Digital Social Hour - Microdosing, Toad, PTSD & Breath Work I Paul Austin DSH #367

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Paul Austin comes on the show to talk about microdosing, toad, PTSD & Breath Work. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly Factor: https://www.factor75.com/dsh50 LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXa... Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, there's a stoned ape theory, which is really interesting. So Terence McKenna, who was one of the OGs of the psychedelic, let's say, sector or thought, he hypothesized that our ancient ancestors would eat small amounts of mushrooms when they were on the savannah in Africa. Because when you eat small amounts of mushrooms, it helps with visual acuity. And if you can see better, you can hunt better. If you can hunt better, you're more likely to survive. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you can see better, you can hunt better. If you can hunt better, you're more likely to survive. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe.

It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests. And it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting. And here's the episode. We are back here on the Digital Social Hour, guys. Today, I got Paul Austin with me, a micro-dosing psychedelic expert. How's it going, my man? It's going well, Sean. Thanks for having me on the Digital Social Hour, guys. Today, I got Paul Austin with me, a microdosing psychedelic expert.

How's it going, my man? It's going well, Sean. Thanks for having me on the show, man. Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of microdosing, so I can't wait to dive into this. Yeah, microdosing, you know, it's really gotten hot the last especially few years. And it's a pretty new thing, right? It only became a thing in 2011.

You know, we've been doing mushrooms for thousands of years, but it was only recently that we found out if you take a little bit a few times a week, you could really change your life. So I'm excited to dive in. Yeah. That's so interesting how it's been around for thousands of years, but we only just started doing it 10 years ago. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, you know, there's a stoned ape theory, which is really interesting. So Terrence McKenna, who was one of the OGs of the psychedelic, let's say, sector or thought. He hypothesized that our ancient ancestors would eat small amounts of mushrooms when they were on the savanna in Africa

because when you eat small amounts of mushrooms, it helps with visual acuity. And if you can see better, you can hunt better. If you can hunt better, you're more likely to survive. Wow. So there's some, and this is just a hypothesis. This isn't proven with archaeological evidence, but I think it's an interesting element of, when we talk about psychedelics,

when we talk about mushrooms, we've been using these for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years. And there's some great modern applications for mental health, for focus, for flow, productivity, all these sorts of things are why people are using microdoses. Nice.

So when you think of microdosing, it's usually mushrooms, right? Mushrooms and LSD are the two most common. Mushrooms, probably 80% of people who microdose end up microdosing with mushrooms because they're much more accessible. People can grow their own mushrooms pretty easily. We have an actual grow kit on our website that we just ship to people and you can grow your own mushrooms in like six weeks, basically. LSD is technically just as illegal as psilocybin mushrooms. They're both schedule one substances, just like cannabis, but LSD is much more stigmatized. So when people hear of mushrooms, they hear of something natural, you know, Colorado has legalized mushrooms,

Oregon has legalized mushrooms, and you can pretty much go online now and just buy microdosing supplements. There's websites all over the place. So it's more accessible for people. It's a natural substance and people find that it really helps with depression, with addiction, but also just general mood and energy, like just feeling better on a day-to-day basis. I will say it's pretty much fully treated my anxiety and depression microdosing. And how did you go about like, what was your, did you use a protocol? Did you do it

here and there? Like what was your... Yeah. So mushrooms, psilocybin, two to three times a week, small dose, I think 0.25 each time. And within two weeks, completely gone. No anxiety, no depression. I was like, dude, this is crazy. And the fact that it's illegal is wild to me. Well, and that's what, so a few years ago, I started a nonprofit. I mean, I've done a lot of things in the psychedelic space. Eight years ago, I started Third Wave as an educational platform. We've educated 25 million people about psychedelic use. Five years ago, I started a legal psilocybin retreat

center in the Netherlands because it's legal there. And then a few years ago, I started a 501c3 nonprofit called the Microdosing Collective. And the focus of that nonprofit is how do we legalize microdosing? Because Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, Ritalin, Adderall, all of these conventional psychiatric medications have like a laundry list of negative side effects. Whereas with microdosing, it's not addictive. In fact, it's anti-addictive. It helps with neuroplasticity, meaning it helps your brain to learn and grow and you can grow it. You know, you don't have to rely on a pharmaceutical company that, you know, is trying to keep you sick in order to keep you as a customer. Microdosing mushrooms can really help you to step out of that lane.

Yeah. So it's not true that mushrooms grow on cow shit? That is true. Oh, it is true. Mushrooms, I mean, mushrooms are really interesting because mushrooms show up in ecosystems and places where there's a level of stress. So the reason they grow on cow pies is because cows are often in overly stressed environments. They're eating the grass, they're eating it up. And so when those cow pies come down, the mushrooms grow in it because it's helping the overall.

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know, mushrooms, not even just psychedelic mushrooms, but generally mushrooms have been really stigmatized because, you know, if you go and you go mushroom hunting, foraging for mushrooms, sometimes if you pick the wrong mushroom, you die. Really? Because they can be very, they can be very, very poisonous. Wow. And these are just general mushrooms, not psychedelic. Oh, okay. The fact that magic mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms are coming back online and we're talking about them, I think it's a glimmer of hope and optimism for a lot of people who struggle with depression or anxiety and nothing else has worked for them. Yeah. So you mentioned you're trying to legalize microdosing. What is the process for that? Is that even a possibility with the FDA and their strict guidelines? That's a good question. So it's complicated, right? So the way that psychedelics have been legalized thus far in Oregon, Colorado, and MDMA will be approved by the FDA next year to treat PTSD is you have to go into a licensed facilitator. Sometimes that's a

medical professional, like a psychiatrist. You have to basically go through an intake process. And then you have to take the mushroom with a person there guiding you. So you can't just bring it home and work with it on your own. And as you know, and as your audience may assume, with microdosing, you're just doing that like a supplement. You're taking it two or three times a week at home. You don't necessarily need like a therapist or guide who is there and present with you. For high doses of psychedelics, that can be really helpful because sometimes there can be challenging experiences that come up. With microdosing, you don't really need to do that. And so the way I think to legalize microdosing is we almost need, it's sort of like finding a good balance between the dispensary model, like with cannabis, and something that's more regulated in terms of

before someone could go in to buy microdoses, they might have to pass some sort of assessment, you know, just to make sure that, you know, they kind of pass the things that they need to pass. I think there is a level of vetting that's required. And just like with cannabis, it's not going to necessarily happen at the federal level. There are certain companies that are attempting to pharmaceuticalize microdoses. So they're bringing it through FDA clinical trials.

Like there's a company out of New Zealand that is using LSD to treat ADHD. Wow. Right. And so they're doing it through the clinical trial process so it can replace Adderall or Ritalin. But again, that will have to be prescribed by a physician if it becomes legal. Right.

When we're talking about mushrooms, it's going to be on a state-by-state basis in Oregon, California, Colorado. And like I said, there will have to be some regulated marketplace model. And it can't just be for depression and addiction. I think the reason I got into microdosing was because I wanted to drink less alcohol and help with social anxiety, which is not necessarily a clinical diagnosis.

And I just wanted to be more productive and more in flow. And so I think we also need to look at microdosing not just as something to treat depression, but it's also just a great tool to live a better life. Yeah, the productivity on it is night and day. I mean, days where I'm microdosing, I am locked in. And the reason for that is because when you take mushrooms or when you take something like LSD, it's improving, increasing dopamine. And so dopamine is tied to attention, motivation, and focus.

And so when you're increasing those dopamine levels in the brain, you're then better able to focus on the task at hand rather than getting distracted by everything and having your attention pulled every which way. That makes sense. So do you only microdose or do you dabble with full doses too? I've worked with psychedelics myself since I was 19. So I'm 33 now. The first experiences that I had with psychedelics were at... Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? We'll click the application link below in the description of this video.

We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to you about business and life. Click the application link below. And here's the episode guys. Higher doses, not like super high heroic doses, but I did, I did LSD and I did psilocybin mushrooms, maybe 15 or 20 times. And I was 19, was 19 20 21 i'd usually take it either by myself or with a few friends and we'd go in the woods we'd go to the beach and just go hiking and kind of be outdoors um and then when i was 24 i was living in budapest and i was doing acid again and was with a couple friends and we were talking about the future of psychedelics where it's going and so at that point in time i was like i think psychedelics is going to be the next big thing after cannabis. There's a lot of people who are talking about it, Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, and there's clinical research coming out and

cannabis is being legalized. So what if we just started an educational platform to help inform people? So since that point in time, that was about eight years ago, I've been microdosing. When I first started microdosing, I did it two times a week for six months with LSD. And I took a break then for a month or two. And now, you know, when I microdose, it's here and there. Like, if I feel like it, I'll microdose. If I'm having a tough day or if I'm noticing that like, damn, for the last week, my mood hasn't been great, I'll take a microdose and I know immediately that I start to feel better, but I'm not necessarily at this point in time following like a structured protocol. Structured protocols are helpful if you're new to this because it's like, okay, I just follow the directions twice a week. I do it for a month or two months.

I take this amount. And then after you start to get a sense of how it affects you, you can do it how you want to do it. You can make it your own and adjust it to how you want to work with it. You don't need to keep following necessarily somebody else's directions. And I think that's why psychedelics, that's what they've taught me quite a bit is like, stop listening to all of the external conditioning, stop listening to what everyone else is telling you to do and start listening to yourself and what you want. And I think psychedelics can really, really help with that process. Yeah. Was there any noticeable differences between microdosing LSD versus psilocybin? So LSD is more stimulating.

From a neurobiological perspective, LSD is more dopaminergenic, meaning more dopamine with LSD. Got it. Psilocybin is more serotonin. So LSD is even better for cognition, focus, and flow, which is why it's so often talked about in like Silicon Valley and these entrepreneurial circles. Psilocybin is a little bit better for presence, contentment, which is why it could help with something like anxiety and what we would call something like somatics, like feeling your body. So a lot of times I'll tell people, if you're working with psilocybin,

maybe do it with a therapist or do it with a coach. If you're working with LSD, start very low. And this is what I tell everybody, start low, go slow, because you can always take more. You can't necessarily take less. So Hunter S. Thompson, who was, you know, this famous journalist in the eighties and nineties, he would say, if you buy the ticket, you take the ride. Right. And that's especially true with high doses of psychedelics, but it's even true with microdosing because if you're taking a microdose and you're

expecting to like go to work and just do your normal everyday thing and you overshoot it and you take too much, sometimes you can't do much. You just have to sit there and meditate and do nothing for a while. So what I tell folks is always start with a low dose, see how that feels, and then you can slowly increase the dose because there's no rush. If you're doing this two or three times a week for a month or two months or three months, we're paying attention to the process, right? How are you feeling after, like you said, the two weeks? You're not like, did my life change instantly the day I did it? You're like, okay, I noticed after two, three weeks, I was feeling a lot better. And I think that's what is important to pay attention to with microdosing. Yeah. Have you seen people overdo it with psychedelics? Because there's the stigma where if you take too many causes some permanent you know brain damage and stuff yes for sure right like and you know it's

interesting because as psychedelics have become more popular over the last several years some of the potential risks or concerns have been a little like whitewash like yeah you know don't talk about them but absolutely like if if you take a hit of acid every day for a year, you're going to be in another universe. You know, you're not going to necessarily be here in reality. You might be highly disassociated. There are people, even with ayahuasca, you've talked about ayahuasca on the show before. So there are even people who have been drinking ayahuasca for 25 years. They've maybe done, you know, 100 or 150 ceremonies,

and they haven't changed at all. The same is still coming up, right? So just doing a psychedelic doesn't mean you're necessarily going to heal and transform yourself. There is a level of intentionality that's required. You know, what I always tell folks is microdosing is not a magic pill, right? It can a magic pill right it can be a catalyst it can be an opener but you really want to combine it with something like meditation or breath work or yoga or movement right like other practices that actually will stick in the long term so you don't feel like you know i'm not dependent i was on prozac and now i'm you know just dependent on mushrooms to feel better.

A lot of people are concerned, if I start microdosing, is the depression going to come back? Am I going to feel worse? And I think a way to address that is when you start microdosing, meditate, do breath work, move, eat better. There's these lifestyle practices that can help to ensure that the benefits are long-term without having to continue to do more psychedelics all the time because it can be, you know, microdosing is pretty chill, but the high doses can be very intense. And if you're always doing high doses of psychedelics,

it's just, it's disassociative, you know? It's just not a good way to live. I've seen people that have overdone it, especially with acid. Oh, yeah, because acid is easy to overdo. It's so potent. It's disassociative. It's just not a good way to live. I've seen people that have overdone it, especially with acid. Oh, yeah, because acid is easy to overdo. It's so potent. It's so tiny. It feels very good when you do acid. And folks will just do way too much, and they'll just get a little like –

A little crazy. A little cuckoo. Have you had a bad trip before? I've had more than a few, I would say like, yeah, bad trips, difficult experiences. Almost always the reason for it is because I do them or have done them in an environment where I'm not like in the same place, maybe sitting or in nature. It almost always happens because there's a change in my environment. So like the two examples is the first bad trip I ever have, I was 19 years old and I

was out doing mushrooms at the beach with a bunch of college friends. Yeah. And we had like a sober driver. And so we got in the car to go back home. And then because of that change in environment, I was in this car. It felt claustrophobic. And all of a sudden, I started to get anxious and paranoid. That happened to me. Right?

And so all of a sudden, then my trip turned into, I think I'm dead. What's going on? Right? Like, I just started to kind of freak out. And about 10 years after that, I was living in Miami. And I went to like a botanical garden. And same thing. I did mushrooms with a friend

and we were like changing the environment. We got into the garden to go somewhere else. And again, I just had this sort of anxiety attack, this paranoia. And so bad trips are not fun. Challenging experiences can be, you know, they can be great teachers. And what often happens is when you're having a challenging experience or a bad trip, it's because you just get in your head, right? And you have all this rumination. So oftentimes just breathing it out. Sometimes there's an emotion that wants to come out from beneath the surface. It could be anger. It could be sadness. So a lot of the practice when working with psychedelics is surrender, right? So if I'm having this experience, how do I have an

environment that's safe? How do I have an environment where I can surrender and paying attention to that mitigates a lot of the potential for a bad trip? Absolutely. So relatable. I was doing acid with two girls, botanical gardens. It's going great, but then it started getting late. So we're like, all right, we need an Uber back to campus. I was in college at the time. We all thought we were getting arrested in the Uber that you could just feel just feel the energy it was horrible we didn't say a word the whole ride felt like an hour but it was like a 10 minute ride and it just ruined the whole trip honestly yeah when you have those shifts of those changes it can be you know you're so sensitive when you're when you're taking psychedelics it just can and i think the driver i don't know something about the driver just felt negative

energy or something you know what i mean yeah you can pick up on that as well because you're so open. And then I was doing mushrooms at my friend's house in college also, and he invited some kid over, and I didn't really know the kid. Just the energy he was emitting was so negative. The closer I got to him, the more I felt it. So I was like, dude, let's play Frisbee. I need to get away from him. Get outside, get away.

So I made him go like 50 yards out and I felt better. But you can definitely pick up on people's energy. Well, even when you're microdosing, right? It's like the idea with microdosing is it's sub-perceptual. It's sub-intoxicating. You don't have visuals. You don't go on a journey necessarily. But you still feel a little bit more sensitive.

And so a lot of people, when they start to microdose or work with psychedelics, are like, oh, I have this toxic person in my life that I just have to cut out, you know, or this toxic relationship or this toxic job. So a lot of what psychedelics teach us, like you said, it's like, I want to keep my energy clean. I want to keep it pure. I don't want it to be around people that are negative, that aren't a good vibe. Right. Because when you take psychedelics, you feel the frequency. You kind of tap into that energetic frequency, and you want to be in really beautiful, nice spaces

with people that you love and are enjoyable to be around. Absolutely. I know you've dabbled with some heavy hitters. You've done ayahuasca. You've done toad. Was there any big lessons from taking those? I'm glad you brought that up. When I talk about psychedelics,

I often talk about them as a skill that you can develop. So just like you can learn to cook, just like you can learn to write, just like you can learn to do jujitsu, you can learn to become more skillful at working with psychedelics to not only heal trauma, but I'm big on like leadership, performance,

creativity, vision, entrepreneurship. Psychedelics are incredible tools for creating the life you want to live right and so what i often tell folks is substances like ketamine and mdma when used in a intentional container not just to party and rave but when used in an intentional container for people who are new to psychedelics those can be great starters because the experience is not as intense. Right. Then I look at something like psilocybin mushrooms or LSD.

That's when we have this sort of like you, this ego dissolving experience. And, and, and this new seed of self is planted. So the, one of the most common things that people talk about when they take a psychedelic is they feel like they died and were reborn. Right.

Ego death. Ego death. And that can be very difficult and intimidating unless you feel like you're in a totally safe environment. So psilocybin LSD. And then I think the sort of master plants, if you will, the master psychedelics are ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, which is bufo, the toad, San Pedro,

which is the cacti from the Andes. And these often have, they have a deep lineage. They've been used for thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years. And they can be, you know, you have intense visuals with ayahuasca. It can be snakes and jaguars. The visuals are quite intense. And ayahuasca is my personal favorite. Wow.

It can be a lot on the body because there's the purging you throw up right you throw up you purge it can be a lot on the body but the lessons and the teaching from it in my in in in my belief it is the highest frequency medicine wow um even higher than bufo uh 5-meo dT. 5-MeO DMT is also very interesting, but it's very, very intense. And I see a lot of people who instead of starting at like a microdose, what I tell everyone is if you're new to psychedelics, just start with microdosing because it's easy, it's low key, it's highly, highly unlikely that you'll have a bad trip, right? So start with microdosing. A lot of people just jump in the deep end right away and do 5-Me a bad trip, right? So start with microdosing. A lot of people just jump in the deep end right away and do 5-MeO DMT, right? And many people have a great experience,

but there are a lot of people who end up having a psychotic break or they end up having, you know, like the whole scaffolding of their personality gets totally destroyed and they have no idea how to put it back together. And so I think it's important that, you know, people kind of go easily into this. And with all that being said, 5-MeO DMT can be the most beautiful and transcendent experience that you've ever had. It's like smoking God, basically, right?

It's that mystical and beautiful, but it does take, you know, preparation. You want a great facilitator. It's not just something to casually do off because there are like vape pens now with 5-MeO. I saw that. My friend has one. I was like, I'm good on that. He pulled it up in the parking lot. I'm like, dude, we're going to the arcade right now. I'm good.

Were you at like Area 15 or something like that? No, we're going to some arcade. I'm like, dude, I don't want to do that. Yeah, so that's the thing. You got to be careful and even you know there are people practitioners who are now microdosing 5-meo-dmt so they'll do it as part of a therapeutic container where you'll microdose the five because it just opens things up a little bit yeah and so there are ways to microdose mushrooms and acid for sure like we've talked about yeah but people microdose ayahuasca people microdose 5-meo-. But people microdose ayahuasca, people microdose 5-MeO-DMT, people microdose with San Pedro and Huachuma. So the whole idea of microdosing is take less, right? Do it over a longer period of time

and still have an intention, right? Like it's not just taking and see what happens, like a pill, like really have an intention when you're going. Yeah, that's great advice to work your way up, start microdosing, because people start with ayahuasca, and sometimes it ends up pretty bad. And the other thing is ayahuasca has contraindications, right? Meaning that if you're on Prozac or Zoloft or Lexapro,

or if you're on medication for anxiety or Adderall or Ritalin, and you drink ayahuasca, it can be very dangerous. Oh, yeah? For sure. Oh, it can be very dangerous. Oh, yeah? For sure. Oh, I didn't know that. So psilocybin is the safest. The only thing that psilocybin can't be taken with is lithium. So if someone's on lithium, they cannot take psilocybin.

Every other psychiatric medication is totally fine if you want to take psilocybin. Interesting. And so that's why I go mushrooms really are the medicine of the people. As we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, they are accessible everywhere. You can grow your own mushrooms. It's really easy. And microdosing, I think, is the best of the people. As we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, they are accessible everywhere. You can grow your own mushrooms. It's really easy. And microdosing, I think, is the best way to start. Yeah.

What do you think of those people that make concoctions? They combine different psychedelics and take it at the same time? So ayahuasca is that in some ways, right? Ayahuasca is a tea. It's a vine and a leaf that they've combined. And the indigenous people of the Amazon say that the plants told them that they should be combined. That's how they, that's how they learned. Uh, there are sort of modern interpretations of that.

One is called, um, farm ayahuasca, which is NNDMT, which you can extract from acacia or certain, you know, ayahuasca, and you combine that with an MAOI, right? And the MAOI essentially allows the DMT to cross the blood brain barrier. So I think that's a, like potions are much more advanced and potions are like what the ancient Greeks drank, you know? So a lot of your listeners, we've heard of Plato and Aristotle and maybe even Marcus Aurelius who talks about Stoicism. All of the leading philosophers and thinkers in ancient Greece participated in what were called the Eleusinian mysteries where they drank a potion that was like LSD. So I think potions, combinations, they have to be done by someone who is masterful. If you're pretty new at this and you're just at home and you're looking up recipes online to try to figure out how to do this, that's highly risky and not recommended whatsoever.

Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned breathwork and meditation earlier. What kind of techniques are you doing? So I recently just did a 10-day Vipassana. Nice. Are you familiar with? Is that the silent meditation? Yeah.

So it's actually the technique that the Buddha used to become enlightened 2,500 years ago. And about 500 years after he died, the pure technique, the pure Vipassana technique was lost in every place except Burma. Wow. And there was a lineage of teachers that kept it alive for 2,000 years. And there was a businessman who, this guy Goenka, who was addicted to morphine because he had migraines, tried everything else, went and sat at a 10 day silent meditation retreat, and it changed his life. And since he was a businessman, he set up 150 centers around the world, 100,000 people now go through this every year.

And essentially the crux of it is for 10 days, you can't talk, you can't look at anyone, you can't read, you can't write, you can't listen to music, you can't have your phone, you have to put your phone away. You wake up at 4 a.m., you start meditating at 4.30, you have a break for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then you basically go to bed at nine and you meditate for 10 hours a day for 10 straight days. So about a hundred hours. And the whole technique is you sit,

you listen to your breath going in and out, and then you body scan. So you just scan from the top of your head to the tip of your toes, up and down, up and down, up and down. And you don't move for an hour. So you sit for an hour. You don't move your feet. You don't move your hands.. So you sit for an hour, you don't move your feet,

you don't move your hands, you try to stay as still as possible. And that's the technique that they're teaching. And so that's been great. I've meditated for like 15 years. After I started doing LSD, I was like, how do I get this state without doing drugs or medicines? And I was like, meditation's a great way to do that.

But I'd never done something this intense. So that's a great practice. And then the other practice that I really like is Wim Hof breathwork with cold plunge. So I recently got a cold plunge that I have at home. This was like probably two months ago now. I have it at 39 degrees Fahrenheit and I go in almost every day when I'm at home, anywhere from like 90 seconds to three minutes. I'll do a little breath work before, a little breath work after. And that tends to be kind of my breath work and cold plunge routine. Sometimes I'll microdose with it as well. Nice. But I wouldn't recommend that for beginners because to take a bunch of mushrooms and go

in the cold plunge might not be a great idea. I love the Wim Hof. I do it every day. It's a great reset. It's great for performance great idea. I love the Wim Hof. I do it every day. It's a great reset. It's great for performance and focus. It helps with norepinephrine, dopamine, and the cold plunge is fantastic as well. Have you tried cold plunging at all? No, I do cold showers.

Okay. But it's probably not as effective as a plunge. It's better than nothing. The cold plunge is great because you submerge your entire body totally in water for three minutes. And I've just found, you know, I've been doing it maybe for three years now on and off. And I just found that whenever I do it consistently, my mood's great.

I have more energy. I sleep better. It's just, again, another lifestyle thing that I'm like, highly recommend. It's great for you. Would you ever try those cave retreats where you're in pure darkness for five days? It's funny. Cause after I talk about,

this is very common. I'll talk about Vipassana and then I'll talk about cold plunge. And then inevitably the next question is, have you heard about these dark cave retreats in Oregon? I think Aubrey Marcus was the one that popularized them. And then Aaron Rogers did one. Oh, Aaron did one when he was trying to,

to, cause he's friends with Aubrey. And so he was trying to think of like, you know, he was going to decide, am I going to retire? Am I going to keep playing? And so this is when he knew

he was going to leave the Packers, but didn't know where he was going to go next. And so he went and did a four-day cave retreat. It hasn't called to me. That doesn't mean that it won't call to me. I think spending four days in darkness, it does something to the pineal gland, which is where DMT gets released in the brain.

So I think what happens is when you spend that much time, automatically you start to have these visuals, almost like taking a psychedelic or drinking ayahuasca. So maybe down the road, I'll do that. But I think for me, the next extreme thing that I feel called to do. So earlier this year I did what's called a dieta with ayahuasca, which is where you go and you spend 10 days in silence and you do five ayahuasca ceremonies. Wow. And you also drink something called a master plan. It's like a shamanic sort of way of working with ayahuasca. And then I did the Vipassana. And the next thing I want to do is like a two week excursion into the wilderness where you essentially just have, you know, a bottle of water or a water bottle. You have like a little kind of shelter and you just spend two weeks in basically the wilderness attempting to survive.

Dang. And that I think is for me. Alone or with people? You know, you definitely have support. Okay. Right? You're not totally alone. But the whole idea is how do

you develop the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness and i feel like we're so domesticated you know we live in these little boxes all the time we've totally lost touch with what it means to know how to exist in like real reality so it's a good balance point to figure out okay if i really needed to could i figure out how to forge food and hunt and find water? And so that's kind of what I want to do. Where would your location of choosing be for that experiment? There's a group called the Boulder Outdoor Survival School that's located in Southern Utah. And so they go out into the high desert in Utah and Arizona, and you essentially do like a two week expedition out there. And so I think that's what,

I've had my eye on that for like five or six years now and as an entrepreneur, I've just been building a lot the last few years and now that I have a little bit more spaciousness, I'm like,

eh, that might be cool to check out. Yeah, that'd be a cool story to tell. So what type of food would you be hunting? I think you'd probably hunt

maybe rabbits, maybe, there may be like smaller antelope. There may be also some level of foraging. I don't know what that foraging would be. I think there's also an element of you just don't eat for a number of days, maybe. So you might fast for like three or four days, which is also an interesting thing to do. And again, a lot of this kind of going back to what we talked about at the beginning of

the episode, right? We've been using mushrooms for thousands of years. They've been great allies supposedly in helping us to hunt and survive. And we've also been fasting for thousands of years. Before we were on the sort of industrial food schedule of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we were sometimes if you couldn't find food, you wouldn't eat for four days, five days, a week, maybe longer. So I think weaving in those, what I would call ancestral practices, is a lot of what I would consider to be healthy things. Like even cold plunging and breath work, right? Cold plunging, we probably had to submit ourselves to very uncomfortable situations to survive. And so I think anything that can help expose us to like acute stress can have a kind of a healthy impact on the body.

Absolutely. Paul, it's been a blast, man. Anything you want to close off with or promote? If folks want to learn more about psychedelics, go to the thirdwave.co. If they want to follow me on Instagram, paulaustin3W. And then if there are any coaches or practitioners in here, we have a training program in which we teach you how to work with psychedelics. And that's at the Psychedelic Coaching Institute. Nice. Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks, Sean. Yeah. Thanks for watching, guys. And I'll see you tomorrow.