Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #165 Paul Austin

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Paul F. Austin is an entrepreneur, public speaker, and educator. He has founded two companies in the emerging psychedelic space, Third Wave and Synthesis. Within Third Wave, Paul leads a small team in building an educational platform to ensure psychedelic substances become responsibly integrated into culture. Currently, Third Wave offers in-depth psychedelic guides, premium online courses, and personalized coaching. Because of his pioneering work at the intersection of microdosing, personal transformation, and professional success, Paul has been featured in the BBC, Forbes, and Rolling Stone.     Help support the podcast by visiting our sponsors:   Check out www.primalfusionhealth.com/e3/kyle for a free gift and more information on Aleks and Sara's coaching. Aleks and Sara are Chek professionals who have taken a deep dive into all matter of life and can break you through whatever sticking point you may be experiencing!   Check out Dry Farm Wines and get a bottle for a penny | DryFarmWines.com/Kyle Dry Farm is 100% organic and biodynamic grown wines from all over the world with about 1g of carbohydrate per bottle! Keto wine with none of the garbage- it is truly the healthiest wine on Earth and the only wine I drink.    Visit paleovalley.com and enter code word KYLE at check out for 15% off you ENTIRE ORDER. These guys made the best 100% grass fed beef sticks, ACV capsules, and much more!   Ancestral Supplements - Grass-Fed intestines  https://ancestralsupplements.com/kyle Use codeword KING10  for 10% off / Only Valid through Shopify Option. For the best supplements helping you eat nose-to-tail and getting the most nutrient dense and bioavailable nutrients in your diet.    OneFarm Formally (Waayb CBD) www.onefarm.com/kyle (Get 15% off everything using code word KYLE at checkout). Check out the BRAND NEW night serums and facial creams and (as always) the best full spectrum CBD products.    Get $100 off the Chek Institute’s Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1 online course by using KKP100 at checkout |  https://chekinstitute.com/hlc1online/ HLC changed my life and offered a deep dive into Paul Chek's amazing wealth of knowledge.    Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Instagram | https://bit.ly/3asW9Vm   Subscribe to the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY IHeartRadio | https://ihr.fm/2Ib3HCg Google Play Music | https://bit.ly/2HPdhKY      

All right, y'all. I'm really struggling here today to get this intro. I've done it probably 20 times. Normally, it's one and done. I'm going to make it as brief as possible. I'm on no sleep, but Paul Austin is the guest, a guy that I've wanted to have on for some time. He started The Third Wave, which is an online community for psychedelic learning and education. And if you've listened to the shows this long and still have not tried psychedelics, that's totally okay. But if you've made it through all these podcasts and are wondering what is the best way to do it, how do I ensure a positive or at least try to construct a positive experience. And what is the low-hanging fruit? What is the best way to enter?

Well, microdosing seems to be that way. And we dive into best practices for microdosing and much, much more. Also how to create ceremony space and a lot of valuable information here. And Paul's background, he's a phenomenal guy. He's not just the psychedelic dude. He's got a lot of wisdom that he shares here

on his own personal journey. And that's all I'm going to say. That's all I can say without starting to stutter and fumble and mess up words. Support this show by supporting our sponsors. They make this all happen. And this show is brought to you by Grass-Fed Intestines with tripe from Ancestral Supplements. These guys are taking New Zealand source nose-to-tail organ meats, bone marrow, and intestines in simple, convenient gelatin capsules. It's the easiest way to get it. Plain and simple. There's a quote here from John Fire Lame Deer.

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dryfarmwines.com slash Kyle. And without further ado, my man, Paul Austin from Third Wave is in the house. All right, we're here. We're here. We're on. You just had a kid. Yep. Or your wife had a kid.

My wife had a kid, but as much as I'd like to give her credit for everything uh we we we did have a kid because as most men know let's see it's i'm looking at my phone to see what day it is it's like that at this point it's like that right yeah we uh she's born on fourth of july at 4 36 in the morning which was fucking rad super cool um tosh was awesome it was our first home birth she got up at i think two or she was up at midnight going through contractions and starting and then at 2 30 she said can you call the midwife so that's when she woke me up we had we all watched the proposal together like a little rom-com nothing over the top just to get a laugh and uh i love that ryan reynolds guy he's great but um we went to bed at 11 30 which is later than normal and then i got a good three hour

chunk of sleep it was like the power nap and when i woke up my mom had already started coffee and it was like all right we're doing it and so 2 30 to 4 30 she was just in labor and doing great and pushed her out in a full squat at the edge of the bed with a little pan underneath her and some stuff over the carpet. And it was awesome. I leaned down and caught her. It's funny. I talked about it on Instagram. And I hate saying that because I've really been dialing back social media.

I mean, deleted everything and then started a group account with my wife because it's the best. It still is for all the shitty reasons. The best thing, best way to communicate with people online and um because of corona and all that it's like all right let's at least have something to talk about here but yeah i talked about how i thought i would be more not accustomed to it like i've had one kid it's not like i've had a baker's dozen you know like i've had one but the experience of that i thought there'd be some i don't know like you go through your first professional fight and then you're like all right i'm uh i got that out of the way yeah yeah and then when she popped out she can't the second

one always comes quick and i was like whoa like she just shot out into my arms and i was like fuck like just blown away just absolutely blown away and um tosh really had to squeeze and she was you know blue and i'm looking at her like breathe and it's that's such a weird thing like to look at like you think and even now it's it's uh this thought i had with tosh and forgive me for being a little scrambled i'm on uh 200 mgs of modafinil and some caffeine to keep me awake here for this. A little snuff too, yeah. A little snooze.

That's all day, every day. But we were talking about how you have the kid and you're like, awesome, yay, successful, especially after a miscarriage, like successful pregnancy, successful birth. She's healthy. Mom's healthy mom's healthy we're golden and then the first time baby chokes on spit you're like i gotta keep her alive yeah exactly you know but i'm thinking about that like when she came out in my arms she was blue and tosh like i don't know if she just read my mind she does that often but she

was like is she breathing because she when she went for her cry there was no sound just wide open mouth you know and then i'm like come on and um michelle the midwife was phenomenal she's like the cord's still pumping oxygen she's breathing now and then yeah and then all of a sudden you just watch the blue turn red all through her body and i was like yes there's fucking blood and oxygen being pumped through there yeah is. It's so powerful. And it's funny because we're going to talk a lot about your background and psychedelics and anybody who's listening to the show, to a fault, will say that how much I appreciate those medicines and how much I appreciate, and maybe not to a fault, but I'm a fan. There's no doubt about it. You know, and some of my experiences I would put in the top five.

Childbirth, obviously also in the top five. But yeah, it's just, I don't know. I think with that and there's a newness and an aliveness that happens when you get to see that miracle, when you get to see creation happen, when you get to see, you know, new life on the planet. And it's funny as we were talking about that not i don't mean to get super esoteric and you know of course we uh you read a book like man's search for meaning or any of jung's work like we're always creating story around around the meaning we have in our lives but with all this stuff going on in the world right now there was a little bit of

nervousness around that. Like, why would we bring a child into this, you know, and then thinking through the divine timing and order of everything, like how special that is to bring a child in when shit's hitting the fan to know that's exactly when she wanted, you know, and I've had visions of her in Ayahuasca in 2016, you know, and more with psilocybin in 2018 and a long time of communication with her. And she took her sweet ass time to get here and came smack dab right in the middle of all this chaos. Yeah. And it's really cool to kind of, that helps me take a step back and say, that's, that's exactly how it was supposed to be, you know? So all that, that's my, that's my wrap on that. Thank you for asking brother. Yeah, brother. Yeah,

absolutely. So let's, let's talk to you. I mean, we, we had, we've had people trying to introduce you to me and vice versa for a while now. I think you might've sent me your microdosing guide maybe a year ago or two years ago when I first got to Onnit. Absolutely phenomenal. But just tell me your past. Talk about growing up. Where'd you grow up? What got you on this path? Yeah. So I grew up in West Michigan. So Grand Rapids, small city, 200,000 people, suburb of Grand Rapids. Not conservative, but traditional. So church, pretty sheltered upbringing, all things considered.

My parents were great, tons of love, tons of support. It was always sort of like, we want to keep you in this bubble. We want to protect you from the nefarious forces that are that are outside of that and so it was really like you know and i always had more of a desire to be independent and sort of find my own path and so when i first was exposed to cannabis when i was 16 it was like it's not as bad as I was told, right? Like drugs and all that. Like these are actually very profound, interesting intellectual experiences. And then when I was 19, did mushrooms and LSD for the first time. I'm 29 now. So about 10 years ago. And it was one of those before and after experiences. I remember texting a friend of mine who had done lsd numerous times and was just like you were so right like i like just the the understanding that i came to about myself about my story about my lineage about what i had grown up with about

the shame right because in places like west michigan in places that are more conservative and traditional there's a lot of shame because it's a lot of group think. You got to be this way. You got to think this way. And so to break out of that was so empowering and so liberating. And from those early experiences, I basically had this insider breakthrough. Steve Jobs has this quote about dropping acid, how it was one of the best two or three things that he did.

And he sort of saw the other side of the coin, saw that there was this great sort of mystical or opening that comes from that. And that was really my experience. It was, oh, there's so much more that I'm not aware of. And I came out of that experience with way more questions than answers, as we always do with any psychedelic experience. We're like, okay, we'll set our intention we're gonna get the gift we're gonna go in and we think oh we'll have it figured out after that and then we realize oh we figured out that small infinitesimal piece of reality but also our awareness just expanded to go oh and there's so much more out there to explore and so i was at a really you know precarious point i was 1920 i was a sophomore in college was trying to figure out like what's next for me how do i want to create the life that i want to live right how can i have that agency and freedom to go and

pursue any path that i wish to pursue and at that time i was i was on stumble upon which was a thing back then did you ever get into something no i've never even heard of it oh it was this cool little little tech thing where you would like put in a topic like psychedelics or travel and you would put stumble and stumble and it would kind of take you from one page to another to another and i started to get really deep into travel and other experiences that would sort of expand the awareness and made that decision like i don't want to live any sort of typical traditional lifestyle but if since i have this beautiful opportunity of life of living of creation why not write my own saga and story that will live on in eons and eons and eons right so sort of this very grandiose kind of approach of okay thinking beyond beyond time even and and so to kind of come back to a more practical thing i moved abroad i

lived in turkey for a year where i taught english and started to get into started to get into like entrepreneurship as a path of awareness so first it was psychedelics. Psychedelics led me to, okay, if I'm going to pursue this path, how can I have as much freedom as possible to pursue that path? So living in Turkey, I lived in Thailand. I started an initial coaching business that was just like me, a few teachers. I was teaching English at that time. And then this was 2013, 2014. I slowly started to notice that psychedelics in 2015 were starting to sort of percolate and you know people were becoming more aware of it tim ferris had started to publish podcasts about it um there was more science coming out of johns hopkins we were starting to enter

like an era of cannabis legalization and so in 2015 i made the decision that i really think this is the path and of course that's easy to say like, oh, I was influenced by LSD and psilocybin. You know, I had these profound experiences. And so when that opportunity came in 2015, I was with a few buddies in Budapest. Again, we dropped Tamasin and we were trying to figure out like, where is all this going we came up with this idea like there's no really solid resource on psychedelics that helps it to sort of shed its hippie counter-cultural 60s and 70s past and step into this new integrated light in in 2015 at the time there was arrowhead which that's what i was doing my stumble upon with yeah yeah

yeah arrow is all right but it's sort of it's it's everything yeah it's meth it's caffeine it's everything and it's so expansive and i think for a lot of people it's very confusing like do i go here do i go here like how do i navigate that and we were like hey if we can create a story and a brand and an idea that helps people to recognize like, why is psychedelic use so critical to health and wellbeing and creativity and awareness, then slowly bit by bit, we can start to shift consciousness so that we can start to figure out how we're going to overcome this existential crisis, like covid made so many people aware of like the civilization that we've been living in this sort of neoliberal

you know industrial leaning into post-industrial world it just isn't sustainable and how can these medicines when used with intention help us to recognize that like we can overcome this we can evolve beyond this and um and i chose microdosing as sort of that carrot on the stick that would get people in to, you know, deeper into the story. Yeah. I love that. Microdosing, as we talked about on the phone, it's beautiful because on the one hand, it's low-hanging fruit per se. You know, you don't necessarily need to have a guide or a shaman or a curandero there with you but at the same time it's the power of a microdose is if you've never done it before is it like you can't really understand that you know you can't understand the macrodose either without going through the experience but to say that it can shift your awareness in a way that's

previously unachievable is probably an understatement. Well, we're so used to these substances like caffeine and like modafinil and tobacco and that sort of help us with this convergent thinking process. They help us to focus. They help us with alertness. They help us to stay on task with things, which was so necessary in an industrial era. We were like, we just got to get shit done. We got to do this and then it's this and then it's this, right? Sort of the corporate hierarchy.

We just take directions from above. And what we're noticing more and more is like creativity in the process of divergent thinking, of weaving together new narratives and ideas is so important. And microdosing just sort of, it gets you that blip above it. You sort of have that detachment where you're like, okay, I can observe what I'm going through. I'm not attached to, you know, like getting really in it, but I can have a little bit of space so I can navigate that and move with it. And this is

why it's become so, I mean, it's just, it spans all types of professions, right? Like jujitsu and fighters have been getting into microdosing, biohackers in Silicon Valley, moms who have been struggling with depression or anxiety or addiction are getting into it. It's just spanning all of these things. And it's sort of just like, like the analogy that I always use is, you know, when we learned how to swim for the first time, we didn't just hopefully get thrown in the deep end and we're like, figure it out, you know, because most of us would have drowned. And that's sort of like a high dose or a peak experience going to Burning Man, doing ayahuasca. But what we did is, you know, we often

started in the shallow end. We had our swimmies on. We had a little teacher there. They taught us, okay, here's how you navigate the water. Here's how you swim, right? Here's how you move in the water. And then as we became more and more comfortable with that, we went deeper and deeper and deeper until we could do flips and turns and dive off the diving board. And I feel like microdosing is that introduction for people in a similar way.

It helps them to recognize like, oh, I can sort of play with my consciousness and I can expand it and I can move with it and I can create and alchemize with it. And it's just a little touch. And then it lets us see like, okay, as I go deeper and deeper into that, more expansion, more awareness, things like that.

Yeah, I like that. I love the ability of, it's funny because I, I don't even know how to word this. Want to be careful is the wrong word. I have the tendency to, you know, when I go through a big experience, talk about how amazing the big experience is and then talk about, you know, what that actual dose was. And that actual dose, according to guys like East Forest and anybody who studies this, can vary wildly from person to person. You know, he told me, you know, one me, he disagreed when I had East Forest on with five grams being the heroic dose that Terrence McKenna talked about

because a gram for some people's neurochemistry is a heroic dose. And I think that's true to a certain degree. I also think that you can, there's no ceilings there, right? Like once there is comfort in whatever- As you've experienced. Yeah, exactly.

There's no ceiling there so once one gram becomes um safe and easy and enjoyable then this you know the sky's the limit there's always more especially with with regard to psilocybin um but it's it's what's cool the the swimming pool analogy is perfect and at at the same time, imagine if you never got bored of the shallow end. That's what the microdose is. It's always something new. It's always awesome. There's a certain layer of predictability and a certain layer of brand new shit you weren't thinking about. And to think outside the box and even just among anything like somebody wrote um an

article it was right after time had had talked about all the ceos and the tech guys in the silicon valley getting into microdosing and um yeah i think it was a doctor from stanford but they were basically shitting on creativity saying like well how many things ask them how many things they've actually created from their journeying they're just addicts you know and it's like oh clearly you've never done psychedelics because hey you don't get it there's a lot of people it's like like graham hancock when he says you don't have a seat at the table to tell me about my ayahuasca experience from a neurochemistry standpoint until you've done ayahuasca exactly the richard dawkins you know but um all that said there is so much in the microdose you know Bear was first born, I microdosed every fourth day for two months with LSD.

And that's another thing that I want to get into you with is the different tools have different flavors. And like I said, it's not standard one size fits all. This is what 10 micrograms of acid does for everyone on the planet. That's individualized and different for everyone. But LSD for me is very energetic. Even when I'm tired, it's uplifting. I want to be in nature. And, you know, I would, I'd sit him in the backyard and put on the best of Tchaikovsky, you know, and we'd get sun and I do yoga and i dance with them and it was like pure magic you know like to connect to him in that way and to see him as a soul rather than this little baby

who needs to have his ass wiped yeah you know but in the sea the trees come alive in a way and it's like the sacredness and everything yeah exactly it's and uh and so that was you know i have so much gratitude and love for that medicine at the same same time, I don't know that I'll ever macro with it again. After my last experience in Sedona, which was, you know, undeniably the hardest experience of my life, thought my friend was going to die. Ballpark, it dehydrated. And forgive me for repeating this for people who have already heard the story. I won't get into it, but we basically had a bottle of liquid. And after spending a week in Arizona, it had dehydrated like half a bottle down to one drop. So when I reconstituted it with more water,

thinking that it had dumped out due to airplane pressure, not that I flew with it, it was flown there. But you know what I'm saying? Like I was like, it's reconstituted fucking more than one milligram, more than a thousand micrograms each, you know? And so i don't know that we would i would know that i would venture that far again that's deep with that

yeah i mean for me i've only done 300 400 micrograms at the most and that was like plenty because that's that's of course the i mean that's what happened in the 60s and 70s right that was sort of the second wave of psychedelics where you had Timothy Leary, who was just like, everyone drop acid, right? Like you get acid, you get acid, like you get acid. And what that led to, it's like, you know, it was just mass chaos and people had no idea. Like when they, when they would do something that intense, the things that would come up. And of course there wasn't set and setting, you you know they weren't having guides as part of this it was just like in fucking you know the the hate in san francisco and everyone's going like what the fuck is happening well i think they got lost with leary's message too was leary was doing it you know right

he was doing it in the very beautiful home up in the Northeast and had classical music was the best thing at the time, but blindfolds or in the darkness or out in nature, he had that, but how that got pushed out through Grateful Dead and through all these things, it was a different experience. I think Terrence McKenna said it best when he talked about that. Somebody asked him, and again, I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating. I listened to this on the psychedelic salon with Lorenzo Haggerty. And he had given a lecture, which was brilliant. And then at the end of it, he opened it up for Q&A and somebody said, is there a wrong way to do psychedelics? And he said, yes, if you don't

take enough. And everyone bursts into laughter and he goes, I'm serious. The problem in the 60s was people would have a uh, you know, a mushroom cap. They'd smoke some weed. They drink some wine. They're listening to Hendrix with 30,000 people at Golden Gate park. And they never really experienced the depth of what those medicines can do on their own. Right. Too many, too many things going on. But as he's forced mentioned, you can create ceremony with anything, whether that's 30 grams or a third of a gram, you can create ceremony. If you treat it as such, if you have intention, if you close your eyes and you're not interacting with others and look, microdosing is great. You can go to your job,

bang out emails, do whatever you want to do on a microdose, no doubt, but to be in nature or to really choose to create a ceremony space around that and sound the sound of ceremony, you know, versus the constant noise that we have. Just the distraction. Yeah. And I think that's one of the greatest things that East Forest talked to me about was like, there's a difference between music and something that is guiding you through the space of ceremony versus just noise right and there's a difference between even just sitting on a park bench without sound just the sound of nature as the song that plays you through your experience versus the noise of talking to one another about your experience as it's happening the process process of going inwards, right? And like listening, really listening

to like what's going on both here and externally. And you need that container, right? This is why we have cuarenderos and shamans. It's to create that container. And that's no different if you're doing 30 grams or a third of a gram as East Forest said, because the container is sort of that space of sacredness that like when we go into that, that's when when we can like we infuse our intention into that container

and we we sort of we can alchemize with it we can create with it and and this speaks to why i love the concept of microdosing you know there's a lot of criticism about microdosing like oh it's just tech bros trying to be more productive or it's just you know people trying to get an edge or it's just you know it's further amplifying the sort of quote-unquote capitalist system that we already live in and i go no you're kind of missing the point right the point is how can we start to cultivate a relationship with these medicines where we understand on a personal level like like we were saying like 10 mics of lsd for someone is going to be like if it's this person they could have a full like we were saying, like 10 mics of LSD for someone is going to be like, if it's this person, they could have a full, like I've heard people do 10 mics, they

have a full blown experience because they're so sensitive to it. And then other people, it's just like they can bang out a lot of work emails and understanding that sort of calibration, like, 10 mics does this, 50 mics does this, 100 mics does this, a thousand mics, you know, puts you way over the top. And that I think is the beauty of microdosing is it allows the individual to start to cultivate that relationship and then they can tweak and adjust. So if they have like a fight that they're going to do, they know, okay, for the fight, maybe 20 to 30 mics. If they're having like a brainstorming session with a business partner, okay, maybe 50 to 60 mics. If you want to have a really deep experience, 100 to 200 mics. And that, I think, is the power of microdosing.

We remove the need for gatekeepers. We remove the need for all these clinicians and psychiatrists, all this sort of structure, which is important for high doses of mushrooms or important for people who have deep, deep trauma, like with the MAPS studies, you know, having two therapists on is great. But for the vast majority of people, right, especially as we look at how are we going to expand the awareness of psychedelics so that more and more people can benefit from it, I see just microdosing as being like, it's that entry point for everyone, potentially. Yeah, there's a certain level of equivalency that you can build.

And this is something that is worth mentioning. Kalindi Iye, who you spoke, actually tell your story about Kalindi and then I'll drop into Kalindi because this is great because you were at a Psychedella conference. Was it in 2015? 2016.

2016, you're talking about microdosing. Yeah, we were in Prague and we were just on a panel and the panel was something like everything from low doses to high doses. It was a bit of a sexier name but that was just the like general vibe and attitude and it's me talking about microdosing doing 10 to 15 micrograms of lsd how we can integrate it for creativity and better awareness and to help with depression and you know like fairly practical sort of like low level stuff and then kalindi comes up after i'm done he's like well that's interesting but like if you want to do

30 grams of mushrooms right like here's what you're going through and he talked about like you know ancient egyptian hieroglyphics and like going into like the the nanosphere and like all this incredible stuff and it shows you like that that's sort of that's the range of experiences right like like it can be very boring like microdosing in some ways can be very boring compared to the high doses or you can just like you've experienced like go into literally other universes and worlds and and sort of like just be blown away and have no words to describe what you're what you're going through and when i heard about kalindi i was like is like is he a joker like who i thought who is this guy and then i look he's like super into Fu. He's like this black dude from Detroit who's been doing this for years and years and years.

And, you know, in many ways and rest in power, not anyone can do this, but if you, again, understand how to work with this, you don't need a doctor or a therapist to be there with you because these experiences are so personal. And I think he just sort of has opened so many doors for people that were previously like totally unknown. Yeah. I think the first time I did seven grams of psilocybin just from hearing Terrence's, it's only a couple of grams more, that kind of thing. But like, well, five's heroic and just a couple more. Am I pushing the envelope too far? And then when

I had a member of Fit for Service sent me one of his YouTube videos, and it's just like some cheeseball title like old martial artist does 20 to 30 gram journeys for the last 20 years. And I'm like, this is bullshit. And I watched the video and I'm like, this guy is super grounded. He has an incredible wealth of knowledge on the history of medicine, especially from Africa and very well-spoken. And, and he's had some dope videos that obviously still exist. He has, he has an incredible video on how Marvel comics created the new Marvel universe. It happened to the city. Did you read, did you watch that? Okay. I have to do all my own show notes now. So I doubt I'll get this in the show notes, but if you Google Kalindi IE, I think it's I-Y. There we go.

He has this awesome video on how basically in the seventies, there was two young artists and authors that worked for Marvel comics that were brought on to kind of change things and bring it forward. And this was when Stan Lee kind of took a backstep and became more of a producer and less of the brand that was coming out, less of the heart of it. And I mean, obviously he started the whole thing. He's the heart and soul of Marvel, but these guys were doing high-dose LSD LSD and high dose psilocybin in an apartment in New York city. And out of that came Dr. Strange. Out of that came the Avengers, complete remodel of the Marvel universe, um, uh, guardians of the galaxy every, and they waited

until the CGI and the technology was good enough to start releasing this. That's why we had a flood pretty much after all the shitty fantastic four movies and the first trilogy of spider-man we just saw like this technological boom on camera and that's when they were like now we're going to take all this stuff out and age of ultron and all this came out and you're just like holy shit i remember watching dr strange on acid with tosh and we were like there's no fucking way stan lee did not do psychedelics exactly there's no fucking way. Stan Lee did not do psychedelics. Exactly. There's no way.

And of course his cameo in that movie is on a train and he's just laughing. And the cover of his book is The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. A nod to all the psychonauts out there, you know? Like, yeah, you don't understand that shit just from meditating and going to the East. Like there's so much more to visually express that, right?

And I mean, you can for sure tap into these things with meditation and I have, but the visual expression of that, the visionary experience that is really given to the camera and the film is, is brilliant. And that's what they were able to do because of these psychonauts that started experimenting. Anyways, at the end of this video, or two of them that I just like started really like, I got to watch more. I got to watch more. And then I was like, Oh shit,

he's giving me permission for this. Now caveat, he says to go up two grams at a time and I had never done more than 15. So should have been somewhere around 17. If I played by his rules also wouldn't do it solo, the 30 gram experience with penis envy. I would do that with a guide, you know, someone who's well versed that can direct it not just play an ipod and hold my hand but like somebody who has

mastery and a musician who can actually guide that experience if i'm in the hell experience again i can at least open my mouth and say am i dead nope nope you're good buddy you're right here just keep going you know that kind of safety grounding cord would be really nice when you go that far. But he was brilliant, you know, and I think that is, there's an invitation there. What he was saying is, is really for the explorers, for the people who are called to that. And I think on our call, I talked about that with, I read the DMT dialogues, which is a fantastic book. It's, you know, the who's who in the psychedelic space from Rick Strassman to Graham Hancock to Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance, you know, some of my favorite podcasts, guys that have been on The Rogan Show. And Dennis McKenna and many more.

But basically their whole thing was one of the discussions around the round table at the end of one person's lecture was how do we get the extended DMT experience? And so thinking about, you know, intravenous, you know, finding that right dose that could put somebody out of body, but keeps them there long enough. So it's not just a short ride and they can actually start to work in that space. And I'm, you know, after my 30 grams of penis, I mean, I'm like, you, that's it. That was three grams or three hours rather of DMT. There was at no point where I didn't feel like I hadn't had a fresh hit of NN and 5-MeO DMT. Like that visual, that out of body, that felt that deep. And, you know, there's nothing in my experience that even comes close to that experience so but i would say that there is kalindi was on track with that for the the truth i cannot and

this isn't me describing myself or any of that it's been but for people who are wanting to explore people like the dennis mckenna's of the world who have decades in it you know black belts in that space that want to dive deeper that's available you know a graham hancock could handle that he could do that you know and i'd love to hear those trip reports well and it kind of brings up i think it was huxley who who talked about this is that the inner antipodes of the mind he had this phrase where it's like you know we've explored in many ways everything we can on earth granted there's like deep sea exploration and, you know, like the inner reaches of the Congo rainforest that we haven't quite been able to access. But

for the most part, everything on earth we've colonized or we've explored or we've sort of like, we know about it, right? It's like very much in the light. It's very much in the masculine. It's very much like, okay, we see all that and and what's left now for a lot of us is not going external not going outwards unless you're elon and you're trying to get to mars it's a fucking spaceship instead of a colony there but for the majority of us it's it's simply going inwards and exploring the vast inner worlds that we all have access to and understanding that like everything we see externally is just a projection of what's going on internally for us and so these medicines they unlock

they unlock those fears they unlock right we only have access to what 10 of our brains so to say and when we take psychedelics we remove that filter and all of a sudden our inner worlds expand to be incredibly huge and we can pull back from that things like the marvel comics or you know the story that i love most is the elusinian mysteries and how like a lot of people don't realize this but everything in western philosophy is a footnote to plato and plato came you know to understand most of his revolutionary ideas through the Eleusinian mysteries and through those sort of Dionysian experiences where he got to go into the shadow and go into the dark and see all that's there. And then from that came Western culture, if you will, Western civilization, how we understand that. And I think that's the beauty of psychedelics is just as there are these keys that unlock our inner worlds, it goes back to like the onion

analogy. There's more and more and more that we can peel off. And that's why I think they're becoming so relevant today, right? There's so much noise in the world. There's so much chaos in the world. There's so many distractions. and what people are realizing is if we want to stay centered if we want to stay balanced if we want to stay present with everything that's happening we have to be able to cultivate that sort of like inner strength where we're just like we see it we know the path we honor the path we keep going down the path we don't get distracted by all the other things, but we recognize that like we have a story to live out, right?

The hero's journey, so to say. We have this story to live out and psychedelics just help us to sort of like place light into spots that we weren't aware of so we can integrate them and bring them more into awareness and better understand ourselves and in better understanding ourselves, better understand like,

fuck COVID and the climate crisis and all of this shit that we're going through. It's just a reflection of how broken most of us are inside. And to heal that inner world will allow us, I think, to create a new culture, to create a new world

where it's actually sustainable for everyone. Because right now we're kind of going through this major like matrix, right? Like everyone has been stuck in the matrix and covid helped people to sort of pop out of it now it's it's been rough for a lot of people it's been you know like a lot of people had no idea this was coming a lot for a lot of people was out almost everyone it's outside of our control and what psychedelics do is they still help us help us to like pop above that but to do so on our own terms in our own power with the choice to know okay we've seen these things we've had these visions we've come to this awareness and now we have a choice do we want to act on that do we want to integrate that or are we just going to ignore

it and push it away and the more we ignore those parts of ourselves, the more we push away those parts of ourselves that maybe aren't so great or so beautiful, that are broken and diseased and desolate, just the disconnection gets wider and wider and wider. And this is what I loved about, when we were talking about your 30 gram experience, how difficult it was, or even the LSD experience where you took too much, right?

To see into that darkness, to see into that shadow, that's where the reverence comes for psychedelics. It's easy to do a hit of ketamine on top of some MDMA at Burning Man and realize that love is everything and that we're in this blissful state and that anything is possible, et cetera, et cetera. But the courage to go into the darkness, that's, I think, where the healing power of psychedelics is because we don't have that in today's world. We've shut off the shadow. We've shut off the feminine. We've shut off the mystery. And for us to actually evolve into what we're becoming, we have to become aware of all of that. And we have to

understand all of it because it is the best teacher that we will ever have in our lives yeah it's the it's the ability to look we're doing that right now too you know with with everything that's happening the the the bubbling up of all that's been under the table in terms of race, in terms of how this country was built between, I mean, I just read Lame Deer Secret Visions by John Fire Lame Deer. It's incredibly powerful. Walking with Bears by Dr. Will Tagle. Both of those really expose a different history than what we were taught in school on how this country was made. And of course, in tandem with slavery,

you know, and, and how we navigate those waters going forward. I'm not, and I'm not trying to say like, everyone just takes psychedelics and it'll heal us all and we'll forgive and everything will be great. Like, no, there a lot of great things to say about that. I will link to that in the show notes. But this idea that there is a linchpin to all these things, to the way we treat others, to the way we treat ourselves, our own inner critic, there's a linchpin to the way we're treating the planet right now. There's a linchpin to thinking outwardly for all of our success, validation, and joy. Like this really dope Tesla is going to be the, I fucking love electric cars. That's going to be it. When I have that, I'll have made it. No, dude, that's that, that carrot stays in front of the horse's mouth forever. Right. It is inside you, all of it.

And I think those ultimate understandings of the self, ultimate understandings of how we relate to all that is right. All of my relations, all my relations, it is not just all the people right all of my relations a home and talk we are yassing all my relations it is not just all the people and all your ancestors it's fucking everything it's the plants the mountains the air the water all the elements everything we relate to as we come to understand that in a new way and recognize the divinity in all things. That really, I don't know many people that can translate that in words on this podcast, which I'm butchering or in a book, right? You don't read about that and get it. Ted Decker said that I can describe to you everything about an avocado, the color of the

skin, the texture, peeling off the flesh, the meatiness of it, the seed that's inside it, the color. I can paint it for you. Picasso could paint it for you, but you don't know that avocado until you eat it. Right. And that's, that's what's true of these mystical experiences. You have no idea until you do it. And it's, again, you see, you know, from traditional yogis or traditional meditators, the, Oh, don't go down that it's the, you know, that there's no shortcuts in life and that kind of stuff. And it was like, look, I don't believe that either go without one another, you know, psychedelics gave me a meditation practice and a yoga practice. And I'm

super appreciative of that. Um, but at the same time, if anybody's telling you that they likely have not done psychedelics, they likely have not had good experiences or, or haven't seen those quote unquote bad trips as good experiences, right? Because anybody who's been in the space long enough knows that there are no bad trips, right? It's no such thing. Like that is the hard challenging experience that ends up showing you more than just the beautiful, awesome, blissful experience, you know? And that's why I hold that 30 gram experience with so much gratitude. And even LSD on the mountain, that would have been a challenging experience had it been with the right set and setting.

But on Cathedral Rock in one of the most busiest weekends of the year in Sedona, wrong set and setting. You know what I'm saying? It wasn't quite optimized for what you needed. In a backyard, if we're purging in the backyard with buckets or into the bush, I'm cool with that but yeah in

public with people checking in on us hey guys you guys all right you got water yeah yeah we're fine late night last night like i don't know what to tell anyone you know yeah set in setting but um you know all those experience are important you know and of course you know i mentioned that as a this is the right way. This is maybe could be better, you know, optimized way, those kinds of things. So let's talk about the right way because you guys have, your site's beautiful. You have a ton of information out there. I was just reading before we came in about ketamine because ketamine has absolutely blown

up. I'll be working with Dr. Dan Engel and Gunter Bergman and a number of other people at CUYA, which is a ketamine center that's opening up right next door to Onnit here in Austin, Texas in the beginning of 2021. And it's not just ketamine. I mean, it's everything from Dr. Craig Conover, who's been on the show twice, the NAD, the vitamin therapies, epigenetic testing with Dr. Micah Hamilton, and a whole host of other wellness things like a wellness spa, hot and cold plunges, float tanks with the flower of life engraved on it. It's going to be amazing. Ketamine will be one small piece of that sliver. But at the same time, you know, I wanted to dive into this because, and then, and then I want to get into microdosing,

but I wanted to get your thoughts on something that we talked about that Paul Cech brought up with me is that, look, everyone investing all the VC money that's coming in to psychedelic research and things like that is great on one hand and then not so great on the other hand, because to study it in a lab and even at Johns Hopkins, they're going to use a pill of psilocybin, not the whole mushroom, which varies in strengths because for the standards of testing and the standards of the scientific method, they have to have it concrete. But as you know, and as we all figured out with cannabis, there's more than just THC and cannabis, right? And there's more than just psilocybin in mushrooms. And there's more than just DMT and harming and harming and ayahuasca.

There's a lot more. And so that was his fear around that. But I think as I ramble here, thanks to Modafinil, with ketamine in particular, what we've seen is a very white coat. Here's your shot. It's been 45 minutes. See you later. Call me in two months. Kind of bullshit, right? That's not the model, right? You can't have transformative or mystical experiences in the model of traditional Western medicine. It's not to say that you can't have a doctor there. You shouldn't. It's just to say like there needs to be a level of care. There needs to not be fluorescent lights in the building. There needs to be, you know, a comfort that you would have at home while you're in their office or the comfort of nature. And I think, you know, as, as Rick Doblin and maps has pointed out in these 3d rendering of

what healing centers might look like near a lake or, you know, on a, on a ocean cliff, you know, a place where you are connected to nature, where there is beautiful art, where you do feel at home and ease and a deeper connection to the earth while you go through this. What do you think, what do you think, what do you see as pros and cons with ketamine becoming more available? I guess is one question I have. And I have my thoughts, you know, that I want to jump in on that and then I want to get into microdosing. So everybody has takeaways for this.

So I think one of the huge pros is like it's creating an entry point to these medicines in the future. So a lot of the clinics that are popping up with ketamine, they're at least introducing people to a drug, a medicine, a substance that is so different from traditional pharmaceuticals we take them every day you know like antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications and they typically numb us to the pain that we're experiencing and in many ways that can be good in the short term but we often become addicted and then it's just like it's it's a kind of not so great thing from from that point forward so i think one of the huge pros with the medicalization of ketamine is it's helping people to recognize that there are other ways to heal that aren't the traditional pharmaceutical way. Now, unfortunately, a lot of the ketamine centers that have popped up are like you were saying, they're just these infusion ketamines where you go in, you're in like a chair in the dark. It's like 45 minutes. You go in, you get the infusion, you leave, and it's like you keep going back.

So people will go for five infusions or 10 infusions or 15 infusions and they'll be like, oh yeah, I feel great for like a few days after or a week after, but actually nothing's really changing in my life. And I think that's the huge con of this, like the ketamine approach right now is it's really just still fit within that old medical system of we'll give you a drug it'll help you to feel better temporarily but in the long term we're not going to see any sort of changes or impact and so that speaks to like what dr dr dan is doing that speaks to like another friend of mine in boulder who's setting up integrative ketamine clinics so for ketamine to be useful and to be effective just like the

classic psychedelics, you need prep. So what's your intention? What do you want to explore? What have you been struggling with? Where are your points of suffering? You need to have the actual experience where you become the observer, where you come to recognize those parts of yourself that you haven't seen before. And then most importantly, you have the integration, right? And so the integration, I had a ketamine experience myself where i did ketamine and body work and so i think when we combine ketamine with i think body work is the the ideal modality to combine it with because somatically we we hold so much unconsciously

that we don't recognize this trauma or that we don't realize and it is impacting us. And with ketamine, you basically allow yourself to totally, totally relax. And that allows a body worker to get into those really tough parts. So pro is it's helping to create an infrastructure that over the next 10 years, we can start to inject other molecules and substances into. Cons, I think the current model with infusions isn't great. And this is also something that we talked about over the phone was spiritual bypassing, you know, where ketamine is such a beautiful experience, which is why it helps as like, with suicidal ideation, if people are suicidal, you give them ketamine, boom, gone immediately. It helps instantaneously, which is fantastic. And right, like ketamine, because it

doesn't come from the earth, because it's not an entire substance, it really only comes with that light. You don't get the shadow element as well. And so to create spaces where we can explore the full range of human emotion and that sort of normal is the ideal. Yeah. I like that a lot. I like that a lot. I had an experience. It's funny when you were talking about the injection of other models with that. Um, and I had an experience that probably will be available in 2022, uh, in some places at least. Um, well, there are two substances that should be legal at the same time. The therapy of combining them may be in a gray area, but MDMA with ketamine was, and this isn't the Burning Man dose. This isn't the, you know, talk to your friends dose. It was intramuscular injection of much higher than the one milligram per kilogram.

And with only 100 milligrams of pharmaceutical MDMA. But that was enough to really steer that. And this was more ketamine in one shot than I've ever had by at least 25%. And there was so much love in that experience and so much ease in that experience. And of course, the guides responsible for that were a big part of it. It's not just to say, this is what the medicine does. It very much was the care of the guides that put me through it. But I see that in the future as something that has infinite potential, especially because of the fact that you are guided in love, you know,

so to heal from that experience, which is why I think MDMA works so well with PTSD or PTS. Simply because of that, it allows us to process things that we normally wouldn't because our guard is let down and we have that heart opening experience. All right. I'm excited, but I do share some of those feelings that Paul Cech does in terms of, are we at a fork in the road where we veer too far away from the ancestral wisdom, too far away from the people who've been working with plants, especially with the plants for thousands of years? And can we at least model some of those things with our man-made creations like ketamine that resemble the respect and reverence and spiritual side of those experiences to a degree that's palpable for all, right? Like you don't want to,

the atheist that comes to your office, you don't need to bless and sage and bow to and all that, you know, that kind of, that kind of thing, you know, have it, have it, have it fit the lowest common denominator for anybody, but at the same time, hold it in that level of respect. So it's not just a procedure, right? One, I think this is the downside to all this VC money that's coming into psychedelics, you know, like a lot of VCs are infinite growth, right? We want, we want scalability. We want something that can grow huge and huge and huge. And, and you had that with cannabis and, you with cannabis because you can grow a bunch of weed. But psychedelics are so different because it's not about the substance itself, but it's

about the entire container that you create about that substance. And you can't scale spirituality, right? And you can't really commodify spirituality because the whole point with psychedelics is that you do them, you heal, and then you don't need to keep going back to them again and again and again. And this is where psychedelics turn the whole traditional medical model on their head, where traditionally we've been like, we're consistently sick. We need a pill. We need help. And it's just like this maintenance band-aid model and what psychedelics do is they go oh we can get above that we can evolve beyond that and all of a sudden right like something that would have taken 10 years in psychotherapy

right gabor monte has the the typical saying right like 10 Like an ayahuasca experience is like 10 years of psychotherapy in an evening, in a night, right? So to have that level of efficacy, to have that level of impact, then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, these people are healed. They don't need to keep coming back. Well, where's the money in that?

Where's the business model in that? And so with a lot of the VCs who are coming into the space i think it's a little bit of like a this is what i've said before like before you start investing in psychedelics you probably do yes you know maybe not 30 grams of mushrooms but like three to four to five grams of mushrooms is helpful for you to understand like why this isn't your typical tech scalable model but how this is really about creating spaces this is about reverence and this is about giving people their power back ultimately that's what it comes back to right like throughout our medical model we've

given up power to psychiatrists and doctors and to people outside of us thinking oh you can heal me and you can heal me and you can heal me where Where in fact, like all of the work that we do, right? It's like the cliche here, the cliche saying like you are your own healer and psychedelics help you to come to that awareness. And so once you realize that you are your own healer, like for me personally, yeah, I'll go to Sultara and do ayahuasca there, you know, down to Peru or do mushrooms with friends. But all of a sudden this whole,

like I'm not paying $10,000 or $15,000 to go through an experience. It's just like I recognize now, back to what we were talking about before, I have a relationship with these substances. I realize, okay, at about this level, I'll experience this. Deeper and deeper and deeper, I can experience that.

And so there's no need to keep pumping money into the system. All I'm doing is taking that energy, turning it back inwards and reinvesting it, so to say, in myself. So I continue to expand and grow and develop. And that's ultimately what we want to create a system around for psychedelics. It's helping people realize that you have all your own power and energy. That's for you. Use that to heal those parts of yourselves. Have mirrors, therapists, or doctors who can support you if you need that support. But ultimately, this is about you, right? It's your responsibility to sort of figure this out. You need to do the healing. It can be tough. It can be difficult. It can be not pretty. It can

be disgusting. And the only way to expand and grow, like we were talking about before, is to take those shadow elements and integrate them and help them become a part of who you are. Yeah, you got to look at it. You got to face it. Well, let's jump back into microdosing. Let's talk about some of the stuff that you guys have mentioned on your website. And obviously, we could spend another hour discussing this alone, but give people some takeaways in terms of what's a good place to start with. I'm fairly confident

most of the people listening to this have some experience with microdosing at the very least, but good do's and don'ts, varying ranges, varying experiences with the ranges, those kind of things. And then personally, what are your favorites? What are your favorites for microdosing? How do you use them? And what are your favorites for macros? So when it comes to microdosing, the most important element to pay attention to is like this, this idea of a protocol. And essentially that means, right? Like microdosing isn't just about doing LSD once, like 10 mics and seeing how it in fact impacts you or doing like a half gram of mushrooms once and seeing how it impacts you

that's an individual experience the key to pay attention with to with microdosing is it's sort of like a meditation practice where you sit down on the cushion every day you meditate for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes you're not going to see instantaneous results. What you are going to see is an ability to better direct your attention and energy so that you don't succumb to distractions or addictions or whatever else has kind of pulled you away from your center. So I think that's the first important thing to emphasize with microdosing. It's two or three or four times a week that you're working with these substances and you're really looking at what's the trajectory of doing this over the span of 30 days or 60 days or 90 days. Like when I first started to microdose in 2015, I was living in Thailand at the time and ended up microdosing with LSD

twice a week for about seven months and had two specific intentions with that. You know, one of my intentions was just to help with the flow state, to help with creativity, to overcome procrastination, to make it easier to like in the morning to drop into, you know, writing and getting into that rhythm. And that way it was much easier to kind of control my day and where it would go. And the second big thing was social anxiety. You know, for me personally, I sort of covered up all of my social anxiety in the past with alcohol. And it was a way to open up and be vibrant and be cool with people when I was going out.

And obviously, the second order consequences of doing that consistently are less than ideal. So what I started to do is I would microdose LSD on days that I would be going out or spending time with friends. And I would notice that I was just able out or spending time with friends. And I would notice that I was just able to not only be myself a little bit more, but just be okay with being myself. Not feel like I had to try or say a certain thing or do something to be accepted, but just totally being me. And so those were the two sort of intentions that I had coming into microdosing.

And then I microdosed with LSD for a while. And what I love about LSD is it's a phenomenal antidepressant. So because it's that crystal, because it comes from this pure form of love, you do see the brighter side of life. You do see the beauty in everything, the sacredness in everything. And that helps so much with enjoyment and being present and not feeling like kind of the world is out to get you and, you know, all these sort of negative energies that just helps you to break away from that. Now, what I noticed is when I started to microdose with mushrooms, that LSD is a very

cognitive, you know, experience. It can help with tying together new ideas. It can help with that brainstorming process. The reason for that, I was actually speaking to Roland Griffiths about this at that same conference in Prague. And this was early days of microdosing. And he was basically asking, what's the difference that people notice between microdosing LSD and microdosing mushrooms? And the way that I put it for him is the reason something like LSD has become so popular in places like Silicon Valley is A, it's a phenomenal antidepressant. And I feel like most people who are involved in that productivity at all costs world and the tech

world, like many entrepreneurs are depressed, super, super depressed. So LSD just gives them kind of a way to come above that and be, you know, the antidepressant effect. And they're using it for brainstorming and more, I would say, external facing things. And with mushrooms, it tends to be a much more, at least for me and a lot of people that we've spoken to, an internal process, an emotional process. So a few years later, it was the end of 2018. I did therapy for the first time, six months of therapy. I was living in New York, super stressed out, right? Like was, was, had, was running third wave. We had a team of about

10 to 12 people. I had also started a psilocybin retreat center in the Netherlands called Synthesis. So I was flying back and forth between here and Amsterdam to like do those high doses experiences for people. And I was just fucking burnt out of my mind, like really tired. And so I went into therapy to start to understand like what's going on. Why am I struggling with mental health? I thought I had this all taken care of in my early twenties. Like why is all this stuff coming back up again? And I remember in my first, either my first or second appointment with a therapist, she was like, how do you feel about, you know, like taking mushrooms? Like you can come in, you know, you can go through the traditional therapeutic process and like take a microdose or a mini dose of mushrooms just to

help you feel those emotions a little bit better. Because as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, right, the place that I grew up in and where I grew up, like feelings were sort of not talked about at all. And for me, before I entered therapy, like whether it was anger or sadness or shame, right? All of those feelings were just like a knot in my stomach. I couldn't recognize the differences between all of them. So of course, when those came out, when I expressed those, it was just messy and like a volcano erupting. And so what microdosing mushrooms helped me to do is to go inwards, to better attune to, okay, when I feel angry, this is how I feel in my body. I expand and my head gets hot and I'm like, or when I feel shame, I sort of contract, or when I feel sadness, whatever else it is, it helped me to better attune to my own emotions

so that I can navigate those when the time came up. And again, getting back to the conversation with Roland, the thing that Roland emphasized with LSD versus psilocybin mushrooms is LSD is more dopaminergenic. So there's more dopamine that's being produced when you're microdosing LSD and taking LSD, which is why it has sort of that psychedelic coffee feel, why we love to be outside when we're on LSD or why we love to be moving and doing extreme sports, whatever it is. We have that sort of proactivity that comes with microdosing LSD, whereas with mushrooms, they're much more serotonergic. There's much more serotonin created as a result of that. And serotonin is tied to contentment, right?

The sense of peace, the sense of staying centered. So when we microdose with mushrooms, it just allows us to go inwards and process those emotions a little bit better. So I think the key with anyone who's considering whether it's microdosing LSD or microdosing mushrooms, and of course, people microdose Iboga, people microdose Ayahuasca, people microdose San Pedro.

I don't have a lot of personal experience with those. I think microdosing some of the traditional plant medicines has a much richer historical lineage. Like you read about the Bwiti in Gabon and they've been microdosing iboga for hunting and for killing things. And it's not just all peace and love with, with a lot of these things.

A lot of the ways they've been used traditionally has been to help with that. Even microdosing ayahuasca, same thing in the Amazon. People would take a little bit of ayahuasca. So when they, they would go out in these sort of, they weren't vision quests because it wasn't just about the internal journey, but it was like for hunting and to, you know, have better awareness as they were navigating this really chaotic Amazonian landscape. So microdoses have been used for performance for hundreds and hundreds of years. And it's only now that they've sort of been adopted in this

late capitalist period where we're looking at, okay, here's how we can be more productive with them. Here's how we can be more creative or make more money, whatever it is. But the key with all of them is just like with a high dose where you have a container, you have the intention, the peak experience, microdosing approach it the same exact way, right? Like before you go into a microdosing protocol, whether that's 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, there needs to be time spent in reflection and journaling. Like right now we're leading people through a six week program of microdosing online. So it's like two weeks of prep, right? Where it's first clarifying your purpose, then eliminating distractions. Then we have a breakthrough

ceremony with breathwork. And then it's four weeks of integration with microdosing. And so again, that key of, well, what do you want to do with those four weeks? Who are you now? Who are you becoming? And how can microdosing in particular help with adapting to that new person you're becoming? Because so much of our behaviors, we just self-sabotage again and again and again from our subconscious. It wants to hold on to the way we were before. And the beautiful part about microdosing, just like meditation, is because of its impact on

neuroplasticity, right? We can tie that to the 5-HT2A receptor and how the 5-HT2A receptor in the prefrontal cortex helps us to better adjust and adapt, et cetera, et cetera. But the key is it's not just about the microdosing, right? It's not just about taking this drug again and again and again, or the medicine again and again and again. But it's really the opportunity with microdosing is to act as a catalyst, again, creating a small opening. And within that opening, then we can weave in new ways of being. We can become more aware of the shitty food that we eat or become more aware of why it's

so critical that we start a journaling practice or start to meditate. And so it just helps us to make these small little behavioral changes bit by bit. It's nothing like we don't got to chomp off a huge bit, but we can just slowly change and slowly adapt because a lot of growth, a lot of development, a lot of awareness is boring. It's routine. It's showing up every single day with the intention of who am I today? Who am I becoming? And how do I hold that intention throughout the kind of length of the experience that I'm going through? That's fucking beautiful, brother. Thank you so much, man.

I really appreciate you coming on the show. Long time coming. We'll run it back for sure. Where can people find you? Obviously, you talk about your podcast and of course, your website. Yeah, so in terms of more information, finding more things out,

the thirdwave.co is the platform that we created about psychedelic education, about microdosing. I also started this high- high dose psilocybin retreat in the Netherlands called Synthesis. So synthesisretreat.com. A lot of those are on pause right now because of COVID.

And then we also have our own podcast, Third Wave Podcast, where I interview medical doctors, therapists, entrepreneurs, writers, all about how psychedelics have impacted their own wellbeing and sort of set them on a new path towards healing and transformation. Incredible brother. Thank you so much for being on. Thanks Kyle. Thank you guys for listening to today's show. My kids are still playing

background noise back there, but that's, that's what it is. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you're hitting me up on the gram at living with the Kingsbury's low C and toe, I'm not on there posting much and not responding to people. So I do apologize for that. I will eventually get back to the DMs or the questions where you've left them, hopefully, and be well. We've got some interesting podcasts coming up that I'm really excited to release. And that's about it. We'll see you guys in a week. Thank you.