Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #109 Cory Allen

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Cory Allen is an author, podcast host, Meditation teacher and an audio engineer based out of Austin, Tx. We discuss his new book Now is The Way and dive deep into philosophy and mindfulness.    Connect with Cory:   Website | http://www.cory-allen.com/ Twitter | https://bit.ly/31CQJCc  Instagram | http://instagram.com/heycoryallen Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/HeyCoryAllen  YouTube | https://bit.ly/2N4iW0B Listen to Cory’s music on Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2Z4tinP   Check out Cory Allen’s new book Now is the Way | https://amzn.to/2MjZw8p   Listen to The Astral Hustle Podcast | http://www.cory-allen.com/theastralhustle   Subscribe to Cory Allen’s Newsletter | http://www.cory-allen.com/newsletter   Show Notes: Now Is The Way by Cory Allen | https://bit.ly/2KAgjlB Hold Onto Your Kids by Gabor Maté | https://amzn.to/2KCe95b Don Miguel Ruiz Books | https://amzn.to/2Z5E6hw Be Here Now by Ram Dass | https://amzn.to/2KFAIHs The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle | https://amzn.to/2hYouaS   Show Sponsors: Vital Farms Ghee Chance to win Onnit Products and a year supply of Vital Farms Ghee (vitalfarms.com/ghee)   Felix Gray Blue Blocker Sunglasses felixgrayglasses.com/kyle (free shipping & 30 day risk free returns or exchanges)    Waayb CBD www.waayb.com (Get 10% off using code word Kyle at checkout)   Onnit Foods & Supplements Get 10% off all foods and supplements at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/kyle/   Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Subscribe to Kyle Kingsbury Podcast iTunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY  

Hello, friends. Today, we have an amazing guest. His name is Corey Allen, and you may have heard him before from his podcast, The Astral Hustle, which I was a guest on. Also, he's been a fucking regular on the Aubrey Marcus podcast. I think he's gone on 16 or 17 times. He was one of the first guys that I jumped on as a guest when I first got to on it. I've been meaning to have him on this show for quite some time because he has a wealth of knowledge in mindfulness practices, figuring shit out in life, plant medicines. He is a dialed dude. And there's something to people that you meet or come across where you realize they just feel different. There's a feel that they have and a way about them that kind of transmutes a quality that is calming and just feels fucking

good to be around. And I always feel that way when I'm around Corey. And I mean that genuinely. He has a brand new book out. It's called Now Is The Way. We dive right into the book. We talk about all sorts of cool stuff from his childhood growing up to how he got here. Everyone's got a path and his story is fantastic. I know you guys are going to dig this one. And remember folks, there's a few ways you can support this show. One of which is to click subscribe, never miss an episode. We're running twice a week. Second, you can hit a five star rating and write something lovely about the show that you like, something maybe you've learned or a way that the show has helped you change your life. And that helps other people to see it on iTunes and everywhere else this podcast is on. Also, support our awesome sponsors. We've got a couple new ones today that

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Don't waste another minute. Get yourself a bottle of new mood. Get yourself a bottle of melatonin and get your sleep right on it.com slash Kyle for 10% off all supplements and food products. Enjoy the show. Well, let's jump right in here. We've already had a conversation about stuff that we can't get into on the podcast. Or we won't get into.

I shouldn't say can't. Regarding Mother Earth. And maybe we'll circle back to that when we talk about ayahuasca. But you've got a new book out. It's phenomenal. I'm about halfway through it. I want to talk about how you grew up and kind of what led you down this path, because I don't know if it was, you know, you had parents that meditated, I think in the Bhagavad Gita,

they talk about that. And I don't, there are two, there, I don't know, there are many, many thoughts on this, but if you believe in karma, there are many people on this planet that believe in karma. And so the idea in the Bhagavad Gita is that if you did well in a previous life when you incarnate it again you would be born into parents who already meditated and we're on the path so you'd be able to leapfrog up a level Paul Selig's guides teach differently they teach that that there is no karma because they teach a love that knows no record of wrong so if you embody Christ consciousness or however you want to call it,

that ultimately God doesn't give a fuck. God loves you no matter what. Right, it's like love without judgment. Yeah, exactly. It's the ultimate highest unconditional love would not punish you for mistakes you made in a life where you were doing the best that you could with what you had. Yeah.

Well, let's jump in. I mean, talk about growing up. What kind of parents did you have? What was life like? Where were you at? I was in Austin. And basically, neither of my parents, no one in my entire family has ever read a philosophy book, has ever meditated, has ever touched. They didn't even read. To this day. Yeah.

Damn. So, yeah, no one in any, not one single person in my entire family on either side ever really even read, much less us and my brother, of course, but previous generations. Yeah, no interest in that. My dad, my parents separated whenever I was four, and my dad was kind of like this Tarantino movie character, kind of Dallas cowboy, crazy businessman type of fella. Heavyset Republican, alpha dog, old school type of guy. Always had multiple guns on him at all times. And it's kind of actually a funny hidden talent. You know, everyone has a secret talent. Mine is that I am a expert marksmanman which is the last thing that many people would

think and it's because growing up i uh anytime i would go visit my dad all we would do would be shoot handguns and shotguns and rifles or after we were done there we would go pack ammunition i in uh at his home because he had this this room in his house. And this is in the late 80s, early 90s. So he's on early on that type of thing. But pack ammunition, pack shotgun shells, and then go to the range and just shoot. And he had a whole gun safe full of everything you can imagine. And so, yeah, like that was, so I'm an expert marksman.

So when Armageddon comes, you know, that's a good skill to have. That's a great skill to have. But anyway, so he very much had this mentality of, you know, unfortunately, you know, I think causally, you know, he had some racism in him and definitely and had this attitude of like, kill or be killed. And also at the same time, he had this weird, dark, twisted humor about it, where it was all like a good story that actually one of his friends told at his funeral, he died by the way. One of his friends told at his funeral was that they were hunting in Argentina and all of his buddies were like on a plane.

And one of them, like they all of course were taking like nitroglycerin tablets because they all had heart conditions because they all basically just ate steak and drank wine every night and were super stressed and hypertension. And this is a story I think adequate for your podcast is that like him and his buddies used to go eat lunch and then go to the bathroom and weigh themselves before and then go in and then come out and weigh themselves after and see who could lose the most weight that was like their yeah their their uh their competition anyway so they're on this flight and one of them starts like kind of

having like a an issue and like kind of passes out and my dad's like no no don't like if he died like there's nothing we can really do we're out in this remote area like and i gotta get back to texas so you know like let's not tell any of the flight attendants. Like, if he's dead, he's dead. Like, if he makes it, he makes it. But I don't want to delay our flight. And all his friends are like, okay, that's cool. Everyone agreed.

Yeah, they're like, oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. You can't save him now. Yep. And so, anyway, but it's interesting is that, you know, going through life like that as a kid, I saw the negative repercussions of that. I saw like he was always he literally always had a gun on him or two. When his car slept with a shotgun under his bed, he always sat with his back to the wall in restaurants. He had no windows on the front of his house.

And it's all because he had fun screwing people over, you know, for a living. And as a little kid, I remember one time him telling me, like, some of the stuff he was up to at work. And then I went to school and they were like, what's your father do? What's your father do? And it's like, okay, Corey, in kindergarten or whatever. What's your father do? I was like, he told a guy to go on vacation and then had his office cleared out and put into a warehouse so that whenever he got back that he would be shocked at the fact that all

of his stuff was gone his office is empty and then my dad went to las vegas that was like to party that's what he does for a living i guess um and so that's you know he would tell me like he carried a gun because he never knew what he was going to see when he came around the corner and he always wanted to be prepared. And, you know, like he, it was that old school system of he was buddies with the Dallas Chief of Police. My understanding was that they gave him a badge just so he could carry his gun wherever he wanted to. And, you know, that was kind of how he, how he did it. And what I learned from that really, like, I just kind of observing it, I don't know, intuitively was that, man, I want the opposite of that because I saw the fear and the anxiousness and like the suffering

ultimately. And I wanted to not live my life to where when I go around the corner, I'm scared and have to be prepared of what I might find. I want to go around the corner and be excited of who I might run into. And I really saw the suffering that that way of living created for my brother, for me, for my mom. And so that was a great teacher to me. What's interesting is that he did die, and I actually write about it in the book, is that he did die just kind of out of nowhere and from heart condition, of course. And it's interesting is that now i you know i've been able to love him more since he's been dead uh not because of uh anything other than my understanding you know you know because everything in our lives man is like peace all that stuff compassion it all is perspective and understanding and the higher view and that

more deeply you can understand someone's own narrative, how they've kind of authored their life and the causality, the things in their environment that have caused them to live a certain way that you can, it's sort of like, you know, you can't beat the saying, if you can't be, how are you going to be mad at a tornado? It's like, you know, it's a tornado, just it naturally occurs and it does create destruction, but there's no real use in being yelling at a tornado, right? Or yelling at God for the tornado. Exactly. Exactly. Or yelling at God for the tornado. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a good teacher for me.

And then my mom, you know, she was just doing the best she could with two young boys and working, you know, no college experience and trying to work and put groceries on credit cards and stuff our whole life just so that she could kind of make it. And then that was that. I found because of a lot of that, you know, there was a lot of other stuff, a lot of traumas and things like that, that I experienced. And because of that, I began, I became very kind of retreated into myself when I was younger. And I was always, you know, there's the blank slate idea. I think that we seem to kind of be predisposed to having, as we're born, certain personality traits, even it could be the genetic switch bank of our brains, you know, or something

like that. I was always thinking in kind of far out ways. I remember a distinct first moment of kind of meta-awareness I had was whenever I was a little kid, I went on vacation and I went to this hotel, this one of those big, massive hotels, like in the Gulf Coast or whatever. And I was there with my mom, my brother. And I remember that my brother had gotten sunburned or something. So he was chilling in the hotel and my mom was like, well, we need to go out and do this. And I was like, okay, I'll go with you.

So I remember we were driving away and I looked back at the hotel and I remember thinking, it's weird that like my brother's in that giant building in that room, in a single room by himself right now, laying on bed, watching TV. And like from the camera of his mind, he's like in this whole other experience and it's in there happening right now,

even though I'm in this car driving away from that building. It's so strange. And I just had that kind of spontaneous, effortless sort of awareness of like, wow, we all are living our own camera view of our life. We all have the headset on, you know? And so I started thinking in those ways, you know, and it actually really led to a lot of challenges

because going to a little school, you know, like a daycare whenever I was a kid, they were trying to push some like Christian agendas on the kids there. How old were you when you had this realization? I was probably like six or something. Oh, shit. Okay, super early. Yeah. Okay. And going to these little like, you know, this little daycares and stuff like that, trying to push a Christian agenda.

And I remember saying like, I don't think, I remember being like, that just doesn this little daycares and stuff like that, trying to push a Christian agenda. And I remember saying, like, I don't think they're, I remember being like, that just doesn't make sense to me. And they were like, would be really angry and they'd punish me and put me in the corner for not, you know, going with it. And they'd be like, well, like, how about this? I'd say like, if there's a God, then how about the lights in this room

will just go out real quick, just as a little high five. And they'd be like, you're in trouble, get out of here here go sit in the hallway you know it's like all right well this is what life is going to be like you know i'm going to think weird shit and i'm going to be forced to go sit in the hallway um but that i started thinking that way kind of early and as i entered society more going through the school system like, that all just got more and more intense because of fighting with teachers. I have this massive issue with authority, hence my self-employment, you know,

and all that type of stuff. And I, you know, life was challenging. I argue this for everyone in high school, but I started realizing one day, totally randomly, I overheard this conversation of some people saying, if you could have dinner with like four people living or dead, who would it be? One of those people was Jesus. Another person was Nietzsche. I remember like hearing that and thinking, that's an interesting name. And so as a teenager, I was like walking through a bookstore. I happened to see a book that just

said Nietzsche on the back. I was like, there's that name. I'm gonna go check that out. And I remember reading it and I opened up. I was like, oh my God, the first time in my life, this is how I think. It's not like what I think, but it's the math of how my mind works. And I became obsessed, unhealthily so, with reading philosophy. After I soaked all that up, I of course was like,

well, okay, well, the Western bookshelf is done. Let's go to the Eastern bookshelf, see what they have. And this is in the early 90s-ish, you know? So, there's no internet. It was literally like, well, what do they talk about in this book? Who are the names? Who are some of the things? And maybe I could just figure something else out. And anyway, so then I started reading and eating Eastern philosophy. And I was like, okay, this is not only how I think, but this is what I think. This is my intuition of operating for the world. And I realized that through reading Eastern philosophy, just kind of autodidactically.

And I like to say autodidactically, not because I like to say, oh, I figured all this out on my own. I'm awesome. I like to take responsibility for my own idiocy. And so- Explain what autodidactically is. Oh, just someone that teaches themselves things. Yeah. I like to say, look, I food all this out of my own. I'm sure there's huge gaps of stuff that I've missed. I'm an idiot. I just, you know,

I'm doing my best here. And so, I realized that my own mind and that my inner life was mine. And I had kind of a Viktor Frankl moment of like, no matter what's going on outside of my life, no matter what I'm forced to interact with or the circumstances, my inner life, I have control of that. That is where my freedom lies. You can be in chains and being tortured and whatever, but you can still think whatever you want. And I realized that, okay, if I can undo some of this stuff and I can get some clarity and understand myself, this can become like my sanctuary, right? My inner life can be my sanctuary. And I started meditating just from reading descriptions of it in Zen Buddhist books and stuff like that, like Suzuki and things like that. And I was reading, I started just, I figured out just kind of intuitively again, I guess, that consciousness was where I was at. Because I started reading psychology and semantics and, you know,

things, all neuroscience and all this stuff, because I just was like, oh, this is, these are all the components. These are the composites that create this thing I'm trying to figure out. And I knew that when I was reading something, it was like discipline. It was like, you hear a fighter. I don't know. I keep getting my ass kicked. I'm going to go back to the gym, go back to the gym, go back to the gym. I don't care what it takes. I'm going to keep getting my ass kicked until I can actually feel confident and I can push through and turn this corner with my game. And I was like that with knowledge. I was like, I'm going to keep reading philosophy, keep reading science of the mind, keep doing it, keep doing it. And I was like that with knowledge. I was like, I'm going to keep reading philosophy,

keep reading science of the mind, keep doing it, keep doing it. And it was tough. I didn't know what I was reading. I never went to college. I still haven't. And it's like, I'm going to keep reading this 800-page book on semantics until I understand it. And I knew that I was really turning that corner whenever I would read and I would feel high. Like I would read something like some a hundred year old book, you know, on, on, uh, uh, psychology or something like that. And I'd feel stoned afterwards. And I was like, that's my brain expanding. That's like the, I started realizing that's the edge. That's the map of my consciousness, kind of the horizon is pushing back and I'm getting new territory here. And that became this crazy thing that I started chasing,

you know? And so the more I did that, the more I eventually realized like, oh, it's consciousness that I'm interested in. This, all this stuff, like this, that's the umbrella that all this stuff is under. And I became just obsessed with consciousness. And I realized that the more that I worked on this and worked on this in life, and it was really out of just like personal sovereignty and safety at first, because I was in a lot of pain. And I realized like, this pain is lessening. I'm beginning to be able to take control of my thinking and I'm able to kind of start responding to my life

instead of just being caught in this momentum of reaction to this thing and reacting to this thing. And the more I did that, the more I realized like, oh, wait a second, I'm different now. Like I'm different than I was last year. And I started comparing the change of like how I felt a year ago to how I felt today. I was like, I'm better. Like I feel better. I feel more clear-minded. I feel, like, more positive. And I kept working at it. And I feel, oh, a year later, like, I'm a different person now. And I just realized that you could literally think your way into a better life. And so, it all completely, it all happened on its own. I had no, and the weirdest thing about it was that

I never talked to anyone about it because no one in my life one would understand it not not in the intellectual way but just like it was not in their like their their ecosystem of thought yeah and two um you know at that time like it was not like i don't know i it would just be seen as weird or something that needed to be handled you know and like for example um whenever i was 14 uh i i was put in a mental institution for a short time because i was basically just like totally fine like i thought i was fine um i did go through a period of basically of only sleeping like an hour a night for a long period of time um but it was because they were i don't know my mom was like freaked out by me essentially and so and so was my dad and so they were like oh there's something's wrong you know he's yeah he's

a weirdo and couldn't understand it yeah talk a bit about i mean we've covered a lot here you one thing that i've come to realize that you stumbled upon, or maybe you were guided to or directed to, is this idea that whatever tools we have, whether it be meditation, float tanks, some form of stillness, and then into plant medicines and breath work and different things that can shift our state of being, is that it quiets the noise of life. And we all have suffering. We all have some form of suffering, even from something as simple as the wanting of things, right? To be born is to suffer.

Yeah. So let's dive into that. What was your, you talked a bit about your dad's suffering. What was your suffering at this point in time growing up? What did you really struggle with? It was all like complete emotional incompatibility with with my own life i felt anxious because of just my family system i was everything was kind of ruled by fear and threats and manipulation and growing up in that it's one of those weird things where you know if you grow up rich you have a materialistic kind of viewpoint of the world if you grow up in one other way you get this inherent viewpoint of the world and i grew up from this way of having just crazy amounts of anxiety

and always having to be aware like am i being manipulated intellectually or emotionally right now am i being how is this threat like why, why am I being threatened? I didn't do anything, you know? And that made me very skeptical of everyone and having, you know, feeling loved conditionally where it's like the switch is flipped on and off. It's like, if you're being good, basically not causing a disruption, then you're not in trouble. If you do anything that, you know, is not acceptable, then you're in trouble trouble if you do anything that you know is not acceptable then you're in trouble the love switch is turned off and now it's you know punishment time yeah domingo ruiz goes yeah that quite a bit yeah yeah and you know man like so that was i grew up seeing the world in that way of being really skeptical hence hence my magnetism towards Nietzsche, of being like, yeah, that's right,

it philosophize with a hammer, you know? And just like in insane anxiety too. Like I used to coming home, you know, I got really into music at the same time as philosophy. And that was like, I became obsessed with that. I would just like play my guitar for like four hours a day. And I would read for four hours a day and just, I would fall asleep with books. You know, I would just like play my guitar for like four hours a day. And I would read for four hours a day. And just, I would fall asleep with books. You know, I would like get in the bathtub to try

and like chill my anxiety and relax a little bit while I was reading. I'd fall asleep. My book would fall on the, like the Tibetan book of the dead is all crinkled up in my library. Because, you know, it's like, I was just doing this stuff just obsessively, really obsessively. It was actually unhealthy. I touched a little bit about that in the book too, is that like when you go so into something with such white hot focus, it does have its benefit. But ultimately I realized that that is,

one reason for doing that is ignoring other things either you can't or you're not ready to acknowledge. And for me, it was basically just my heart and mind was not ready at that point. couldn't plug into it so anyway feeling yeah man just extreme anxiety extreme almost depersonalization you know at that time and in as a teen you know i started doing psychedelics a lot you know because in the 90s people were partying in austin and um that was another it was like my own kind of little mental ecosystem that I was in and just trying to figure it out and yeah so it was just working

through that anxiety working through that fear and and trying to build that bridge back to like okay it's cool to not it's okay to not be skeptical of everyone. It's you're not, everyone isn't trying to manipulate you. There isn't a reason to be scared like all the time of like what might happen next. And that's the really damaging thing. And I think all of us experienced that to some degree or another is that you have this kind of unhealthy attachment

to like Bowlby's theory of attachment. It's really fascinating. But whenever you get in this kind of the idea is that we're supposed to feel rooted and connected to our parents and that's where the unconditional love is and that allows us to go out into the world and then test things out and if things don't go well we always can go back to home yeah home base yeah yeah but if you don't have a good attachment then with your family, then what happens is you get a destructive attachment to where that's no longer safe,

but the world isn't safe either. So you basically get locked in this place of like not being able to count on the world and not trusting the world and not being able to trust the family and not being able to trust that, you know, the unconditional part of that. And that creates this auto-regulation of your emotional state because you're like,

I'm a singularity human. I'm a singularity person. And if you're okay, Kyle, if you're calm, then I'm calm and I'm happy because that's what I'm worried about, right? And if that person's sad, then I need to, I'm like, oh, okay, now I'm feeling sad because of that. And I need to work with that. And if that person's anxious, then it makes me anxious. And I got to go like, oh, God, we need to work on this together. So you're trying to send out these grappling hooks to try and find that home base and kind of co-regulate with every person that's around you at all times. Gavramati talks a lot about this in a book called Hold On To Your Kids, which I think is phenomenal for all parents out there.

But yeah, he talks about that attachment. Nice. When that attachment is broken, either due to the punishment reward system, the conditional love, or to other reasons, your kids will find that elsewhere. And oftentimes, they look for that in their friends. Yeah, definitely.

And that's exactly what happens. I mean, it was the case for me in high school where everything you do is predicated upon what you think other people think of you, right? So it's 100% in not just trying to make friends. Like obviously there are certain skill sets that are really important in life. Jordan Peterson talks about those,

Sam Harris talks about those. Like things that you can give to your kids are one of the skill sets. How to make friends is critically important. It's critically important for them their entire fucking lives. But how you go about that makes all the difference in the world. Because if your happiness is dependent upon what other people think of you, you're failing at any stage of the game. And you end up getting into a lot of bad situations. Yeah, man, definitely. That's a really important piece of it is how friends become your family. You know, that's the only place you can find that thing

because, okay, well, this dude has always been cool to me, you know, and we have a good time. And I think I can, we can be connected. And that was how I totally grew up like, as with friends as family because of that reason yeah so you touched on psychedelics at a young age when i remember when i was in high school there was some people you know doing mushrooms i'd go to the park and uh maybe we're gonna smoke some pot i probably smoked weed like three or four times in high school but um my parents who had done a ton of drugs and never told me about it always just to tell me don't do drugs they're bad and they'll ruin your testosterone you'll suck at football and all that

shit and so i've never heard that one before they'll ruin your testosterone it'll lower your testosterone so i was like oh okay you know i'm reading all the bodybuilder mags i'm like all right clearly it was a lie it's a total lie and um fuck yeah i was i was thinking about that and you know the kids plus it's like it's like rogan told me and i'm not trying to name drop but but when when we were um talking about acid and he's like i've never done it before because everybody who's offered it is some fucking hippie who hasn't showered in 40 days and has a beard down to the floor and he's like hey man you know and i'm like okay i get that because in high school that was my experience when i looked at people who did psychedelics i thought of them as total druggies like losers right and these weren't

like i mean maybe it was a lot of the skate crowd that kind of stuff and i don't think of skaters as losers but um the appearance to me was these guys aren't getting shit done and um so i avoided it then but i remember the first time i did it i I think I was 18 or 19. It was at a house party. No intention, just to get high. I was drinking too. And it was for sure, I don't believe in bad, you know, like a good experience, bad experience when you have an experience. There's the saying, there are no bad trips, only challenging ones.

Yeah, that was for sure the most challenging experience because I didn't know what to expect and I didn't know at that, you know, obviously things are dose dependent, but the fact that I was, you're not in control, right? So you can either submit to that and surrender and let go, which is critical in all plant medicines and in life in general, or you can fight it, right? And much of us fight life just as we fight the psychedelic experience. And so fighting that was incredibly

challenging. But talk a bit about those early experiences. You mentioned partying and things like that. And I think a lot of kids want, they instinctively know that they need to get out of their head. They instinctively know that there's something deeper in life. And that they need to get out of their head they instinctively know that there's something deeper in life and so they look to those things even alcohol to shift their consciousness right because we we all need to get we all find altered states whether that's a tribe without plant medicines that uses fucking bullet ants on a sleeve or anything or they dance without water for definitely you know 24 hours till they start to trip. Like we're looking for altered experiences and altered states of consciousness.

What were those first experiences like? Were they how you experience it now or how are they different? I mean, what's funny too is that people might hear you say that we all seek altered states of consciousness, right? And think, I don't know about that, but someone sitting on their couch and eating a pint of ice cream is doing just that.

It comes in every possible form. of Joe. Exactly. You're trying to shift your consciousness and it's fucking caffeine's a hell of a drug. It's the best and most transformative. Uh, and yeah, so basically I think that it was, you know, there was a lot of, uh, LSD around whenever I was, uh, in high school and there was no, I never drank like my friends was no, I never drank. Like my friends and I, we never drank. It was just that, there was just LSD, you know? And basically what happened to me was that

I was never like going crazy, you know? There were times where I would set up my guitar rig and go over to like my friend's house and we would all, know take lsd and then i would like crank it up all the way and have all these effects pedals and just like shred and have this giant wall of noise and they would sit there and like lay down and just have this like crazy psychedelic train of a sound bath going down and that's like a way to party um but a lot of it was just sitting around talking and like thinking about stuff and i was just very drawn to that you know that way of things it's kind of like

jason silva yeah exactly and i would have like some of the dumbest slash most amazing insights ever which would be sitting there like like looking at this bottle on the table and be like that's not that far away you know like that's right there man and that's it that's not that far away. That's right there, man. And that's it. That's it sounds dumb, but it's actually amazing, you know? And so some of the, the real actual useful things that I can see that unfolded into some real meaningful insights for me was, um, I was actually just talking about this with Donald Hoffman, uh, is that I would, I, you know, was under the influence of some friends and there was this poster of like a horse head nebula, like a big gaseous space thing.

And I remember looking at it and being like, hmm, that looks like Jabba the Hutt wearing a purple wig, you know, and then go leave and come back. That looks like someone reading the storyboards of Armageddon or Apocalypse Now and Godfather 1 and 2 to three crickets, you know, or whatever. And it's like, come back and that's the alligator wearing a hat made of meat and and then waking up the next day and

looking at that that horse head nebula posting oh that just looks like a gaseous star again and i remember realizing like oh wait a second like our mind is just this kaleidoscope of impressions it's not an illusion it's just just an impression. It's very flexible. And it's like that classic kind of visual illusion test thing where it's like, is it two faces or is it a vase? You know, it's like you can see it both ways depending on how you look at it. And kind of from that point on, I started seeing it in three ways. You know, it's like it's two faces, it's a vase, and it's also two faces and a vase at the same time. And I realized that that's how our perception works.

So it was a real breakthrough for me to start understanding that I was making a perception of life, even down to, of course, visually, but even down to my emotional state, the way of thinking and responding to kind of the cyclical feedback I had with my own existential experience was fluid, and it stretched in and out. And it was always changing, always different based upon what was

in my body. And that could be natural chemicals or just daily life or experiences or whatever. So it was very useful and opening in that way. Yeah, no doubt about it. I think Ruiz talks about that too in Mastery of Love, how our perception, there's three different perceptions in a relationship of two people. My perception of my partner and what I project onto them to be, their projection of me and what they project onto me, and our projection as a whole of what our relationship is in together. But in reality, there is me, which is far greater than any interpretation of someone else's perception of me. And there's her, and she's

far greater than any interpretation or perception I have of her, and far more than that. And in both directions, right? There's the high self where unlimited growth, unlimited potential, unlimited ability to change and to shift and to become aware. And then the shadow, all the traits that I don't see or don't want to see that can exist there. Right. And that's just on a human level. It's on every other level too. Totally. Totally, man. And that paradigm you just talked about is why it's so silly to try and be cool. You know, it's because like, what are you doing? It's like, I'm trying to, I'm being cool right now. It's like, for who and for what? for what it's like well i have this idea of what everyone else thinks is

cool and so i'm going to try and do that and it's like well what are they doing well they're doing what everyone what they think everyone else thinks is cool it's like well what is who is actually cool people who don't give a shit and do it and be themselves well then what are you doing you know i mean it's like and if you just yeah and it's not a fake don't give a shit and do it and be themselves. Well, then what are you doing? You know what I mean? It's like, and if you just- Yeah, and it's not a fake don't give a shit, right? Yeah, yeah, it's acceptance, man. Like people have asked me a lot in life, which is really weird because I don't think I'm like a cool person,

but people say like, what is coolness? Like, what is it? I'm like, it's just accepting yourself. It's just being who you are and doing it without any attitude, right? It's like, that's not cool. That's of course a projection as well, but just like being able to like let go and just be okay with what you are. And that's whenever

your originality, because as you mentioned, like we are all in, by definition, we're all infinite. We're unknown. We can never know all of who we are because we're always experiencing life. So everything, you know, as we experienced, as we're having this conversation right now, you and I are both learning new things. We're feeling new things. There's always information flowing in. And so we're infinite. You know, our resonance with life itself creates an infinite, an infinity within each of us. And that means that each of us are this doorway to infinite possibility and originality, because only you have walked in your footsteps and experienced what you've experienced. Only you have walked in your footsteps and experienced what you've experienced only i have my perspective on life and so forth and so if you are able to

accept that and be yourself and be comfortable with that which you know it does take some work some undoing not doing but undoing then your originality really can thrive and in the world and that's where you get someone like anthonyourdain, you get someone like Bill Murray, or whoever. These people who everyone's like, oh, wow, they're such an amazing person. It's like, yeah, because they're allowing themselves to be this individual person. And that's what we're all wanting to be, ultimately, I think, to begin with. Yeah. How do you begin to unpack that the undoing the undoing well it's a um i think that cultivating negative space is really useful so like meditation is something that's really handy in that uh of course you know i think psychedelics have that effect on people

because it just kind of gets you out of your camera view of your mind of that. We're all like locked in our first person narrative of experience. And we think that this river of awareness that is arising within us is what there is in quotes. Whenever really it's just this frequency, like the world outside of our skin is this crazy like radio signal and our nervous system is like an antenna just tuning in this tiny little piece of it, right? And once you begin to experience that, then you go, oh, wait a second. I am also have this radio knob on me

that's turning all the time. And I'm just dialing in different parts of this giant frequency. And you begin to realize like, oh, I'm fluid as a person. Like just my consciousness, my way of seeing the world is always changing. And once you begin to realize like, oh, I'm fluid as a person. Like just my consciousness, my way of seeing the world is always changing. And once you begin to recognize that, you can sort of get out of that.

I need to stick to this shape and be this thing and be this character and identify my identity as this thing and lock on to all of these ideas of who you should be, which honestly, you had no say in for the most part to begin with. Like we're all born and told who we should be, what our lives should be like, what we should do in the world, what our ethics and morals should be before we even hardly know how to talk.

You know, our parents are just pounding that stuff into our head. Our society, our cultural reinforcements are just pounding all that stuff into our heads. And we have no say in the matter. And it takes a bit of recognizing that we were programmed but get then to begin to unprogram um and so meditation is another great way to do it because it creates the same amount of internal negative space you get a little distance from compulsion the compulsion of being you know most people are just living in this long like just links of chain of reaction,

reaction, reaction, reaction. And through meditation, you're able to stop and say, okay, hold on a second. Let me be aware of what's arising right now. What am I thinking? And why would I say this to this person? Or what could I say to this person to help them to create more equanimity and more compassion? Why would I want to make that decision? Maybe there's another way to approach life. Maybe I can approach this whole game in a completely different way. And that space between thinking and arising thoughts

and actually executing your thoughts. I actually call that the mindfulness gap, where you can, and that's how you can author your life in a beautiful way, is whenever you have a negative arising thought, where you feel like you want to talk shit about somebody, you want to do something bad or whatever it might be, in bad, of course, it's relative, but do something you know is destructive.

You can literally just, if you have the negative space in your mind that arises, you can literally just let it go. Throw that shit in the mindfulness gap. Okay, next. Our minds have 40,000 thoughts a day, right? So wait three seconds and you'll have another idea. It's not like we're short on,

like this is the problem is we have too many thoughts. So if you have a bad one, let it go. Another one will be another good or whatever one will be around the corner before you're even done processing the fact that you let go of the bad one. And it's just, yeah, it's an amazing way to be able to really shape how you think in the world. And because of the fact that our brains wire themselves

through neuroplasticity, repeated habitual behavior, the roadways of our mind actually start growing into a shape to try and help and facilitate that way of thinking. Once you can get into this pattern and this habit of thinking in a positive way, your brain literally grows into a positive way of seeing the world

and your entire perspective starts shifting. That's one of the things I put in the book is that we're not our thoughts, we're our thoughts that we put into action. You could think about nasty shit all day, negative shit all day, but as long as you have're aware, and you have this awareness what you're putting into the world and how you're affecting other people,

is the good part of yourself, the part of you that can touch on love. Even if someone has a horrible internal matrix that, you know, through no fault of their own or through fault of their own, there's all of this have this ember inherently in us because in order to have negative, there must be a polarity, a balance in all things. And sometimes that's smaller, sometimes that's bigger. But for a battery to have energy, it's got to have a negative and a positive end or else there's no charge. Each of us have that charge within us. So if you have this tiny pinhole of love or positivity, maybe it's shrouded and protected in armor. If you can listen to that and hear that through the noise of the pain and the negativity and start choosing to turn to that,

that's where your actions come from. That's how your thoughts, you can let all the negative ones and let those things blaze on and pass and turn the thoughts that come from that place into action. That's who you are because that's what other people experience. And that's how you start building what you are in the world. Yeah. That reminds me of the native American tale of the two wolves, equally sized, equally matched.

One's good. One's bad. One's black, one white. And which one, which one wins. Right. Right.

It's the one that you feed. That's right. And that's, that's exactly it. I think of, I think of a lot of these things is we, no one teaches us this shit when we grow up. No one teaches us that we're not our thoughts.

No one teaches us that we don't, if we experience a thought that we don't like, we don't have to grab it. And we talk about going down the rabbit hole with psychedelics and people that are averse to that oftentimes don't realize they go down the rabbit hole all the fucking time when you're driving your car when you're on the shitter and you start spinning out of control in a fucking whirlwind of shitty thoughts that's right you've gone down the rabbit hole you've effectively grabbed on and latched on to something yeah you're true that isn't you right exactly and that that is

a state of um it's a state of unawareness, but it's also a state of, of some form of psychosis the longer you stay there. Right. And I think the more ways we find to, to quiet that noise and to figure out like, where is something stemming from? And then to latch onto the thing that we know is best for ourselves, best for our community, best for our families, whatever that thought is that does good for the world. Right. That's how we can be what we wish to see. Totally, and it's crazy how, you know,

if someone even needs a self-centered reason to act in that way, if you start honoring the white wolf inside of you, the gray wolf, then you become known in the ecosystem of your own life as that type of person. And that's how people respond to you. It's like we're all, like all of our lives, it's like, I call this sitcom reality, where all of us have like, oh, there's Kyle. He's this guy that thinks this way a lot of times and acts like this and dresses and, you know, wears Speedos and stuff. In the sitcom of my life, like, that's what your character is,

right? And so, as an actor, I interact with you as that character so that we'll have a good story. And that's how everyone treats and kind of understands everyone else. Like, oh, this is this guy's character or this woman's character, and this is who they are. And so, people are prepared to engage with you kind of in the cosmic drama, as Hinduism would say, in that way. If you are an asshole, people see you coming and they go, oh God, this guy is always negative. He's an asshole. Let's close off, not interact with him, be skeptical, not give him any warmth. if you're a funny person who's always warm and in good spirits and trying to you know be uh be cool and whatever then they see you and they get excited they say

hey there's kyle what's up man how are you doing like just like we did whenever we you know sorry this morning and so if you can honor that good part of yourself and start bringing that to your life, then your world gets better. It actually can be kind of solipsistic if you want. It's like your world gets better because everyone around you starts seeing you as someone that they want to be around and they're excited to see. And so as you do your daily walk, the world actually becomes a better place. And as a nice byproduct of that is that you're actually being a good person

in the world. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. You think of like the, what is the motive? Those kinds of things. Yeah. You can even come at it from a selfish point of view. It always starts with you, right? Like the idea that you can't truly love someone unless you love yourself. Right. It's completely true. Right. And you can love other people, but it's a different kind of love. And it might even be an attached love or an incorrect love, a love that does hold a record of wrong, a love that does withdraw upon conditional changes and all those things. it allows you to operate differently it allows you to be better and the people around you gravitate towards that yeah i mean i talk about energy on the show and i don't know this i took over a fitness show right and uh i'm not sure you know there's a lot of pro wrestlers and shit like that they're on the show before and i don't think i know there's plenty of pro wrestlers that meditate and then are down but um so it's not a knock on pro wrestling but this idea of energy, like if someone walks into a room and they're a little off or they're

fucking fuming, you might have be on the lookout for that guy, you know, like without fucking saying a word, you would know if you're tuned in, like, I don't know. I get a weird feeling around that person.

Yeah. Right. And if somebody comes in that you've never met before, but they're fucking glowing and they got a big shit eating grin on their face and they're laughing and telling stories, you're like, I want to stand by that guy i want to stand with that girl you know like what's she saying let me go over by her absolutely that kind of thing right so we all are drawn to these these forces you know that that are within ourselves each of us is our own universe

but as we get in contact with other people and that's truthfully one of the feelings i have around you you know aubrey introduced me to you He's introduced me to Ted Decker. He's introduced me to Perongi. There's Dan Engel. There are certain people in this world, when you meet them, you're like, oh shit, I want to talk with that guy more. And I think that's a true testament of the work that you've done. No doubt about it. Thank you. Thank you, man. i really appreciate that um and what's crazy too is what you're saying is that if even someone is not uh interested in or they hear you say the word energy and they're sort of like i'm i'm switching off now to something else uh that is actually a you can you can take that down to a kind of a scientific level you know uh and also if you think

about energy in the body you know if a wrestler is listening to this you know they that down to a kind of a scientific level, you know? And also if you think about energy in the body, you know, if a wrestler is listening to this, you know, you've got your body, that's an important part of the system, but the energy in quotes part, that's what's up in your head and in your heart, you know? And those are vital, vital parts to the body. More of us talking to Jason Havey one time, the CEO of Onnit, we were talking about kind of how I fit into the Onnit world. And he was like, this company is all about nutrition and we've got all the body stuff, but the work you're

doing is our head, you know? And this is a really useful thing for you to be involved with us because of that. And you look at the energy in quotes of someone who is, makes you feel uncomfortable. And I've thought about this a lot because I was very curious, like, why is someone who seems like elevated? What is that? Like, what is the quietness of that person? Alternatively, what is someone who makes you really uncomfortable that you don't even know? Like, you can be on the subway in New York and someone walks in and you're like, oh, that guy has 30 heads in his refrigerator.

Let's not make eye contact with him um and uh you know if you think about on a biological level all this we're all recognizing like facial expressions all the different you know muscular uh aspects of the body how we're holding ourselves we actually can sense a lot of times how someone's blood pressure is moving you know you know all that stuff we have a subconscious understanding from an animalistic level of what's going on in someone's body just on a physical level. And that allows us to understand kind of pre-intellectualization where someone's at. And it's just an ancient part of our brain that's a protection mechanism. Because if you're in the wild, you want to be able to recognize a threat or something. And we recognize it like that because we've had 200,000 years to work on it.

And so whenever you see someone who is really, we sense is like, hmm, that person seems aggro. Like they are, they are feeling that way. And you feel that way for a reason. You should listen to it. What's interesting is that alternatively, whenever you meet someone who you were so kind to say that you feel that way, whenever you and I get together, that all that other stuff is gone the other direction. It's like your internal matrix, the muscles in your face, your blood matrix, the muscles in your face, your blood pressure, the focus of your pupils, the way that you engage kind of intuitively with your environment, it's all clearly slower, calmer, more tuned in, and it doesn't have the

dissonance and the animal aggression and kind of the frenzy that someone who is in a state of aggression would have. So it's kind of curious how you can find these people who seem super, their quote-unquote energy is really dialed up and tuned in. And it literally is on a physiological level. Yeah. And I think at basic survival levels, you realize, oh, I can take my guard down. Right. Right. And just from there, you realize, oh, there's much more to that that and you start to embody some of that peace some of that laughter some of that joy yeah and that's infectious you know totally we gravitate towards those people because they impact us in a positive way without saying a fucking word yeah just by being in their presence yeah that's the best kind yeah well shit brother let's talk about your new book let's do's do it. We only got 10 minutes here. All right.

We'll be in and out. You wrote Now Is The Way. That's right. And it seems to me that any book with the title Now has impacted me in a very positive way. Awesome. Power of Now. And shit, there's one. Another one was Now.

Well, we'll just focus on those two. We'll just focus on. Let's just focus on. Let's just focus on let's just focus oh yeah be here now wrong exactly exactly those are the two thank you be here now and uh and uh the power of now uh phenomenal books but talk about talk about your book now is the way yeah essentially i wrote it because of everything we're talking about you know people are suffering uh anxiety rates depression rates feelings of isolation and

distraction are through the roof, you know, and that's because technology has exploded. It's blown right by us in our evolution. And one of the things I put in there is that, you know, our biology is trying to catch up. We have this kind of evolutionary hangover we're dealing with, right? We're trying to catch up with how the modern world has evolved so quickly. And one of the things I put in there is that there are still hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon rainforest, while at the same time, amazon.com will deliver your groceries to your front door in two hours. Like, how can those things coexist, right? But it's just because technology has gotten crazy, right? And so the pacing of life has become so much more fast. The amount of

kind of attention thieves and the different directions we're pulled in have gotten so, has become so intense that people are really feeling fragmented. They're feeling pulled in all these different directions. And that also maps onto social media, you know, the images and ideas of how people see themselves in the world versus the curated world that we see online and all this stuff. And it doesn't have to be this way, right? We don't have to feel this thing, even though we're getting sucked into that more and more. And it's designed to suck us into it because attention is a new currency. People are making money with your attention online. So algorithmically at a level that we can't even imagine, it's like,

there's a thing called computational inference, which is super evil, which is like what Facebook uses, Google, you know, all these algorithms that basically based upon your behavior and your movements online, they know what you're looking for before you do. And so they serve up an ad that will serve you what you need before you even recognize that you need it. It's like if you're feeling depressed, you go look for sneakers online. That's what makes you feel better. They'll recognize how long you sit on certain photos, what you like, who you interact with, and they're like, oh, this is a pattern of depression. So as they're entering into that state, show them an ad for sneakers. So before you even get there, you're already... So it's crazy,

right? Yeah. So I recognize all these forms of suffering because of my past experience and that I figured out ways to work through those things and get on the other side of those things. And now is the way, is the map I use to do that. And being in an interesting position for my podcast, The Astro Hustle, which is a... That name confuses people, but after it was in the Hustle, which is a, that name confuses people, but after it was in the New York Times, you know, it is what it is, right? But it's supposed to be

a quadruple entendre for a reason. I want it to be confusing because I want you, I do that evil thing that makes you actually think for yourself. That's what I like to do. It's like, what does that mean? What's it mean to me? You me? And so as I started talking about these things over the years in my podcast, just kind of sharing some of my personal experiences and how I got through them, I started getting all this feedback from listeners saying, hey, man, that thing that you said,

that actually, not only am I experiencing that too, but that really like how you got out of it, that really turned a key in my mind and it helped me get out of it. And as I heard that, I started realizing, oh, wait a second, these aren't just things I experienced. These are universal human challenges. Everyone experiences this type of suffering, all this shit in just a different way or another, but we all go through this, right? So I wanted to create this guide to help share all this

information I knew and I know can help people transform in these universal experiences. And I'm really interested in wiping away all the jargon. And because some of this stuff, because we're dealing with the mind, it's nebulous, right? It's kind of ethereal. And like you work out in the gym, you can measure your bicep and see if you're getting growth or not.

But with your mind, you have to, it's a little bit more intangible than that. You have to like stop and pause and okay, am I feeling happier? Am I, has my life scaled in a good direction? And so because it's slippery like that, it's so easy to read some similar things on similar topics that are just kind of gobbledygook, that are feel-good, kind of positive thinking stuff that don't really convert to actual real change. And so, I like things that are functional. I like things that you can really feel. And so, I made it all crystal, crystal clear and just simple. And I spent a lot of time taking kind of a lead from some of the people who inspire me to break down these huge ideas into single

sentences, you know, things that are like, here's all this stuff just, you know, parsed out in the most crystal clear way where anyone can understand it and really use it to transform the way that they're thinking and the way that they're living and stop kind of reacting to their life and start responding to it and begin to author their future and make the changes they want. Another different thing, what makes it, you know, people ask me, you know, the subtitle is an unconventional approach to modern mindfulness. It's modern because I'm talking about it and what it means to be a person living in the modern world today. A lot of these great books and ones that you mentioned, those are written 40, 50 years ago, you know? And so it's like they apply to that world and, you know, they still it's like, they apply to that world

and they still hold timeless truths, but talking about these things in a modern perspective from a modern mind, you know, from my age group, our generation, and being able to really connect them and communicate them in a way that people living today can understand is really important.

The other thing that makes it, the thing that makes it unconventional is it's really, I really built a bridge from knowing to doing. Because a lot of the books that talk about things like this, like, oh, well, here's all these ideas, go enjoy. It's like, well, no, that's cool, that's great. But the piece that's missing is like,

how do you convert that into your life? And in some ways, I almost modeled this, my book, like a business book or like a strategy book. And it really, it is modeled in that way because I took it like it's modeled, the sections are now, which describes the present moment. Like what is presence? Again, it's one of those weird kind of slippery things to define. It really talks about it, gets someone to experience it, feel the wow of now, you know, right now in the moment. The next section is there,

which talks about how we get lost. Helps you identify the ways that you can get snared up and go down these bad rabbit holes in your life that pull you away from yourself. The here section is how you reel yourself back in. Whenever you do get lost and you do get into this pattern of bad behavior and just feeling negative and whatever,

how can you reel yourself back in, pull yourself back to the present and start taking control and get back to that peace, get back to that self-awareness and start really altering your life again? And then the how section is where it really kicks off into action. That's two parts. One is called 12 ways to now, which are 12 guiding principles that if you even inserted one of them into your daily being, things would change. And I even say in there, don't do all these at once. Kind of spend time, introduce these new things, try these things out. And it can be, there's simple things that are elaborated upon, like don't let your past keep you from your future. So many people identify with

what they were, and it keeps them from being who they are today and prevents them from being who they can be in the future. And being lost in this idea of yourself won't allow you to enjoy the abundance of what you're experiencing right now, you know? Even another example from 12 Ways to Now is like, try new things that challenge you. Because as we go through life,

we kind of learn what we like, we learn what's comfortable and that challenge you. Because as we go through life, we kind of learn what we like, we learn what's comfortable, and that's great. But what happens is that we get a little too comfortable with that stuff. And that part of our brain that needs to snap on and identify and assess something new gets lazy. It starts to kind of atrophy. And so eat weird stuff, travel to weird places, meet new people, talk to different things, read a different book on a different topic, you know, get into a different, try a different kind of music, whatever it is, keep trying new things in your life, add new things to your day, because that brings you right to the present. Cause your brain, like if you had never been

any, you know, if you'd never traveled to an Asian country before and you go to Shanghai, like you better believe you're going to be in the present moment. You're going to be like, Oh God, how do I, how do I get to my hotel? How do I talk? How do I order lunch? What do I do? How do I cross the street? Because your brain kicks on and it goes, okay, cut away all that, the illusions of the future or the past, get right now and deal with what's right in front of you. So in a smaller way, you can do that every day by just kind of engaging with new information. So then the second part to the how section is called on meditation, which I really took a cue from Stephen King's on writing. That's like kind of a high five to him that that title is. Because

he doesn't tell you how to write in that book. He talks about writing and he sets you up to actually write for yourself. And I feel like there's so many words have been written about meditation that kind of make it more challenging for people to get into it because it's like trying to describe your own first-person experience. You can't do it, man. The only thing you can do is set someone up a good scaffolding and set up a way for them to try it themselves because it's the only way you're going to experience it. And it feels the more that you color what that experience should be like, the harder it's going to be for someone to get to their own authentic connection with it. It's like telling somebody the exact details of your psychedelic experience with this particular medicine that they're about to do for the very first time. And then you just set a tone for what

their expectation is rather than giving them guidelines that help them get to a place where they can have their own experience. Totally, totally. It's like, go have my dream. It's like, I can't. You lay down this way. You go to bed at this time. You take this tea at night. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's it, man. That's the whole book pretty much from top to bottom. And it was crazy. I wrote, I'm learning this is a bit more common, but it's because of, part of it is my insane tenacity and drive to just do the best that I can. And another big part of it, honestly, is just my immense respect and integrity I have for humans and for people and for what I'm trying to do is that i wrote three manuscripts you know because i thought the first one it's like well i've never written in this long a form before

and i wrote it 50 000 words like well that's done let's delete that and try start over and try again i just started again from scratch and i was like oh now i see the voice coming through now i'm figuring out how to connect my mind and my heart and my thoughts and all this stuff. And when I got done with that, and I was like, well, that's better, you know, but now I've, I kind of was like seeing what I could get away with almost, you know? And now I'm like, okay, that's cool. I'm glad I got that kind of like bratty, like, hey, I understand the mechanics of writing, you know, like, and I have, I can articulate weird ideas out of my system. Let's move that away and let's really drop into the heart and just let it all come out in just that

right way where it's like us sitting down right here. And that's a, I think another fresh part of it is like, I, as I said, I have so much respect for the human experience because I knows all that. I know what all that shit feels like. I've been through it. I'm still going through it. We all are. And I really have a deep, deep respect for it. And so I made it like a conversation. It's like, I wanted to be like, we're going to sit down and just talk about this shit. Because that's really all writing is, right? It's this psychic transmission that the book, the pages are like a mirror. And it's like, you have this, this idea in your brain, it just bounces off and goes into someone else's head, you know? And so just made it like a conversation, you know? I love it, brother. Yeah. Well,

we'll link to your book in the show notes. Uh, we'll link to the astral hustle in the show notes. Listen, if you haven't already, I'm sure people are aware of you just from Aubrey's podcast. And I've been on yours before in the past. Where can people find you online? Corey-Allen.com and heycoreyallen is my social media on all platforms. Awesome brother. Well, we'll definitely have you back on.

It's been amazing having you. Thank you so much. Thank you Kyle.