Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - PsyDAO: Decentralising Psychedelic Research - Dima Buterin & Paul Kohlhaas

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

One could argue that psychedelic research has experienced a similar journey as crypto, in the sense that decentralised communities bound together to fund research where centralised entities refuse to do so. One of the greatest hurdles in modern science is access to research funding, and DeSci aims to provide a solution through decentralised crowdfunding. In addition, IP rights are incontestably attributed with the help of blockchain technology, as they cannot be altered at a later date. However, as the human mind is unique and moulded by each individual’s life story, establishing a causal relationship between consumption and their beneficial or detrimental effects can be extremely biased.We were joined by Dima Buterin & Paul Kohlhaas, to discuss the vast subject of psychedelics (especially in relationship to trauma), how research has progressed and how decentralisation pushes the field forward (DeSci).Topics covered in this episode:Dima’s & Paul’s backgroundsDiscovering psychedelicsDealing with traumaPsychedelics throughout history and societiesHow Molecule DAO was foundedDeSci & on-chain IPEthereum early days, causality & rationalityPsyDAONetwork statesMiscEpisode links:Dima Buterin on TwitterPaul Kohlhaas on TwitterMolecule DAO on TwitterPsy DAO on TwitterSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

Psychiatrics can be a shortcut to decades of meditation. And then I began thinking like, cool, what if you did through smart contracts? We're like, people could pull their money together. And you could literally say, once enough money is in there, a chemical manufacturer could come in, kind of claim it as a bounty and then deliver the substance. And then participants could distribute that substance. I think the IP system is just as broken as the central banking system. This episode is brought to by Gnosis.

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You can even offer high-year staking to your own customers using their API. Your assets always remain in your custody, so you can have complete peace of mind. Startsaking today at KOROS.1. Welcome to EPSCENO, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Ryan Crane. And I'm today joined, first of all, by Paul Kolhaz. He's the co-founder and executive chairman of Molecule, also a previous guest on his podcast. And they've been incubating a lot of different initiatives around decentralized science, including one related to psychedelics. And then we also have

here the father of our most frequent guests, where we have Dima Boutarian. So the father of Vitalik, who's been a long-standing, very active member of the Ethereum community in many ways, and is also very interested and deeply involved in sort of the transformative power of psychedelics, because that's going to be our topic. Cool. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, guys. I mean, maybe let's just start with a little bit of background. Maybe, Dima, do you want to go first?

Tell us a bit, like, what's been your journey and how did you end up here? You have to give me some more direction because otherwise, you know, like, what is really there, right? Like, I was born. I grew up. I suffered sometimes. And right now I'm here talking to you guys and it's exciting. And I love, you know, their ideas of decentralization and psychedelics is a fun topic as a powerful tool. So excited to have this chat with you guys.

Okay, perfect. I think that was a good, that was a good, a good kind of intro. And then what about you, Paul? Maybe too related specifically to the context of the call. So I was born as well. Nice. I began growing up. We have something in common. So I was born as well. And then growing up, I spent a lot of time as a teenager in front of my computer as maybe some of us at playing World of Warcraft, collecting interesting herbs. I was a shaman and a healer actually at World of Warcraft. So very early on, it was like, found fun and interesting to combine things. And then spent a lot of time on online Reddit forums as a teenager.

And many of these forums were dedicated to different like biohacking topics, neutropics, but among others also psychedelic research. So probably at the age of 15 or so, even though I hadn't done psychedelics yet, I was like on Aeroid, which some of you may be familiar with, which is like one of the first kind of open science trip report platforms on psychedelic research. So spent a lot of times in these forums looking at different new emerging substances. And then I think when I was 18, I decided with a friend together to order a few of them online. So back then a lot of like research chemicals were still pretty openly available in the white web.

these were all legal research substances at the time. A lot of it actually based on Alexander Shoggin's work. And as I began looking outside of the psychedelic research community as well, I realized, hey, there's communities here that are looking at developing their own HIV therapies because there's HIV patients they don't have access to anything that actually treats them. We're diabetic patients, for example, that were looking at developing their own insulin. And so I found this really interesting. And I was like, I asked myself as a teenager, why are these people here?

And I realized they're simply here, one, out of curiosity in the case of psychedelics, but also maybe because they're looking for a psychedelic therapy. And maybe psychedelics aren't available in their country or in their jurisdiction, which is why they're online with internet strangers trying to get access to something. But in other cases, it was often just out of sheer need, out of sheer necessity, because people couldn't afford insulin or they couldn't afford a specific cancer treatment. So we're spending a lot of time online in online communities. And then so found that really fascinating.

And we as there as a teenager, hey, here's a fundamental. disconnect between what people need, but then also the power of open source. And then I went to university, studied economics, and then during my studies, I learned about Bitcoin. This is about 2013 and started diving into like internet forms again, but this time about like back when it was still our cryptocurrency and our Bitcoin and our Bitcoin markets, I think, and realized, hey, there's a similar proliferation here of like open source ethos of open source building. And then began looking at open source software. We found that really interesting.

And noticed there's a lot of similarity here in terms of what I was experiencing in those early biohacking or psychedelic research forms and what I was experiencing in these online forums. And that's a part of the thesis that later on led me to yet to believe in decentralized science and build what I do with molecule. But maybe I felt like that was a long,

that was a longer interest. Or maybe I'll just give a pause here and hand it back to you, Ryan. Yeah, yeah, no, thanks so much. Yeah, maybe I feel like also should add, I mean, so personally, I remember when I was like an undergrad, I somehow started reading about psychedelics, and I was also super fascinated by it. And I think by the idea of like, okay, the mind being, you know, potentially being so different on it. I remember reading all the, like, Timothy Leary, somehow the guy with, I found very inspiring. So he was one of these big psychedelic leaders in the 60s.

He was very radical guy, right? He was very, I guess in many ways a bit similar to some of the crypto philosophy in terms of really trying to kind of, having big political agenda around it too, right? Because it felt it was like this vehicle for societal change. And so I got very interested in it then, and then, you know, later years also spent a decent amount of time exploring, exploring the mind, which includes meditation, but also psychedelics and things like that. So I'm excited for this conversation. So, you know, maybe to make it more directly also why I reached out.

So I've actually been looking forward to having a conversation with you for like a couple of years. I've always been really curious about, specifically about your relationship with psychedelics. So I went to Edcon, Toronto in 2018, still like relatively early theorem days. and I was having a conversation with someone, yeah, I was having a conversation with someone about psychedelic research and telling them about some of these early ideas I had around like, how come we use smart contracts to essentially fund or explore or proliferate psychedelic research? And he mentioned that I should really speak to you because you had an intimate relationship with also more obscure psychedelics.

And so when it's asking, what is your personal relationship? with psychedelics through your life. They entered my life pretty late, if we speak about age. I am about to get, I will soon turn 52. So the very first time I tried psychedelics was when I was 42, 10 years ago. And my entry point, like, I always had a very curious mind and always read a lot and it was awesome in terms of learning. it was my preferred way of seeking, my preferred way of

distracting myself from feeling and living, if you will. And one particular book that I was written at the time was Waking Up by Sam Harris. And a really good book, loved it. And the book, the subtitle of the book is spirituality without religion. And for me, that was very interesting

to learn his perspective. because growing up in the Soviet Union, my programming was that religion is awful. It's all a sham. So growing up, for me, religion, spirituality was one big bundle of bullshit. And so this book gave me a slightly more fine distinction of those different types of bullshit, if you will. But most interestingly, in this book, there was a chapter about psychedelics, right? And the way he was talking about that was very eye-opening because I grew up again, like, you know, my programming was like, drugs are bad, you know, they fry your brain. And I would touch anything besides wine.

Well, maybe a few years before psychedelics, I also started, you know, opened up to cannabis. So cannabis, I don't consider a psychedelic, but it's related, right? So anyways, so there was a chapter. And in this chapter, he basically said that psychedelics can be a shortcut. to decades of meditation. And that really picked my curiosity, be like, what drugs? They're bad for you.

Meditation is good for you. How does that work? And after reading this book, I did a lot of reading research and listened to like many dozens of podcasts, rather than lots, lots of books, and eventually realized, yeah, I've been brainwashed. And this is a very interesting tool for humans.

And eventually I tried my very first psychedelic, which was LSD, and since then, there were many other experiences, and they were eye-opening, and they gave me a very different perspective of what humans are, what consciousness is, what God is, everything, right? And my personal story and, if you will, the psychological trauma eventually went away. So it was a really fascinating journey in the last 10 years. I'm curious, he said, like, your personal trauma spent away. Is this something you can, like, expand on?

Sure. And, I mean, obviously, any statements like this, again, the bullshit, because I don't even like the word trauma anymore, right? Because the way I look at this is different, you know, going to the forest and you will see all these different traits, right? And you look at this particular treat and you can see, oh, maybe this brand. branch is broken. Maybe this branch is dried up and lifeless. Is the trauma, right? Or is that a feature of this particular tree, right? And the same with humans. We have our unique set of experiences and they shape us as individuals, right? And the human mind tries to build a very simplistic story of this. Like, oh, here's this is me and this is my trauma. And if I get rid of my trauma, then I will be

better authentic self, you know, it's such bullshit. But anyways, that's kind of the common story. And for me personally, for a big chunk of my life, there was a painful story that I'm not lovable, I'm very awkward, I'm very, whatever, physically and attractive, and I'm not loved by others, and especially by females. And my trauma was kind of connected to my mom. And at some point, that thing disappeared. It was very fascinating. Like, you know, all of those stories just went out of the window and then it's like, oh, wow, here's the same reality and I still have the memories, but those memories no longer, you know, combine into that story and the story of pain and the story of suffering and poor me and, you know, blame. And no, it was just like,

it became very light. All of my past eventually became. ephemeral, if you will. It's there, but it's no longer seen as as real in any way, if you will. Just an abstract story. No, that's very beautiful. I really appreciate you describing sort of how the impact it had on you.

And, you know, it's not, like, again, it's not like, you do this and then you become pure and clear and, you know, suffering free. It's bullshit. You are human. Stuff happens. And, you know, you get sick. People around you get sick.

Sometimes they die. Stuff happens. You make money, you lose money. Relationship happened. Like I recently had a very painful breakup. And it's been a lot of processing to go through that. And it was fascinating to observe how different emotions go through this. And they're like, oh, I'm okay.

That's not a problem. You know, I'm above this. but then deep waves of sadness come and like, wow, this is fucking killing me. A news story comes up, right? And then eventually I had a couple of sessions with some helpful tools and really breaking down into deep abandonment wound, like, you know, something pre-verbal.

And there's no story, but there's so much crying and screaming and sobbing and wailing. like uncontrollable, unstoppable, unstoppable. And when the organism really gives into that, it stops being a problem. It's just like, wow, extremely intense. And it becomes extremely peaceful and beautiful. And it's just amazing. It's like, how can that be, right?

Like, you know, in normal life, we usually try to say, this is beautiful, this is suddenly. This is positive. This is negative, right? But it's fascinating, right? Because life is not like that. You can go through the deepest devastation sorrow. And at the same time, that's beautiful and loving and compassionate and peaceful at the same time and angry. Yeah. That's really beautiful Dima. I had a, first of all, very sorry to hear that you had to go through that experience recently. like breakups are among the hardest things that I think we can experience as humans, both in romantic relationships, but even with friends or partners in any way, shape, or form.

I actually, I was always really profoundly curious to try ayahuasca in my life. And I've done a couple of times out. And I think first, something that I learned through actually working with shamans and doing ayahuasca and almost like a ritualist retreat like setting is this big differentiation between like psychedelics as medicine and psychedelics with a very clear intention and then also psychedelics as like tools and recreational tools expanding the mind, expanding the consciousness,

taking something at a festival with friends or in whatever setting. So the first time I went to an ayahuasca retreat, I was coming out of a four, four and a half year extremely difficult, extremely difficult relationship. And I'd almost like hit rock bottom from a, from a emotional standpoint, but also like my energy levels, my karma. And so finally it felt that I had this calling to do an ayahuasca retreat.

And it was over New Year's. And I was just like, I was looking up things to like online. It was maybe like a month before. I was originally wanting to do a Vipasana retreat, which is like this 10-day silent meditation. But they're really hard to get into. You have to be. extremely committed and normally sign up three or four months ahead. And so I realized, okay,

I'm not going to be able to do a bit of Pasoenade. So I'm looking up for like what other kind of retreat could I do over new years just to get myself into a better headspace. And this was almost at a point where like I was coming out of this relationship about to, we were about to like move to separate continents and it was also fundraising for, for my second company. So extremely, extremely difficult time. And so I went and did this retreat. And, and, Actually, the first ceremony, or the first time I took ayahuasca, I felt I just fell asleep. And maybe to any listeners, if you've never done on ayahuasca, ayahuasca can be very different for different people.

And it's something, it's almost, even from a biochemical composition, it's something that has to build up in your body. So ayahuasca is both composed of MEOIs and then of DMT. And the MAOI has to get to a level where the DMT can actually flood your brain and cross the blood brain barrier efficiently. So the second time I took it, and my attention going into this retreat, was really to like find peace or like find a way forward with this very difficult relationship and and kind of like liberate myself from it.

And then it only took about 15 minutes at the second ceremony and and then throughout the journey so to speak with the medicine. I kind of relive all of the experiences of that relationship. And I think when we are in relationships, we often protect ourselves from the bad. like we only, especially in a breaker, we only want to see the positive, especially when the breakup happens to us as opposed to like, it's a mutual thing or like you're breaking up with someone, you only tend to want to see the positive and you attach yourself to it so strongly,

how great, or only the negative, right, depending on, you know, certain instances, right? Sometimes you get stuck in the negative, sometimes just in the positive, yeah. Absolutely only. Yeah, I think it goes both ways. I'm like an internal optimist by design. So like whenever like when I, when I, break up like situations, I attach myself to.

like why this was the best thing ever and then try to try to fix it and save it. And so, and so within the first 20 minutes of this, of the trip, I kind of fell into the steep, the steep journey of reliving almost every moment of pain throughout the relationship and like why breaking up was the right thing. And then came out the other side being able to envision my future life without this person in my life. And, and, yeah, I felt like to the earlier point that you made. I felt like I lived through years of like I was able to close with one, just one of these sessions, like through years of trauma and actually come out where I felt a profound sense of gratitude for the relationship, but like very ready to go on this next, this next stage

of my life. And yeah, so just want to just share it can really relate to what you're saying. And also, I think there's an interesting separation or differentiation to make between psychedelics is medicine and like and the whole um going to ceremonies or going to retreats and then also psychedelics i think as ways to expand consciousness in a in a recreational setting or or even even as different medicinal tools well well thank you so much for sharing that as well paul yeah i i feel maybe i want to share i i feel for me i think one of the things that i think i felt with like i think for me it was also like acid in the beginning when i was maybe like 21 22 or something.

But I think I had the experience of just feeling very sort of like stuck in my own personality. I felt like man, just sort of like trapped in there. And I would keep moving to different continent, different country because of to try to find, like to try to sort of find myself in some new environment where nobody knew me. And I feel like what psychedelics, I think we sort of did was just to open up like, oh, the mind is so vast and so capable of, like, change as well. What do you guys think of the societal role that psychedelics maybe have today or also, like, could have in the future?

So I think if we actually dig back into, like, the 60s and 70s, I mean, when psychedelics first... Actually, you know, I think it's interesting to look back even further. I mean, I think psychedelics have been integrated into like ancient societies and civilizations. I mean, there's many theories that like there's like a, what is it, the stoned ape theory that actually different Neanderthals and like prehistoric humans used to eat mushrooms regularly. Then I think psychedelics had a strong role in like the Mayan and Aztec empires. So like this kind of also the the origins of ayahuasca. And then I think it was really around.

the aftermath of the Second World War and the Cold War and like when LSD was discovered and different scientists were really actively looking at psilocybin again or peyote mushroom that actually the role of psychedelics massively changed to be viewed as something negative and bad because I don't think people and then there was this whole Vietnam War like you didn't want to the the powers that be didn't want the American public to wake up or realize that this is false this this much larger thing I think that surrounds us. And I think probably around 2010-ish, I feel like we've been slowly breaking out of that again, meaning that psychedelics today are much more acceptable, acceptable again, and that there's, I think we're seeing like a research renaissance. I actually think psychedelics

within them, if used in the right way, really have the power to fundamentally cure things from, to fundamentally cure specific mental diseases or problems like chronic depression. I mean, there's so much data merging around that. And a molecule, so something that I've often, or like a phrase that often stuck with me, which was from a Goldman Sachs analysis of a large pharma company, they asked, is curing patients a sustainable business model? And in the context of this, they were analyzing a drug, I think,

developed by Glaxis muspline that was a hepatitis C drug. And so hepatitis C previously didn't have any, cures, it only had a treatment. So if you get hep C, you have hepatitis C for life. And then they had various treatments on the market. And so JSK developed this cure for hep C. It's like a six-month pill that you take and then you don't have it anymore. And so Golden was like, with like this is bad. You shouldn't have developed that cure because you're hurting your bottom line by curing your like your your recurring revenue. So like you're destroying your recurring revenue. Based on that, the company was downgraded. And I think,

think like there's a CEO change or like there's leadership change. And so the capitalist system that we live in today fundamentally disincentivizes cures, right? We're all about recurring revenue, recurring users. And I think this is one problem in the way that psychedelics are regarded because they act too much like a cure. They can be a cure for certain diseases, but they can also actually get people to move away from things like tobacco or alcohol or even cannabis. And so it's actually psychedelics aren't a very profitable business.

And because of that, I think their role in society is still very limited. And it's quite sad that that is the case. It's like, yeah, here's how that, if that resonates with any of you. I mean, you know, you said capitalist system, but like, I don't know, is it capital system? Because it feels actually a little bit analogous to like, you know, the financial system where basically you have a bunch of like sort of incumbents that, they're using regulation to sort of, you know, control this market and control the incentives and, you know, keep things like crypto out, right, and be a viable alternative. And I think it's kind of

like very similar, right, with the pharmacy company and the medical system and medical insurance and all of that, just in this kind of like really bizarre. I mean, and then you have this like insane outcomes, right? Like in the U.S. where you have, you know, insanely high healthcare costs that just seem to be going up and up, and then life expectancy going down, and the results being so much worse than in other countries. And you have, like, you know, medical debt. There's this massive issue. I think, like, number one cause of bankruptcy and stuff like that. So I feel it's kind of, and I remember actually one thing I watched some years ago. So there's this documentary about, I think it was like the first trial they did in the UK for giving, I think it was side of, I think it was

psilocybin to people like depressed people right i think imperial did that college and then did the documentary about it where they followed the people in this trial you know before they did interviews and during and afterwards and you know these were people who had been like depressed for like i think they had to be at least 10 years depressed and then they had to have had you know a whole bunch of other types of treatments that all didn't work and so they were really like really bad shape right like a lot of them completely locked off and and then if you saw that documentary, like the transformation that you saw in a lot of these people was just incredible, right? It's like they came alive again. But then it was also sort of a sad ending, right? Because like,

you know, for example, I remember with one guy, he sort of really came alive. And, you know, the children of this person were like, oh, for the first time, it feels like I have a father again because he's actually kind of like here as opposed to before he just wouldn't talk even. Like, it was just sort of there wandering around. And then he kind of came back and he was there for like two months, three months, and like all of a sudden I'm alive. And then he kind of gradually fell back again. And then, you know, it was sort of like the sad thing in the documentary.

It was like, well, but, you know, this is a trial and it's not legal. So, like, there's nothing we can do. And, I mean, I hope that will change and that this will actually become a viable alternative that people can, you know, can use to, I mean, one is, I guess, address their mental issues but then you know maybe also just explore their mind and learn about themselves and reality and grow as people and I want to throw in slightly different perspective or maybe totally different perspective right like slipping back a little bit whenever we look at society it's an abstract idea here's me here's society I know how it is and

And I know that this is wrong and this is good. You know, and then from that, I come up with ideas that society would be better this way. End of the day, when you look very, very closely into this and become very obvious through meditation, through psychedelics, whatever, like, you know, we feel some emotions and some emotions are uncomfortable. And then we have ideas that if circumstances around us change, then we will feel better. And then we have an idea that when we feel better, the circumstances change, this means that the world is better. And it's very human and it's very dangerous.

And I'll just throw a couple of examples that you're right. Like one is them is drug war. Because, yeah, some people are very scared. And like, drugs are bad. People are dying from them. People dying is obviously bad. And they're drawing from drugs, blah, blah, blah. And there's the societal change that we deem.

to be negative. So we will solve this problem. We will fight drugs and look at all the mess. Look at all the money lost. Look at all the humans who suffered. Look at all their people incarcerated. So all is our simplistic solution coming from the perspective. This is bad. There is an inherent danger. And the second small example is I grew up in the Soviet Union and the whole history of the Soviet Union. And you know, like, oh, you know, there's this whole. terrorist empire was bad, and now we will just take over and build this socialistic system. And you know what? That system was absolute and total crap.

Like, you know, absolute poverty, corruption, very inhuman and lots. I mean, lots of good stuff, lots and lots of bad stuff, right? So for me, it's always like generalizing is very dangerous and then thinking that what I think is right is very, very dangerous, right? So I think the journey for each one of us is always, it's a journey about how I feel, right? How I feel, and then based on the emotions that we feel, then we'll have a range of options.

And when we look at psychedelics, they're a very, very powerful tool that can affect a human psyche, right? And what does that mean for a particular human? It might mean nothing. It might mean that they, there's less, suffering in them. It might mean that they go crazy or die, like all kinds of outcomes, right? It's not like it's not a silver bullet like, wow, we give people psychedelics to become better. Society will change, right? But here's the thing. There are conflicting human drives in all of us,

many of them, right? And one of them, for example, is that we want stability. We want things to be the same, right? Because they seem to be safer when there is no change. And we try to find a way like, you know what, let's all follow this rules, let's be this way, and then this way we will be safe, it will be okay, right? Of course life doesn't work this way. Like, you know, look at all this attempts, look at some of the religions that try to stick to those fundamentalist ideas, like all those leads to disaster, right? The world is moving forward, right? And it's inevitable. And right now I think that we're going to face even faster rate of change with AI and crypto and everything else, right? So their question is how do we?

humans deal with change, right? That's a fundamental question. And psychedelics is a tool that on the one hand can be very scary because it can disrupt your safe and normal functioning. It's a tool that can help you adapt to change the environment, right? But again, like, you know, it's not like nothing is black and white, right? So we kind of have to, whenever we look at situation, again, when we think, oh, I think that it wouldn't be better this way. It's always a very dangerous notion because things the way they are because of everything, right? Like, you know, it's not like they are this way because the cabal of alien lizards is directing the earth to be bad in this way. Of course not. It's like, you know, it's the infinity of different things, you know, what's happening with the sun, with the weather,

with humans, with food, with, you know, different countries and so on, right? And all of that results in the current environment, right? So then we might have an idea and we want to, we act, right? And, you know, our action will have consequences. And those consequences will be always eternal and unlimited, right? And I look at, let's, again, little example, Ethereum, amazing invention, amazing technology that brought out so much potential for humanity to better collaborate, cooperate, and so on. And has a least so much gambling their ICOs originally than, you know, meme coins and whatnot. And lots of people who made money, lots of people who lost tons of money, people who killed themselves, right?

So you can look at the theorem and say, take a family and somebody in their family lost all their money and killed themselves, right? So they might as well look at the theorem and say, oh, it's because of this horrible invention of Ethereum that my son or my husband or whatever. they kill themselves. So of course, Ethereum is bad, right? Because we're projecting

our internal perspective. So this is always the danger. So anyways, that was my long speech to contribute to you guys. Reflections. I think that was an incredible interesting perspective,

Dima. And it actually made me think, I mean, I think permissionless networks like Ethereum have a similar level of permissionlessness as psychedelics do

when they enter the human body. It's like, it can be good, it can be bad. It always depends on your internal perspective. I actually remember in the really early days of Ethereum, this is like 2016, one of the big concerns around open permissionist smart contract networks like Ethereum. There's a huge concern that like someone might post, for example, an assassination contract where like you could be paid a bounty if you assassinated someone.

And like people were really scared about this as a use case. I remember specifically like the Bitcoin cast being like you can't enable this open permissionlessness. the smart contracts. Like, and then it's funny enough to that it never actually happened, but, uh, or like, like, of course, bad things happen on chain over time. Um, but yeah, maybe a follow question. Do you, do you think? So I think we can look at the, uh, the subjective effects of, uh, of psychedelics,

obviously in the human body and like every, everyone's experience is different. Uh, and, and you need to careful weigh the pros and cons, as you should carefully weigh the pros and cons of engaging with any, any smart contract. the network. Do you think access to psychedelics itself should be permissionless? Because today we can kind of consider it permissioned, right? In certain countries, it's completely forbidden. Like, kind of, yeah, like there's a firewall almost on access to psychedelics. In other countries, there's a much larger access. Do you think access to psychedelics should be more permissionless? Awesome question, right? And I can,

I can never give you one answer to anything. I have to give you a whole bunch of answers. The first one I'll tell you is that I don't believe in the concept of should, right? Because the way things are, right? You know, you look at societies and there are obviously lots of people who are concerned and scared, right? And then you say, no, no, no, it's good. You know, fuck your concerns. Fuck your fears.

We will, you know, make psychedelics available to everybody, right? So then you think that you're meaning well, right? but you also disregarding the emotions of some humans around that, right? So for me, it's not about like there's no objective shoot or whatever. I can only tell how it feels to me. I can tell you that in Toronto, for example, we now have a few dozen mushroom shops, and I think it's amazing. I think it's awesome that now people who want to have access to this powerful tools,

they can have access to this, right? I can also tell you that for me personally is the whole idea that we tell people what is good and what is bad is very questionable, right? So I think that for me inherently, every human has the right to decide what is good and what is bad for them. And of course, it's like, again, it's not black and white. So if they decide like Putin that it's good for Putin and for Russia to go and invade Ukraine and kill people in Ukraine. So here's their, I mean, my perspective, right? It's like, I think it's his right to feel that way and to act that way. And then it's my right to, you know, feel differently and act in the opposite way and support Ukraine and, you know, and so on.

Right. So it's not like, you know, this is right and this is wrong. But this is like, here's that human's perspective. Here's my perspective. So from my personal perspective, I think there's a powerful tools. I would like to see them more available to humans everywhere, as well as people when they become decriminalized, right? It becomes much safer in terms of dosage, in terms of, you know, how pure they are,

in terms of available support, in terms of normalization of everything, right? Because it's very interesting. Like, actually, and I want to comment on the concept of normalization, right? because very often when I talk to humans who are going through some deep suffering, like let's say I have a friend, awesome guy, very creative and sometimes who is suicidal, right? And sometimes when he's feeling that he reaches out, right? And I know that when I'm suffering quite often than other people, they want to help and they're like, well, Tim, I don't feel this way, don't be sad and all of it.

Like, guys, what the fuck? I am sad. Why deny that, right? So when I talk to my friend, I don't tell them, oh, you should not feel suicidal. It's more like, oh, wow, you're feeling that, right? And this is the reality. And it's very difficult and it's intense. And this is the stuff that happens to humans, right?

Like, you know, so it's not about like saying that it should not be this way. It's about acknowledging that this is how things are, right? Because like when there is a, that's a best foundation than for going anywhere, is to clearly see that things are the way they are, right? And they are the way they are for many reasons. Some of them we might be able to sense some of most of them we're not able to see, right? So that's how I think about it.

Paul, you mentioned, I think there's some involvement in psychedelics and the birth of molecule. Can you talk about that? Oh, yeah. Actually, this brings us back to the conversation that we or like kind of just my personal introduction. So when I was 18, me and a friend ordered a few psychedelic research chemicals online. If any of your listeners are more into that, there was 4-H-O-M-E-T, 4-A-D-M-M-T, and a compound called

2-C-E. And me and my friend, we dabbled a little bit. but then I kind of just kept these, and it was a very small amount, I just kind of kept them in my house for many years. And then after I finished university, and was already kind of working in crypto, so this was like 2016, no, 2017, actually, late 2017.

I was working at consensus and spent a lot of time in those past couple months, like looking at architectures of novel protocols that were emerging. One of them was actually Ocean Protocol, for instance, but this is also the time that CryptoKitties kind of blew up on chain. And so it was a really interesting new time, I think, on Ethereum. And I went home.

I was at home. I think my parents are out. I was visiting kind of my hometown, which is in Switzerland. And was listening to classical music, like Brian Eno and classical music. And was on a doing a two-season. trip like a relatively small amount but and during that trip at towards the three or four I was in I developed such a profound appreciation for having come into the into the ownership of this like very rare weird psychedelic and I I kind of like and if you've

know so there's a whole two C B range or two C range and these are all phenethylamines and and are structurally very similar to peyote or or masculine. And so Alexander Shulgin was a famous chemist in the 70s and 80s. He's the inventor of MDMA, but he invented hundreds of other compounds. He was actually at a, he was working at a pharmaceutical company when he developed MDMA and then had such a, like, thought this was an absolute breakthrough. But the company actually let him go because they're like, this is too weird for us,

you're too crooky. And so he retreated and with his wife and Shulgin together, they built up a kind of like clandestine laboratory where they, began kind of just discovering hundreds of new compounds he published two books one is called pical uh phenothoramines i've known and loved him now this called t-car which focuses on tryptomines uh and so out of this there's this two c range now which is similar to mescaline but some of them are very weird they might work for like 20 or 30 hours like it's very much not these are not like commonly known psychedelics and so i do this trip at two c and i during my it's actually the first

psychedelic I ever took in my life. Me and my friend, and back then developed such a profound level of respect for this particular substance, because it's like, I think when you read Trip Reports on Arrowhead, it says like, really only for experienced

psychonauts only, because it's something that is extremely visually intense, but then also very neutral. So like, and with neutral, I mean that many psychedelic compounds have like make you very emotional. It's like you go, LSD for me typically comes in like, almost like waves.

You go through different waves of intensity, of emotion while you go through a trip. And so 2C specifically is extremely neutral to the point where you can almost look at yourself from like a third party and analyze your emotions in a very clinical way while you're going through a trip. And so I'm on this trip. It's like 11 in the evening. I'm listening to music and I think I was having gloss of red wine as all. And I just come to this point where I was thinking about my life, I just worked through some things.

And I come to this point where I have this profound appreciation that I somewhat through the internet got like the ownership of this super rare substance and still had some of it. And I was just like, wow, the internet is such an amazing place. And then I was like, wait, what if instead of, what if you began looking at this from a smart contract perspective? And so I knew I'd spend a lot of time in these online communities. And I, these online communities often. So if someone develops a new psychedelic substance, it's actually very difficult to get it. And if you develop a new substance, in principle, it's always legal because it hasn't been described in any, kind of in any, yeah, in any literature yet, but like it's just a new substance. And what online communities typically do is they do something that is called a group buy.

So like maybe bride, you've read a new research paper from a university and you say, hey, guys, I found this new thing. We should try this out. Who's interested? and then let's pull our money together, and then maybe we can do a group buy. Because typically doing a custom synthesis of a novel chemical compound is really expensive, a couple of you cost $100, maybe half a million dollars to just get it produced. And then I began thinking, like, cool, what if you did this through smart contracts?

We're like, people could pull their money together, and you could literally say once enough money is in there, a chemical manufacturer could come in, kind of claim it as a bounty, and then deliver the substance, and then participants could distribute that substance. And that was, like, that was kind of the origin of molecule. I later on began realizing how that is actually related to IP, how you need to move IP on chain, how IP is actually related to supply chains and distribution.

But yeah, kind of that night. And like, it came into me like a lightning spark. And then I started writing it down. And then I've essentially been building this organization ever since. But that's like the origin, that's the origin story. And I think it speaks to the absolute power that psychedelics have. I think in infusing ideas, infusing us with and infusing me with energy and infusing, and I'm trying to take Dima's philosophy here of what they do to me specifically.

So it really infuses me with ideas with energy, with resolution. And yeah, it's been an incredible journey of exploring how I then. extrapolate this to research more generally, how we can actually open up research in the same way that smart contracts have opened up the transfer of money, the transfer of ownership. I want to ask, maybe going a little bit different one. So you said it's important for IP to be like on chain. Why is that important? Interesting question. I think it's it's really like asking why should money be on chain? Like why should it actually be on chain? Like you, we've got the fiat currency system.

It kind of works. You know, I can make my payments. And I think the IP system is just as broken as the central banking system. It's just, it doesn't affect the transfer of wealth or it just actually affects the transfer of innovation and how we transact or fund or disseminate research openly to the public for humanity. And so the patent system was actually developed in the 18th century. And it had a lot of, that had a lot to do actually with like the, the,

still the history of colonialism. So the patent system is deeply together with colonialism and monopolization. The patent system had one big hard fork in the 1950s, but since then the patent system has never really evolved again, and it's the fundamental thing that we use

to to transact innovation in. Patents are generally created to incentivize innovation. So like if I'm researching, for example, a new treatment or a new, yeah, and medical treatment, I should be able to get back the money that I've invested into funding that cure or that treatment. What the patent system does, though, in reality, is it really

disincentivizes collaboration. It's often used for price gouging, and it just creates monopolies. It creates these big pharmaceutical companies that we know as paid monopolies today that fundamentally control what comes onto the market. And so I said earlier, like curing patients is not a sustainable business model. There's many cases, both anecdotal but also described in literature where where larger companies specifically suppress innovation that might hurt their bottom line, meaning that if I have a cancer treatment on the market and someone has a cancer cure, it might actually make sense for me to buy that and then just kill it and make sure it never sees the light of day. And with patents, you can actually do that. So the patent system, I think,

that we have today is really disincentivizes this. for humanity. And in a similar way that I think the central banking system today disincentivizes growth and the distribution of prosperity to humanity. It actually centralizes wealth within a few, as we've seen with the central banking policies of the last eight to 10 years, specifically of the last four years. Again, if you look at what inflation is done in terms of concentrating wealth, yeah. And so why is it important to take IP on chain?

So we fundamentally believe that like permissionless open IP that is programmable where you can actually access the underlying data in an open fashion would make research and science unstoppable, meaning that in the current system it might not make sense for a group of companies that are kind of collaborating in a cabal to bring a drug to market. If the same drug or cure was published on an open network, capital would naturally allocate towards that. If it's like, if you look at on the open network and you're like, okay, we have these five treatments, but there's one cure, we should all probably fund the cure. That makes the most rational sense. So I think in the same way that smart contracts are unstoppable, I think IP should become unstoppable, scientific research should become unstoppable. I don't know if that analogy, did that analogy make sense?

I think so. And I just wanted to like, you know, one little tiny thing, you know, what Paul was saying that resonates a lot, right? I do think that, you know, having more things on the public blockchain, their transparency of that, the decentralized nature of that resonates with me a lot. But it was like one little thing that he said at some point, he said about rational decision. So here's my take. I don't believe there are rational decisions, no stage thing.

Humans are not rational. Their idea in the human mind, talk, here's me. and, you know, I took this, you know, options. I consider them rationally and I made a rational decision. That's an idea, right? But why were the options, the options that there were? Why was a particular option choosing? There's nothing rational about it.

It's absolutely totally subjective to a particular human existing in a particular context. It was all of their programming and brainwashing and patterns and the current desires. And, you know, like, and did they see a lot of them? smiling people today, what did they eat yesterday, how did they sleep, how was the air, and so on, right? So anyway, it's like that's kind of small but important point that nothing in the world is rational. Do you maybe a follow question on that? Do you think, and I tend to agree to a lot of extent. I actually, I studied economics, so I think some of my thinking always varies into like the direction of rational markets. Do you think there's rationality on chain

in an objective way? Do you think on chain people behave in a certain rational pattern? No. No. I look at humans and humans just like yesterday, a guy that I know and he reached out to me about

Vitalik's recent article about fully homomorphic encryption. You know, he reposted his old article. And the guy is asking me, he is a smart guy, he's an engineer. He's asking me, oh, Vitalik mentioned F-H-E. Is that a coin? Can they buy it?

Right? Fucking ph. that's that's human for you right you know and uh i'll go in further right because as humans we constantly um confuse our model of the world with the actual world so the actual world is unknowable the model of the world is is the model of the world right and it's like even like the basic things like math one plus one equals two what does that mean right you know there are not two objects in the universe, I mean there are no objects in the universe, that's a separate conversation, but there are no two identical objects in the universe. You take two apples and

you know, one apple and one might be poisoned, one might have warms or whatever. You take two electrons. They have different spin and different blah, blah, blah, blah. And what does it mean one plus one? You know, maybe they combine and blow up the whole city, you know, because of their fission, fusion, whatever, nuclear. But, but us. So yeah, we as humans, most of the time we live in this abstract, you know, world of rationality and concepts and models. And we can, you know, and that's part of the reality. But we kind of think that this is their reality, but it's an aspect of reality. We spoke to about Ethereum quite a lot. Do you feel like psychedelics have anything to do

with like the early origins of Ethereum? And I just, a community member inside out, he posted the tweet, which is from Naraj K. Agarwal, which is like just a troll, like a well-known crypto-trita troll. And he tweeted in 2017 that he says pretty sure the official drink of Ethereum is soiled mixed with ayahuasca. Do you have any opinion or like any experiences or knowledge that you would share, like, lore that you like to share about like the early history of Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation, or in your data partisan psychedelics. It's fascinating, right?

It's like human mind wants to find their cause and the sect, right? And for me, it's absolutely clear that causality is a bullshit story because you can create many different causality stories. They all depend on the perspective. But specifically to your question, how do you answer that? Like, you know, their original idea of Ethereum came up in Vitalik, right? Vitalik wrote their original white paper, and Vitalik had no idea about psychedelics, had no exposure, no experience with them.

His white paper was based on his interaction with a lot of people around the world, right? And some of those people had experience with psychedelics and all kinds of other things, right? So that was part of their input into that, into the white paper of Ethereum, right? And then their actual realization of their idea of Ethereum from the white paper, That took lots and lots of amazing people to actually execute on that and build on that and make lots of mistakes and whatnot. And there were many amazing people. And I don't know, like, let's take Vlad Zanfir, smart, talented guy. And he was part of, a big part of some of the early contributions to ideas on the theorem.

And then Blat is really into, as far as I know, deeply into psychedelics. So they are there, but everything else. There were also cats around people, right? And there were birds and they were drinking tea, right? Was it drinking of tea that made the impact in creation for fear, right? It's all a bullshit human story, but that's all that we have, right? So do you want psychedelics to be important in that creation? Sure, why the fuck not?

Cats were important for sure, I can guarantee you that, right? And many other things, like, you know, podcast, iPod, Vitalik heard about Bitcoin. For me, I've heard about Bitcoin on the podcast from, what's his name? I forgot the name of this guy, but he's been running this security podcast. So it was a security podcast called Security Now. And it's been running for almost a couple of decades. Yeah.

You know, like, you know, and why did I listen to that? And it's all connected, right? Yeah. It's all one big quantum soup. And then you want to like, you know, oh, here's my causality story. I will take this quantum soup. and then I will start here and then I'll go there, there, there,

oh wow, that's a nice story. This is how this thing happened, right? Oh, and now, no, no, no, you're wrong. I'll start there and go there and blah, blah, blah, right? And here's another story, right? And now we argue which story is right, right? And I'm saying all of them and none of them and everything. I want to ask you, Paul, so side doll,

because, yeah, because you guys have sort of incubated different types of dolls, you know, so like the ones I'm aware of, right, there's like Vita Dahl, which is focused on longevity, and there is hair doll, right? I think it's focused on like here.

And then I know I'm aware of Athena doll. It's like focused on like reproductive health, women's health. And I don't know, there may be some others that I'm not aware of, right? But then there's also a side dog which is focused on psychedelics.

Like, what does Saido do? Sato's mission is to kind of like make psychedelic research and psychedelics by definition himself like open and unmanobilizable. So applying like open science principles into into psychedelic research. And psychedelics themselves have been yeah, I think we talked about this earlier, even from a research and academic perspective quite tabooed. And even in online forums, I think there are many online forums, for example, where most people post anonymously.

there's still like this large stigma surrounding it. And actually maybe before we, and so one of the core things that SIDA aims to do is fund open psychedelic research. There are many really underfunded areas, underfunded that could be facilitated and do so in a community-centric way that is on-chain native. Sider also supports psychedelic art, for instance, from the Shepibo, Kenebo people, which is like a tribe in the Amazon that administers ayahuasca and create, sheep music, which is really, and so trying to build an intersection between psychedelic science, permissionless innovation, and psychedelic art, and weave that into like an on-chain tapestry. Oh, and then just because he said quantum soup, Dima, we actually have a down, also entering kind of

this flurry of innovation that is focused on quantum biology. So they're building, it's a research team, the world's preeminent quantum biology researcher, and then looking at how do we actually look exactly what is happening? in that quantum suit, but from a biological perspective, because there's this big theory that quantum mechanics are actually at play in the cell, and it's the only reason that cells, a biological cells actually work is due to quantum mechanics. But one of the core things that Sider, sorry, like weird side, weird side, Kevin, one of the core things that Siderot aims to do is build, one community

member is called it like a tornado cast for trip reports, because there's this huge stigma actually about how we collect psychedelic research. And, for example, I probably wouldn't want to post a trip report that I had about because it could be associated with me, I can get doxed. And society is really exploring, like, how should psychedelic subjective data? So, do you also think you said that really well? I think psychedelic experiences are extremely subjective and we try to find causality. But I do think the more data you collect on something, the more causality you can infer

over the effects of a particular substance or even of the, even about consciousness itself. And so what Sada was trying to build at its core is an open, an open science platform, that is zero knowledge proof protected, where both academic researchers, clinical researchers, can upload data through study participants. So this is now, Brian, you mentioned a study that you'd read or about a psilocybin trial. So this could now be actually used in the concept of psilocybin trials. To that extent,

Isada is working with Robin Card Harris from Imperial College, who's a super well-known psychedelic researcher, and then a research called Balas Sigidi, who works really closely with him. He's now at UCSF. And so we're building up this platform called UPSF, which should be both for academic researchers, but also for and on psychonauts.

And this thing goes much more into, like, how can we create the arrow, like a future error width. And then if you want to take that further, you could then actually build, you could train a crowd-owned LLM based on that data that is emerging and use that to analyze the data, to train an AI model that is community-owned and community first, that you can now ask questions, maybe from your own perspective, from your own causality of other people

are having similar experiences, can I take this substance and combine it with this one? Has anyone done this? and do so in a safe and accessible way that opens this up to humanity. I think that could be both used both. So I often find myself Googling. Has anyone had similar experiences with this, this, and this, and I think actually collecting all that data bringing it together, and then also enabling a way for people to safely share their psychedelic experiences could be really valuable to humanity. I'm saying could be, but should be because it's obviously my,

my own, yeah, my own churistic. And I just wanted to mention a couple of things that came up in me as you were sharing this. Sounds like a pretty awesome idea. And I think that it's very interesting because every psychedelic experience, right, it's facilitated by this medicine, right? But it's very much dependent on your context, on your consciousness, on your emotional state, on, you know, things around you and so on, right? So I think it's when we're trying to research this,

kind of thing, we cannot just say, oh, if me, human, add this molecule, how do I predict what's going to happen when I put this molecule into this organism, right? The thing is, like, your organism, your consciousness is absolutely fucking unique. So the question is, how can you then, if you will make it more scientific by having a deeper understanding of what are there, what's the emotional setup of this organism, right? Like, how do you do that? Under all kinds of psychological tests and all kinds of things. So this is a very important aspect of this. And the second one also, what is the physical state of this organism, right? So what kind of like, you know, and I hope that thanks to AI and many other tools, we will also have better, better access to individualized picture and understanding of

this organism, like, you know, my blood markers, my, you know, saliva, my, you know, peptides, my gut bacteria and so on, right? Because otherwise, it becomes like, you know, we can have really awesome idea about a particular molecule and then give it to two different people. And one person has an amazing experience and, you know, meets God and the other person goes crazy. Absolutely. What do you guys feel like, I mean, at this time, right, there's also a lot of interest around this concept of like, you know, network states. Well, basically sort of like new types of, you know, communities, bodies where people like gathered together, you know, create some kind of

governance structure, maybe have some physical land, and, you know, basically try to kind of reinvent like what we've had with nation states, the way there's been basically, you know, almost no innovation, right, for a long time. Like, it's basically impossible to come in and say, hey, I'm going to create a new state and I'm going to do it with totally different rules. So I'm wondering, do you guys feel like there's a big intersection there and that that could kind of also be one of the ways where, you know, maybe psychedelics could end up having a completely different role in society. Let me start with this, right?

I think on the one hand, it's a very natural aspect of human evolution because thanks to all the technologies that we have, it's so much easier now for, I've never met Paul, I've never met you, Brian. Actually, you look familiar with, I think we've met at some conference. Might as. Right, but, you know, we're connecting and we're talking about we have shared interest and we feel more connected, right? And I look at my daughter and she's in this gaming community with Minecraft and she's into, you know, watching anime. And she's connecting with a lot of humans.

She doesn't have, she's very smart and has whole unique, you know, aspects and she doesn't have friends around her here, but she's connected with people around the world, right? And I saw that in Vitalik when Vitalik was growing up, you know, and then he became part of Bitcoin community way before he even met somebody in person, right? But by connecting online and so on. So I think that technologists, they do facilitate this creation of new connections and new kinds of communities and a totally new way. That's for sure, right? But then I also want to point to this like, again, the policy of the human mind tries to

idealize that and like, oh, wow, I can find all the people that. that like the same thing that I like, let's say Web 3 or psychedelics, whatever, and we will create new community, it will be so awesome and I'll be so happy. Well, you know what? That community will also will be full of all kinds of people. There will be some greedy assholes that will fuck you up and there will be some awesome people who will at some point will go crazy and you will meet the love of your life and then you will lose like, you know, like the humanity of us is not going away, right? So yes, new tools, new types of communities. And And this is, I see this as a natural evolution of human society and also of us as humans constantly

experimenting with stuff, right? That's what we do. Like, oh, look at this mushroom. Let me eat it. Oh, I'm dead. Oh, no, I have not. You know, it's exciting, right? So let's build this new community.

So it's amazing to look at all this experiments and look at Zalu, looks like a really cool experiment, look at the Ethereum community and all the DOS and, you know, like, and meme coins, right? Like, you know, the community is built around that stuff and doesn't resonate with me, but who cares? You know, there are lots of people who are excited and they connect and they resonate and they try to make money and they lose money and maybe they lose money, but maybe they find the love of their life, right? And so that's my take. What do you think, Paul? I would always lose all my money for the love of my life. Yeah, I think love is the ultimate.

Trump card if you I think you mean you can have lots of love and be really poor but like like ultimately like no amount of money can get you love but I think on a more on a more jurisdictional level I also think network state experiments are really interesting and I think actually I think there's a similar maybe forget about network states for for a second I think network states really interesting because they enable a form of regulatory arbitrage that we haven't seen before or regulatory openness that we haven't experienced before. And there's a lot of regulatory arbitrage in crypto, meaning that some people only live in Switzerland or in Dubai or in Singapore

because it's where crypto can be freely traded, transacted, or you can actually own it. In other countries for many years, you couldn't even get a bank account if you wanted to get any kind of crypto assets out. And the same is true with psychedelics, meaning that in Canada, for instance, I think, I believe, 5MEODMT is legalized, Then you have Colorado, where I think mushrooms are now legalized.

And lots of people go to Peru because you can take ayahuasca there. Amsterdam had a similar role to play in the past with truffles. And so there's all of this. I think in crypto, you have a lot of regulatory arbitrage in terms of what you can do. With psychedelics, you also have a lot of regulatory arbitrage with what you can do. And so enter the network state. I actually believe one of the really strong roles of network states can be like really clearly defining. Like, we are open to this arbitrage.

Or like we actually enable you to safely conduct, we empower you to safely conduct crypto transactions. We empower you to safely conduct psychedelic research or safely take psychedelics. And I think this would actually be expanded to one more things. I know another that outstate Vitalia recently had a lot of, or actually in Zuzal, both Vitalian Zuzal had a big focus on longevity as well. And in longevity research, you have a similar problem,

meaning that, for example, they're really interesting longevity gene therapies. However, even administering a gene therapy or running a trial for gene therapy in the United States is highly regulated. So I think they have this little regulatory arbitrage. We're in Rua Tung, now a company called Mini Circle administers this new gene therapy. It's a pholostatin therapy. And initial results, just I met someone at a confid in Dubai that had actually taken this therapy. There's only been 300 people globally. He'd taken the therapy.

And he was like, it's been absolutely life-changing. And I think he suffered. He had medical issues before, but he didn't take the therapy specifically for that. He's just like this longevity crack. And he spoke extremely highly about this therapy and said it was like life-changing. For him, he's in his early 30s. So it's not like that he's that old yet. And again, this really has to do with regulatory arbitrage.

And so I think network states can play extremely powerful roles in enabling current research to go more effective in enabling more, open access to people who want crypto psychedelics or longevity therapies, I think fundamentally give the people what they want, right? Like, why do we have to live in a society where, like, I can't do what I want? Like, like, as long as I'm not hurting anyone, and as long as I'm not posing any risks or arm other than potentially to myself, like, I'm allowed to smoke and drink alcohol, which kills more people worldwide than like anything else, but like, no, I can't try this new experimental therapy or this, I can't eat this mushroom. Like, that to me seems, that doesn't make any sense. And so I think network states have a really powerful, yeah, a really powerful potential

role to play in that. Well, what's your opinion, Brian? Or any, any thoughts from you, Duma? I agree with you. I actually, and I think it's certainly has that role in psychedelics. We can have that role there. Although, you know, actually, I feel like psychedelics are maybe kind of threatening to the governments, but not like as, like, having crypto as general. like you there's like more more threatening and i i think crypto maybe needs network so it's even more i think especially if you think of things like privacy right which is something where i think there's like just a complete you know big governments maybe like okay you can you can you can you can you can't you can speculate and stuff but you know we want to like know exactly what you're doing

and like we want to control the ins and outs and be able to shut things down and if you're going to try to do something privacy focus we're going to like come after you so I think that that feels like something where, you know, what's the way out there? I mean, one of the ways out I could see is if you do have more of these, like, you know, new states that are saying, hey, we actually want to sort of enshrine some of these, you know, rights of people, which I think historically some countries have done, like, a great job at, right? Like the U.S., of course, of the Constitution has historically done, you know, a great job at, like,

protecting people's rights of Switzerland as well, right? I think we're like privacy something that's really like held up high. But I feel it's been kind of getting with the technological changes, it feels like these values kind of keep dropping away. And I feel there's some kind of need for like a rebirth, right? Where someone says, okay, we're going to come and, you know, define new rights and protections that people should enjoy

that are actually like, in many ways similar to things that they were in the past, but just like updated for like the digital age and for the internet and for blockchains and decentralization. I really like that thinking and actually just mean we wonder like why a network state like why don't put like constitutional level rights into like I guess it's hard to enforce through a smart contract but actually I've seen a lot of network state initiatives essentially become these like little mini pop-up conferences and I'm like that's cool. But actually like why don't start at a what should a constitution look like for a network

And I think then if you started combining it with actually like on both on chain rights and potential off chain rights, if such a network state actually had a piece of land or was in a physical location, I think that'd be really interesting. I wonder, Brian, have you seen any experiments? I know network states itself is almost, is almost becoming an area, like in like a hot area in crypto. I'm curious if you've seen anyone actually work at what you've described, like that constitution. Yeah, I'm not like super up to date on. like, you know, with the latest thing in network states. But, you know, for example, we did do podcasts.

There's been a while or two now. But with, you know, it's Project Nation 3. So that's basically, Luis Quende, who is one of the co-founders of Aragon. And Aragon, of course, I think, was one of the first kind of things who was trying to do on-chain, like basically trying to do Daos, and they had this idea also of, like, a court system. And I think Nation 3 is,

really like is trying to do that right i think that's one of the core things that's trying to have is this kind of like you know on-chain legal system what then they can have you know different kinds of values and ways to dispute uh handle disputes and so yeah at least that's one i'm aware of that's kind of going in this direction cool yeah it's a good job with lewis i haven't seen him or yeah haven't seen him in a while cool anything else you guys want to touch on Can I ask Dima, just a question from our community? What's your favorite psychedelics out of the many that exist and why? It's hard to give one answer, right, because everything is very context-specific, right?

And depends on what's your perceived intention, right? Sometimes you feel isolated and alone and then taking MDMA. can be amazing, right? Sometimes you want to deal with some difficult emotions. And then, let's say something like ketamine and 5MEO can be very emotionally opening combination combination. Sometimes you want to meditate deeply or whatever, right? So it's really about the context.

It's hard to pick one. 5MEO, GMT, right, is a very powerful tool that I've gotten to appreciate more and more. And it's really awesome that it's not criminalized in Canada. And it's actually available in those mushroom stores there. And so it's very powerful, right? So of course, it's always very important that people approach that things carefully and gently, right? That's kind of one of the big things, as I always kind of like to say that, you know, life will inevitably fuck your heart.

So why don't you be gentle with yourself? and, you know, because difficult stuff will happen anywhere, right? So gentleness has an important aspect of how life is approached here now. So, yeah, there is that. But, I mean, TECB, I love T2CB. I think it's awesome, even though I haven't taken it in a long time. And there are so many fun, cool things to play with carefully, you know, responsibly, if you will. And, yeah.

Thank you so much for sharing that, Dima, first of all. And I'm personally also really interested in FiveMEO and think much more research should be, should be funded. So people actually know what use cases can I apply if I have MEO DMT for? And like what is the like what does the data say what people are experiencing? I mean, so when people meet God, right, like how the fuck do you measure that? All right. On a scale of one to ten, how much was, you know, how deeply did you meet God? But yes, of course, human mind will find a way to try to measure stuff.

Yeah, I was like, you know, 60% into feeling like connecting as God. Do you, actually have an interesting community question that might also be a nice way to run it off. So do you think that people need to hang up the phone after they've gotten the message? This is, I think, something that is often discussed in psychedelics is like, or do you think there's a wider way to frame this? I think that always, always, always, the only thing that happens is the only thing that can happen, right? So then we try to find a story that describes and says, oh, I should therefore, I should not have. But that's bullshit because the only thing that happens is the thing that happens, right? And, you know, if you have an experience and then sometimes you're tempted like, wow, you know what, I'll stay away from that for like, you know, next year at least.

Like, you know, my first experience was five a minute. I'm like, wow, not going to touch it for a while. That was so powerful, right? Sometimes it opens something and then you want to continue going there. Sometimes you're like, oh, you know what? Like that was awesome. And now I just want to, I don't know, go to Vipassana. and, you know, Vipasana can be a very powerful experience too.

So for me, there's no answer to that, right? Like, we want to find a recipe, a recipe that will take us on the prescribed path from where we are and we have suffered and unhappy and not peaceful and we'll get to, and you know what, there is no such path, right? Like, you know, you only have this current moment and the emotions of that and your actions, right? So everything is absolutely totally unique and subjective to you. And everybody, anybody had tells you that tells you, you should do this, and you know or you should not do this and I always say like thank you but you know

fuck you like because you've never lived this consciousness right you've never been in the shoes of this reality you have no idea right so I don't believe in advice as such you know like we can throw ideas but you know what most of the time the human who is going through something difficult I would much rather give them a hug I would you know just like you know hug them give them a glass of or whatever, they don't need my fucking advice. You know, they will figure it out, right? But, you know, sometimes we feel disconnected and we feel lost and, you know, we feel unloved

and all of that. And you know what? Let's share the love that we have. Cool. Beautiful. Well, I think that's a good place to maybe like enter this conversation. Yeah. With the instruction of like, give someone a hawk and people will figure out their own thing.

I think that's generally true. Right on. Yeah. Thanks, guys. That was a really cool to chat. Yeah. No, thank you so much. Yeah.

Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Tima. It was really great to have you on. Really enjoyed the conversations. A little bit of a different podcast than we generally do. But I think still kind of like a lot of connections to decentralization. And I think all of the values that, you know, people sort of try to realize when working on these technologies or exploring psychedelics.

So thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you guys. Thank you so much for having having us. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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