing kind of trees of Buddhas.

What happens here is you create this system by creating internal change with yourself, which is the seed of the idea for microdosing. You enact it into the world. You understand the intention behind it. You understand the reason, the aspiration behind it. You go out and start creating these communal teachings. This to me is what Tiknot Han is talking about with the future Buddha. This is the Maitreya is the Sangha. This is going to manifest in every single community who is dedicated to getting to the truth of what's going on in reality and also just fundamentally how do we reduce suffering? How do we reduce the suffering of ourselves and everyone else?

That's really let's be fucking clear here. That's why we're taking psychedelics, whether it's an all inspiring experience that gets you in touch with the cosmic interconnectedness of everything or it's just because you want a way to deal with your relationships or your anger or your stress just a little bit better. We're talking about reducing suffering. Anything that serves that is not a bad thing. The more we can talk about these things, the more we can understand how these things can be used in a holistic and really like integrative faction, we're not trying to blow open everyone's third eye chakra so we can all be hippies.

We just want people to see that there are many different paths to understanding who you really are and what this world really is. Let's just open those doors a little bit. I love, man, that you have actively penetrated the veil and found microdosing to be this catalyst because you and I both know, man, in a couple of years, a few years, this shit is going to be next level. This isn't going to be under ground. No. We're talking about the psychedelics conference. This year, it's huge. It's bigger than it ever is going to be in Oakland and we're seeing things like maps. We're seeing little cultural centers pop up all over urban cities and this country and other countries where people are talking about this on a regular basis.

This is why I think people like you or me are generally very optimistic even in the midst of Donald Trump and the world seemingly being on fire around us. This over time, that graph is an encouraging trend. That's certainly how I look at it. I think we're optimistic because we're involved in these communities. I think there's a level of understanding that comes with that. I think a lot of people have said, yeah, maybe another apocalypse is coming and the only way to survive that, the only way to really get through that is to have strong relationships with people who you can depend on in a situation and not money.

Money's useless in an apocalypse. Not helpful. Maybe not apocalypse. You need bonds. You need human bonds and that's what psychedelics do. We understand that through those human bonds, that's actually the best way that we can go about preventing something like this because psychedelics have this amazing catalyzing effect where they can change someone's perspective in less than eight hours. That's incredible that you can't do that with anything else. If it's done within a container, if it's done with all the check boxes, check for health and safety, that's amazing. I think that's why we're optimistic is because, especially for me, I see this changing cultural narrative where, yes, it's psychedelics, but it's also mindfulness meditation.

It's also food to table, eating, organic, eating, local farms. That's Michael Pollan. I'm the worst woman. Oh, God. Michael Pollan. He's writing is about psychedelics. Yeah. I saw that. I saw that. Damn it. Like, great. Cool. You know, this even yoga, you know, there has been a level of commercialization with yoga and the state. Oh, has there? I hadn't recognized. I feel a little uncomfortable when people argue, I'm not, I'm not shitting you. I went to like a beak room yoga thing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I'm from where my family is from. I was back there for a couple of months and I went with my sister.

We did yoga and then afterwards, we clapped for ourselves because we did yoga. I'm just like, guys. That's not how you do it. What Asana is clapping for your, I mean, I get the idea, but still it's, yeah, I totally get it, man. So there are these trends, right? And I think that speaks to a valid concern in the psychedelic space, which is the commercialization of these substances. Yes. And I think that is a valid concern at the same time, you know, my organization that I'm trying to grow and build is growing at a very fast rate and people know me. Yeah. You know, they know that's not in the ball game for me whatsoever.

We don't get involved. I'm not putting my literal career and reputation on the line for money. Right. It's a fairly superficial thing, which is there's many ways to get it and getting money in a way that aligns with your principles is what we're trying to do, not just get as much money as possible. Well, and again, coming back to this conversation of we got to change things from the inside out. Let's look at Elon Musk. He's literally changed, he's changing the larger systems that we live within in a way that is unprecedented and he did it because he made a billion dollars with PayPal. Right. And that, and you know what I mean?

He took that money. He went to SpaceX and so let's talk it. I want to, this is nothing to do with microdosing or anything, but I love this concept of Elon Musk or where the origins. I am a, let's talk, it can even relate this to farm to table. I'm a firm believer that every step of a process, people who listen to this podcast are probably sick of me hearing saying this, but every step of the process of, let's say you get a, you pick something up in the supermarket, slice deli meat, every single step from the cow being raised to, or the turkey being raised to slaughter to the person who killed it, to the person that was delivered to, to the person it was butchered by, to the person who was transported by, those karmic imprints, the energy from that entire thing is in the final thing you're consuming.

Just like a piece of art, when you listen to a song you like, it's not just the finished piece of music you're responding to, it's the entire creative process imbued into that. So when we're talking about businesses and corporations, I always think about Facebook because it was in Boston when Facebook was blowing up, I was like, you know, one of the first schools at Northeastern and Berkeley to get it. Just to be clear about what Facebook was in its origins, it was a way for Mark Zuckerberg to get girls. It was literally it, he wasn't cool, he invented something that was a platform, he obviously recognized this was a business idea, but it was a social networking tool, I mean it really was how you met people, you could, it was, it was incredibly novel and amazing, eventually it's evolved into this, you know, huge, clearly multi-billion dollar, omnipresent kind of interface of our reality, but nevertheless, the same things that were there at the beginning and beyond this, so when I think of someone like Elon Musk, who, let's just be very clear, my admiration for the man is pretty high, just in terms of his willingness to shake up the paradigms of our structure, seemingly for the betterment of humankind, for his willingness to discuss topics that many other really rich people won't broach, whether they're accurate or not, and just for seeming to be pretty focused on things outside of himself, not just for his own reputation, we don't know that for sure.

So I'm not questioning his intentions, but I do think that there is this idea that if you pay pal just to be clear, just to be clear about pay pal, one of the worst fucking things the internet has ever produced, okay, just to be anyone who is you, just, it's a first iteration, okay, the first iteration, but listen, I Bitcoin, I'm totally with it. My point is is with pay pal and all this, and I, like I said, I think Elon Musk, what he's doing is incredible, electric cars, all these ideas he has, and I'm not questioning his thing, but I do think there is this cognate, you're doing it in the right way, but people can sometimes use kind of the monetary bypass, we'll liken it to a spiritual bypass, that as long as I can rack up enough dough or money to fuel my vision for something, it's going to be okay.

I do believe in principle or theory that can work, but what you're doing and why it's just, you're not saying that only is if we can do that within the system and maintain our altruism and our intention and our desire to reduce suffering, cart fucking blanche, do whatever you fucking need. I mean, don't kill people, obviously, but I mean, work within the confines of the system that's going to work. The other benefit I think you'll have with the psychedelic stuff and the microdosing is you're seeing the cannabis industry go through probably any permutation of commercialization for an illegal substance, like we're not going to see this again in our lifetimes.

Psychedelics will not follow the same path. They're not going to have candy bar psychedelics out in a store that you can buy. So you're kind of seeing like the cartoonish version of that happening right before. I mean, I don't know what you're, what's your problem? Here's a question. There's a question in here somewhere. What's your prognosis for the legality both medically and, you know, I don't want to say recreationally, but therapeutically, for the mass public at large, like you have a timeline for when you're hoping this can happen or is it just, we'll see how it evolves. What are your general impressions on that?

So I think step one is already going on right now where a lot of these substances are legal in certain jurisdictions and there are wealthy people or even just middle class people who have the income to afford to fly to places to do that. And I think that's the number one step now that's, and it's still in many ways, it's in its very infancy. There's not even like any sort of integrated accountability system into, for example, Ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon. There's no like rating system. It's like still very like refer old middle ages is what it is. Like let's get our shit together and let's solve this problem.

I mean, that's part of what we're doing as well. We're working on working on an app because these are serious problems. You have people go down and who I go down to the Amazon for Ayahuasca who get, who get sexually molested and taken advantage of by shamans because we don't have anything like that. And you know, 95% of things, probably not even 97. It's great. There are horror stories. I think part of that is because we don't have an accountability system for that. Anyway, so this is the first kind of push, I think, is like we're going to start rolling out psilocybin retreats in Costa Rica and Jamaica and the Netherlands because in the Netherlands, you can get truffles which have psilocybin in them like a shop.

So like all over Europe, that's very accessible for those people. Asia, not so much. We're still kind of looking. Is there a spot in Asia? We don't think there is. So that's this first round. That's Ayahuasca. That's Ibogaine and that is going to be magic mushrooms and magic mushrooms retreats will outpace both Ayahuasca and Ibogaine retreats. They're in their infancy, but they're going to like just blow the can off of this retreat because there's so much more research with magic mushrooms and because there's so much more accessible to a Western audience because they don't have the shamanistic kind of baked in where you're purging and puking and it's like very foreign.

It's a more specialized is the way even with its current. So my my she's going to listen, she's well, the cats out of the bag mom, she's been going down to Peru and up in South America for almost 20 years. We had a family reunion back in the mid nineties, late nineties and one of our relatives from France, Fredrick, was one of the leading researchers on Ayahuasca back in the mid nineties. So like she was telling her about it and she eventually got plugged in when I've never done Ayahuasca. I've never done DMT, but I know a lot of people who have been doing it. And it's just this huge, not researching, but this, this output that we're seeing now to me, I think is great.

It also freaks me out a little bit that so many people are doing it in like urban environments, like New York with people who are just like white guy shamans. It freaks me out a little bit because I do think there is they're not to be taken lightly and contact set and setting whether it is, you know, and it doesn't have to be in the jungle. I don't think that's pre requisite, but some honoring of that is important. But to me, it always seemed like this is in the pantheon of psychedelic experiences and eight to 10 hour long, slow, inner journey is not something everyone is going to be seeking out where they're throwing up and confronting the core of their being.

Mushrooms for me and I've taken every possible dose of mushrooms one can take, right, from micro dose to, you know, 10 to 14 grams, you know, some blasting off into space. There's an element there like you're saying it's much more accessible. There's also a spectrum of experiences that are like, I mean, I remember airway back in the late 90s, you could see that little graph of the threshold coming up here is your experience three, four hours later, you're going to peak and then boom down. That ability to replicate an experience over and over again is perfectly suited for retreats. It's perfectly suited for people doing some real work on themselves with intention and kind of integrating in with these, I am going to again, jump off to a question because it I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this.

What do you think about the idea of these plants specifically less so LSD, but let's say psilocybin, so mushrooms, ayahuasca, various plants, of having their own eye view cannabis like this? I think it has its own consciousness and I think what we're experiencing is an integration or interweaving of our inherent human consciousness and this plant consciousness and I think this is how everything works. Have you ever had conversations with plant consciousness while you're on a particular thing? Have you attempted that? This is something Dennis McKenna brought up to me and I tried it on mushrooms afterwards and I definitely got some responses, whether it's me talking to myself, who the fuck knows?

But have you had any experience with that? I haven't, no, but I think what you're talking about is interesting and I think what I did want to say about this, this idea of mushrooms or ayahuasca or Ibogaine, having their own consciousness, I'll be honest, I'm not a very vibrationally tuned person. I tend to be more rigorous in my understanding of very concrete things and for that reason I tend to have a healthy skepticism of some of the, not even what you're talking about, I totally understand that and I've had close experiences but more even like the woo-woo quote unquote things, you know what I mean?

At the same time I recall you and I'm familiar with synchronicity, I've read obviously all these things. For me, I kind of lean into this role and I think one, I think it's legitimate, obviously. I think every subjective experience is legitimate. At the same time, I think when people make that assumption, another thing they also assume is that psychedelics or plant medicines have these inherent principles or values that everyone quote unquote who takes these is going to have an experience that ayahuasca, you know ayahuasca, you'll see mother ayah or you'll always see the snakes or with mushrooms, mushrooms are a more male presence, you know, Ibogaine is more of the father, ayahuasca is the mother, cannabis, I don't know, maybe it's the red-headed stepchild but like, you know, you have these things and I think what that can lead to is it can lead to a kind of overzealous evangelical quality which at times can harm the legitimacy of what kind of is going on in the psychedelic space.

Basically, this is a very complicated way of saying like, when we associate psychedelics with hippies, we take about a 40 year step to the back. Exactly and I mean, I think this is something I'll even kind of try to contextualize. It's almost like psychedelic materialism like you put on this garb and I, just for full disclosure here, I'm as woo is anyone. I believe in things that people who are very grounded in reality and you know, it's like I love, you know, but I know what the fuck you talking about but it's all based on direct experience. I don't, I don't allow concepts or ideas like I don't read about, you know, some alien race and like, well, they're real going to put them in my pantheon.

It's just if I have a direct experience with something, I'm like, let me test that and see if it's real and I've had enough of them where it's like, oh shit, okay, I got to believe in this weird shit. Now, great. But I do understand what you're saying because you want to, it's like walking on a razor's edge here, right? You want to be able to legitimize, bring things out of the dark ages, out of the shadows into a place where we can access the value that they're providing. But then also, and these, this is why this podcast exists is we can also have personal conversations about our thoughts and subjective, who the fuck knows, because none of us really know what's going on, but trying to toe that line and not being like a wackadoo, like you don't want to be put up there, like, you know, what's his name, David Ike, the reptilian guy.

This guy probably has some valid thoughts on plenty of things, but when you start talking about reptilian beings, shape shifting, and Hillary Clinton said, and all these people are reptilians, it's like, it's hard to take you seriously, man, like your voice now is just going to be associated with this wackadoo idea. And listen, maybe fucking reptilians exist, but like you said, you're not working from the inside out here, man. You're shouting from the outside about the reptilians and no one can fucking hear what you're saying about anything else. So I recognize not wanting to go too deep into the kind of speculative, subjective, experiential, only anecdotal information when we can say, listen, there's this whole swath of information about how these things are practically beneficial.

I personally, you know, I like being right in the fucking middle there where we can say, well, yeah, this shit is totally, it's like the Advaita Vedanta stuff, right? We know everything is interconnected. We know everything is unified. We know this. We know the quantum. We know this. We really know this. However, we also recognize we live in the dual universe. There's good and bad. There's sweet and sour. There's hot and cold. There's you and me. There's us. There's them. So we live in a world of paradox in a lot of ways. Being able to figure out which cultural and contextual framework is going to serve our ultimate goals.

The best is a very important skill. One that I'm happy to see you really embody quite well. So that's good. You're good for the movement, my friend. I think then I like getting into this conversation because then the question is, of course, what is our ultimate goal? What are our objectives? What is it that we are trying to accomplish? And I think when you ask those questions, you then get a lot of clarity on what are the next steps to take. So someone like the reptilian dude, his objectives clearly are different. Maybe he's still, his ego still wants buy-in, maybe he still wants to get people and he knows that by talking about these things, yeah, he might not even believe it necessarily, but it's interesting and he gets a small following because of it.

This is also fairly prevalent with conspiracy theories. There are a lot of people who do psychedelics who have bought into a lot of conspiracy theories, which I, again, treat with a healthy dose of skepticism. And while I'm a fan of people like Graham Hancock, who's a phenomenal journalist and he doesn't go quite in conspiracy theory, but it's definitely not like, you know, it's kind of like right on the edge there, very much so. I think there is a hesitation to buy into things that aren't true. And I think if we want to facilitate change, and if the ultimate goal quote unquote is, you know, for everyone to become enlightened, however you want to shift that, if all consciousness for it to come back and now with one another, then we need to look at ways that we can do that, I think we need to be very then practical and conspiracy theories are not practical.

They're not pragmatic because you're not facing reality. Right. And if you don't face reality, then you like as objectively as possible, it's hard to change it. It's hard to change systems. It's hard to really have to understand things from both a spirituality level and a science level. You have to understand the whole spectrum. That's right. If you want to facilitate change, and I think that's that's partly what then, you know, I think I'm trying to do, and I also think that's what scientists and researchers are trying to do. And they've gone a little bit, I think, too far to the right. They've gone a little bit too objective.

And that has alienated a lot of people in the psychedelic space because they're not talking about personal experiences. And that's why this whole thing is taking off because, again, this is this is pragmatic. We're connecting with people. We're talking to them. We're empathizing with them. We're hearing their stories. We're creating community. Community cannot be built on science. Community has to be built on relationships and relationships aren't necessarily reducible. That's right. That's right. They aren't reducible. That's what makes them so unique and so special and so amazing is they aren't reducible.

And that's that's right. And that's why these type of conversations play such a crucial role towards kind of sending out the bat signal that this shit is a exist, be it's okay, be it's having practical benefits. And you can take it. And this is my whole idea with my iPod network while it's not specifically related to psychedelics in some way, you know, it has something to do with that. We're trying to create a spectrum of entry points for people who want to learn more about themselves or the world. It doesn't have to be from a psychedelic perspective. It doesn't have to be from a Buddhist perspective.

It doesn't have to be from a creative perspective. It can be any entry point that resonates with that type of person. You, like me, don't presuppose that everyone else is like us and into the exact same things and have our proclivities and have our exact same psyche. So we recognize we want to probably like come in at your own pace. What you're doing is making that first step into people discovering deeper layers or levels of themselves pretty fucking low instead of like a big, you know, Aztec, you know, climb up Chichen Itza like, holy shit, how do people go up and down these steps? You're making it like, here you go, a tiny little baby step, step up on this step stool, then we can start reaching these other things.

And I think that's like profoundly important. I'm super happy to have connected with you. I'm sure we will be crossing paths quite often and frequently and anything I can do to help support the third wave you personally or anyone else who you know, I'm happy to do. So I want to end this conversation with three quick questions and then one larger one. And I'm also going to give the caveat. I'm going to start giving the caveat now. I'm going to ask you your favorites of three things. If you don't have a favorite to say the first one that comes to mind or when you identify because people are giving me so much shit on this now, like I swear in the past like 20 episodes, I don't have favorites about this.

Like, well, I get it, man. I get it. I understand neither do I like the commentary and I'm not a leadist, please, blue, not above all others. I'm just saying. So I'm going to ask you some favorites. What's your favorite color? Red. Cool. What's your favorite number? 13 mine to love it. What's your favorite animal? A lion. Cool. That's very cool. I'm a Leo. When's your birthday? I'll get 16. Cool. I'm a cancer right before you. Summer birthdays. Got it. Okay. Last question. What is a practical tip that you could share with listeners that has helped you in your life related to anything? I think understanding the truth of who you are.

And understanding that so well that your outer actions become congruent with who you know you are, who you know you want to be. And I think the sense of authenticity, the sense of self-reflection and the sense of understanding has become so difficult on the world of distraction and pings and superficiality and kind of just banal-boring hyper-consumerist shit that it's become very difficult and culture doesn't help, especially the culture that we live in. So I think this ability to reflect and this ability to step back and this ability to understand what you want and who you are, and then like we were talking about earlier, having the courage to pursue that because if the worst thing in life is death, it's not so bad.

And then acting down those things to make sure that your external behaviors become congruent because when that happens, when that shift happens, when you become externally who you really want to be. And I think with most humans, that's someone who's compassionate, that's someone who cares about others, that's someone who's loved, who's accepted, who has interesting curious thoughts about the world, who is engaged. When that happens, I think it just, it's an amazing shift. It is. It's pretty fucking awesome. I recommend it for everyone. And just to point out that if you hit that state, we're human beings and we oscillate.

So you don't just, you don't reach somebody and fucking say it. There's no perfection. But understanding it, I think it is. Exactly. It's like, Paul, dude, thank you so much for doing this. Next time your state side or we cross paths, do you locally? Let's get together, man. Hey, I'll be in New York early June. So let's connect that with the Alchemist's kitchen in New York. I'll be there, man. I will be there. I'll send you the details. Cool, dude. All right, man. Peace. Enjoy Germany. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to that episode. I hope you enjoyed it.

You're at the end here. You must not have hated it unless you fell asleep. Check up, but if you want to tune into what Paul's doing, if you're interested in microdosing, he has a guide that you can check out. Go to the thirdwave.co, there's no M, C-O, the thirdwave.co. Check it out. Get his guide. Really cool, dude. He's going all over the world. Maybe check and see if he's coming to a city near you or a town near you. Thank you to everyone who listens past the music and reminder at some point later this year, we're thinking fall 2017, I'll be releasing my very first EP of music that I am putting out.

Also, if you're listening at this point, I appreciate every single one of you who makes a donation every month. As I alluded to in the intro, I'm going to be doing a Patreon think. I'm like 95% sure. I'll have details on what that means. I was encouraged to do it by many people. When people tell me to do things a lot, I eventually do them. So again, thank you for listening, you're super cool. The next episode I mentioned in the one before this is going to be Jason Louvre. Stay tuned for that. Because this was a bonus episode. This is just because I love you. All right. I'll see you next week. Hey there.

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