Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #471 Luke Storey - A Horse Named Lonesome

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Luke returns to the podcast after a long hiatus creating and writing his new book- A Horse Named Lonesome. He does a phenomenal job relaying wisdom from his life experiences. We deep dive addiction, cults, sex/drugs/ & rock-n-roll ;) LINKS: Website: https://lukestorey.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/lukestorey Facebook: https://facebook.com/LukeStoreyPod X: https://x.com/MrLukeStorey TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lukestoreyofficial YouTube: https://youtube.com/@lukestorey Telegram: https://t.me/lukestorey CTA:  My new book, A Horse Named Lonesome, launches November 17, 2026. Pre-order now at ahorsenamedlonesome.com and get bonuses: access to my Inner Circle Book Club, an exclusive Lonesome Conversations six-part miniseries, and an ebook transcript of the series. Luke Storey | Wellness & Spirituality Podcast Join Luke Storey on The Life Stylist Podcast exploring wellness, spirituality, and biohacking for a more conscious, balanced, and optimized life. lukestorey.com   Brain Supreme is the best microdosing company on Earth- the Genius and the Athlete are my favorite products but all of them work incredibly well for a variety of purposes. Get 15% off everything in the store by using code "KKP" at checkout.  https://brainsupreme.co/collections/all I just launched my new community The Kingdom Within on Skool- sign up now for a free 7 day trial. This community is for people who are dedicated to learning and making positive changes in their lives. Read here for more... https://www.skool.com/the-kingdom-within-5541/about

Welcome back to today's podcast. We have the return of my homie Luke's story. Luke has been in a cave, per se, creating and delivering to us his first written works, a horse name Lonesome. And it is a fucking incredibly powerful book. I've known Luke for a while, probably since 2016, 2017. As he mentions, you know, being a homie with him is one of the reasons he felt comfortable moving here to Texas. he's a great fucking guy and I know a lot about him, but there was so much in the book that I just had no idea to the depths of where addiction comes through, where's his addiction came from. And so much more, he has lived a fucking wildlife. You're going to get plenty of it in this podcast. And I was just floored by the amount that the guy has gone through and alchemized and come out on the other side better for. So my hat's off to Luke.

I'm so grateful that he took the time to put all the effort into compiling and bringing this book to life. I think it's going to help a shit ton of people. It certainly has helped me to reflect on my own addictions and my own upbringing and how these things all kind of interplay, relationship bonds, you name it. I mean, he's done a lot of work on himself. And really, you know, there's no shortage of. pretty raw and awesome accounts of Luke when he was younger.

So you guys will dig this podcast, share it with friends. Again, support our sponsor, Brain Supreme. They make this show fiscally possible. And of course, you know, check out The Kingdom Was Then. It has been rocking and rolling here for about six months. We've got a small group of people that's on school. You get a free week. So if you sign up, just go ahead and look through everything,

jump in on some of the old recordings and see how it's done. you got one lecture a month, one Q&A a month, and it's going to be fantastic having you guys there. All right, without further ado, my brother, Luke Story. Well, dude, you've been writing a book. You were talking off microphone, I'll admit, which is, you know, that's blasphemous in the podcast world, about some really cool shit, important stuff about, you know, writing a book about loneliness and how, you know, in order to dive into such a great project, how you have to really section yourself away from friends,

the outside world and really knuckle down. We're going to unpack some of the many of the topics that are in this book. I got to read a portion of it and was just fucking blown away in particular with your history, right, in the depths at which you communicate about it and how that really dovetails and leads into all these avenues that you explore from addiction to plant medicines to relationships beautifully stated. It frames things in a very, in a touching, you know, heartfelt way that's also like real as fuck, right? And I think that was awesome, how you leveled, you know, just fucking no bets here.

We're just going all in. This is it, you know? Dude, now that it's, you know, I can't touch the book anymore, right? I went, I just finished the final, final, what they call copy editing. And that's, that's at the point at which your publisher sends you a PDF, not a word document. Once you get out a word document and it goes into PDF, you're easing toward the point at which you can't touch it anymore. And I just passed that point. like a three-page version of the PDF and they're like, oh, we have a couple questions about this or that, right? Fact-checking shit and references and whatnot. And I turned that in and I was like, wait a minute, I'm talking about being molested, going to orgies. I mean, like, you know,

I think, you know, at least I didn't realize when I was writing the book that other people were going to read it, you know? And so I'm having these kind of little ego deaths along the way where I'll look at, you know, I have an advanced copy of the book. It's called a horse name Lonesome. And I'm practicing to read the audiobook, so I got to read it, right? I'm not that great at reading aloud. And I'm like, I need to take that out. This is so embarrassing.

But it's like, who's the one that's embarrassed? Who is that? That's not me. I'm not embarrassed. I don't give a shit. But the persona that wants to have some sort of optics doesn't like the vulnerability. Yeah, the potential of how you're viewed by other people, right? Yeah, and I just remind the ego when I see it flaring up like that, that I'm just, I'm not that important.

You know what I mean? Especially with the onslaught of media we have now. I mean, it's just like, dude, I mean, I could have put way worse stuff in the book. And even if someone took offense to it or was judgmental of my, you know, my life story or whatever experiences I've had, it's like, dude, who cares? It's like, you're here for a blip. and what people think or don't think about you. A, is none of my business. B, like, really has no direct impact on my life.

It shouldn't, right? I mean, I think that's a big one for me to remember because I've had my 15 minutes of toil, we'll say, you know, online specifically talking about opening the marriage and whatnot. Like, just the onsla, I was just reporting like anything else as a self-experimentor. Like, hey, man, we're going to try this out. This is what we've researched, you know, and these are the books that led us to this decision.

we've had many conversations. And he's like, oh, you can't fight. You know, like, you fucking cuck, like the whole world just shit. I was like, man, I guess the world ain't prepared for that. But from that, it did a couple of things. One, you know, my wife and I have been happily monogamous for the last six years. There's a lot to unpack from like what, why that was such a wonderful and challenging journey for us. But just from the social media standpoint and the what others think of me standpoint,

that was really important to like refine. You know, like Tim Ferriss talked about, you know, and I forget the book, how the ancient samurai would wear like a, this one general would wear a pink tunic. And he did it to have the eyes on him. He did it to feel, you know, what is real embarrassment? Because this isn't real embarrassment. What is real embarrassment? What should I truly be concerned with?

And so Tim started doing practices where he'd order a coffee and then lay down on his back while he were playing a Starbucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've done that shit too. And I thought that was like, these are great, you know, because they're just peeling layers to get to the truer self. And I definitely want to speak to that, especially as we speak about Bufo and things of that nature. I got a lot of topics I want to get into.

So I don't want to beat around the bush too much. But let's talk. Can I share something real quick? I'm just going to jump ahead to Bufo and ego. I was thinking about this yesterday. People often refer to experiences with entheogens where they have an ego death, right? And I just kind of, I don't think anyone's really defined what that means. Anyway, I was contemplating that.

and I was thinking about coming here and the trip that I came to a house hunt here in 2020, during which I also sat with Bufa with our mutual friend Aubrey. And that was the second time. Or wait, no, third time. Well, actually, the second time I did a bunch in one day. So who knows how many times. At any rate, I had what I think could be described in very technical terms as an ego death. Whereas in other plant medicine and, you know, experiences, I've had what I perceive to be an ego death,

meaning, you know, the intellect, the persona, the body, all that makes me me is kind of pushed to the side as it happens, right? And you're just kind of embodying your soul and you're doing the things that you do in those realms. And therefore, it's kind of an ego death because you've just bypassed the ego and now it's sort of just put in the corner with a dunce cap for a few hours while you do your soul's work. But in that situation, in that particular ceremony, I had what I would now define as a true ego death. And I wish I would have put this in the book, but you only have so many pages. But what happened was, and I took a big dose. I had a nice prayer with Manu. I don't know.

Yeah, I worked with Manu. Beautiful prayer. I was totally, you know, ready for the experience, fully prepared. The other people in the room were doing a little microdosing. So the field was strong and unified. It was like perfect. You couldn't ask for a better setup. Set and setting was like locked, right?

Take the dose and, you know, it was the full send. So just everything disappears into the totality of consciousness, right, as it happens with that medicine. And then as I started to kind of reemerge, I'm sure you've had this experience. You have a lot more experience with Bufo than I do even. But you know how the person. starts to kind of reintegrate, right?

Like you're totally disintegrated, and then parts of you kind of come back online, and you start to be aware of thoughts and feelings. Little chunks of awareness. Yeah, it just, you know, it starts to subside, and then who you thought you were starts to come back. So in the process of kind of coming out of the big peak of it, consciousness, God, higher self, whomever these voices are that we hear, said, hey, do you want to look over here?

You know, medicine will kind of invite you into some nooks and crannies sometimes, right? And I'm always a full yes. Like I've never had anything come up in a ceremony where I'm like, no, no, I don't want to look at that. I don't want to deal with that. It's too scary, too painful. And I didn't know what it was exactly for the few hours afterward. I was able to unpack it eventually. But essentially it was like, hey, do you want to look at this? And I've looked at, you know, the abuse that I suffered as a child, harm that I've caused other people, you know, my family lineage, just there's no stone unturned in terms of. of shadow. And it said, hey, do you want to look at this thing or do you want to work on this?

And I thought I was saying it to myself, but I was actually saying it out loud in the room, which Aubrey shared with me afterward. I said, nope, too soon, too much. Pull the plug. I'm out. And I opened my eyes and I sat up and I had this incredibly vivid hallucination that seemed so real that when I had arrived in that room, I had set up all these like iPad and iPhones and I was live streaming the journey to the whole world. It was like the inflation of ego was just insane because I used to do that. We were talking about traveling around with our podcast gear. I used to live stream, you know, on Instagram and Facebook, two Facebook pages, one

Instagram. I have all these little tripods and everywhere I'd go if I did something interesting, I would live stream it. And so the hallucination was that I was kind of trying to be badass and like I'm sitting with this really powerful medicine. I'm going to show you guys how it's done. And I'm hallucinating that I'm live streaming. And that now everyone in the world is if I was like the biggest celebrity in the world,

that's kind of the grandiosity of the ego expression that I was feeling. Everyone in the world is watching me have a bad trip and resist the medicine and freak the fuck out. And it was like this level of shame and embarrassment that was just beyond belief. but with that I truly felt that I just nuked my entire, you know, public persona and personal brand and that I was now like the laughing stock of the world and my career and everything was just over, right? This is totally real as I'm sitting up and resisting and everything's blurry and fucking weird. And I swear to God, I really believed it was real. And so what happened was, you know, I think, you know, people in the room were like, okay,

he's doing that thing that happens in Bufo for some people. Usually I just lie down and I'm totally still and just chilling, just having the experience, but I'm starting to get up and freak out. So Bailana comes up to me and starts just singing to me. And I just focused on her eyes. And all of a sudden I just looked through her eyes and I just saw the infinite reality beyond through her eyes.

And then her voice and her eyes just started bringing me back. And then I realized like, oh, I'm not live stream. I mean, like, I'm fine. That was not real, but I was still in the medicine. So I laid back down and then actually had a pleasant journey. Long story short, when I unpacked that over the next few days of integration, I was really in just a place of just really high consciousness for the days after that. A lot of like night school and reactivations and stuff with which I know you're very familiar. So I'm going, what was that? The question was, what did I say no to? I'm not a no guy.

I'm a fuck yes guy. Let's go to the darkest of darkness and shine some light on it. And what I realized was, God was asking me if I wanted to experience non-existence. So not death. Death means you were once alive. It was an invitation to experience there is no you. There never was a you.

There never will be a you. And that's what I said no to. But it wasn't me that said no, because my soul already knows that I'm not a single thing, right? I don't believe in separation because it's not real. It was the ego going, I'm not going to not exist, and that's what caused me to fight, right? And so that led into that whole hallucination of just being mortified and embarrassed

and all of that. So when I was looking at that yesterday, I thought, no, that's actually a real ego death, right? And the funny thing about it that was so instructive, to me and just really helps me to integrate and just have a healthy relationship with the ego is that what the ego wanted to resist had just happened. It was late to the party. I was already in the place of non-existence, right? Where the single source of consciousness that we call Luke's story was assuaged temporarily. So it was just so funny, you know, that the ego,

as cunning and clever as it is, it's also very dumb. You know, it was trying to prevent something from happening that had already happened. And what had happened was something that it couldn't resist because the potency of that medicine is more powerful than the ego, right? So anyway, you know, so I don't know where that story fits in, but I, you know, I love talking about Bufo with you or anyone that's had that experience because it's just one of those things. It's like, it's ineffable, A, I mean, you really can't explain it no matter how many

times you and someone else might have had it, but it's that, I guess, finding the meaning of that, and maybe that's the whole purpose of working with these medicines, is what parts of myself don't want to be seen, and why are they hiding, and what are they hiding from? And so that helped me see that rather than the ego being an enemy, that it's really there as part of self-preservation. It wants to keep the body alive, and it is integrated with the mind, with the intellect in a way where you have these animal instincts and these emotions and these base survival kind of drives. And then it gets up in the mind and charges the prefrontal cortex with doing the job of keeping the body alive. And most of us spend our whole lives thinking that kind of, you know, storm.

of entities and persona and thoughts is actually who we are. So it was such an incredible experience. I mean, it was just one of the most profound things that ever happened because I really got to see who and what I really am and that these other parts of me have caused me and other people so much harm in my life because I didn't understand the nature of that relationship. So it's like as I sit here with you now, I'm speaking from my heart, from my truth. But there's also this part of me over here that says you're talking too long.

Kyle's annoyed. People don't want to hear this story. You sound stupid. You just repeated the same word three times. You said, um, four times, right? It's like that critic is over here. But because I know that's not me, I'm not fighting it. It's like, oh, thanks.

You're trying to make me sound super smart or whatever, entertaining. I appreciate that. But you don't need to be in charge of that because there's a higher intelligence that can be in charge if I allow it to be, and that's my truest expression. So the way that I framed that, I didn't tell that story in the book, but I think 5MEODMT specifically, I think, is the closest thing you can get to a near-death experience, an NDE. And so the way I framed it was an EDE.

You know, if you really have that kind of full blast, there's no space for the ego to exist there. There's something that that medicine interacts with in the mind and the neurochemistry and God knows how it works. But I think it's the only one I've ever experienced where you truly are completely divorced from ego for that period. But then as you start to come back, well, guess who's coming back with you? You know?

And in other experiences I've had too, it's like I'll be in that kind of purgatorial bardo space between like the full send where you're deaf and blind and, you know, you have no awareness of you even being there. you are gone, so to speak. And I've had this thing where it's like, it's trying to walk on a tightrope, right? And it's like, I'm trying to stay in the zero point, this center point of that medicine. And then the ego is coming in with this distorted field. And it's really like visually for watching the video. It's like, I'm trying to stay on this line. And it's trying to pull me into your resistance. But it's not doing that because it wants to harm me. It's doing that because it

wants to protect me, and it's losing its grip. You know, it's losing its validity in my mind. And so it's just struggling to hang on and keep me from going into consciousness. It's trying to actually keep me from dying because it doesn't realize that there's no physical risk involved in the exploration. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about brain supreme.com. Brain Supreme is the very best mushroom company ever. If you've read about microdosing or heard about on this podcast, there is no better route than trying brain supreme. It is absolutely incredible. They have a series of products designed with many functional mushrooms as well as the good stuff in there as well, discreetly packaged, and they have optimized for neutropics with the genius.

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Also try the Mac stack. That one is magic free, but it is a phenomenal product. You can throw it in your coffee like I do every morning or mix it with tea if you're going caffeine-free. And it is exceptional. It just potentiates all of the neurochemistry and turns all the firing and wiring on blasts. So you can have an absolute phenomenal day.

They also have Sheila Jeet pearls, which are oddly incredible and probably the most convenient way to take in Shilogy. Check it all out at Brainsopreme.co slash KKP and now back to the podcast. I would say here's one thing that I want to add to that just from the final thing you just said

there because I have approached what felt like and Paul Chek has said this as well. So he's said that there's layers, whether it's the pleroma or whatever the fuck you want to call it, layers of consciousness where he reached a spot

and this happened to me only once where you're welcome to go through there, but there's no going back, was basically what he understood. And I had the same, same exact feeling at one point where it was like, hey, you can go further, but there's no you, there's no, Tosh, there's no anything after that. It's a different experience entirely. Yeah. And that scared the fuck out of me. Yeah. Because I love this experience. It's terrifying. I think there's medicine at this experience. It's terrifying. To your point, though, like it does move you beyond comprehension, right, which is, you know, part and parcel of having an ego. Like you, as Paul said,

if you don't have an ego, you wouldn't, you wouldn't know where to go pee, you wouldn't know how to drive a car, you wouldn't know your fucking first name, right? It's an important piece of being alive. And it also sometimes needs to take a back seat, you know. And if you can tune into these different areas, it's like, you interviewed Brian Costello, primordial code author. No, I haven't. Oh, dude, you'd love them, man. You got, you have to. Yeah, you'd love that book too. Fucking fantastic novel. Things like us, you know, like all the things. He's fucking, he's level. he talks about primordial code the book is the primordial code primordial code like when you sun gaze you're getting information that is beyond thought right you're getting you're getting

downloads of information through on a physical on every level physically mentally emotionally spiritually and it's it's re-updating your primordial code then we have empirical code like what you're taught in fifth grade science class right at a public school that's empirical code when many people can regurgitate empirical code. Many people when they're brought with an idea that's counter to what they were brought up with will recite empirical code without even realizing it. So kind of the defining line between Newtonian physics and quantum physics. Similar, right? But this primordial code, you know, that is baked into us being barefoot on the ground. It's baked into what we feel like when we're in the ocean, you know, like everything's communicating with us. There is something to

that effect magnified with something like Bufo, right? Because it's the ultimate fucking reset, the ultimate primordial code coming through that reminds us of who we really are. And also can be challenging to integrate, you know, super challenging. And I want to talk about non-dual states and all this stuff with you, but I do want to finish what you want to say, but I want to get back to, you know, talk about your upbringing.

We've done this before, you know, but like talk about how lay these things out because I feel like, you know, whether it's, you know, the, God, there's so much here. The existential loneliness and spiritual amnesia piece is a big one. But I think about, you know, you talk a lot about forgiveness and, you know, the Troubled Teen cult piece. Like, I want to get into this early Luke. Cool. And map, you know, where these things start to, you know, lay out for you because your trajectory is phenomenal, brother.

I love it. When I first started piecing together an outline for the book, there was very little story involved. I didn't really have a memoir in mind. It was more the teachings. My book kind of has three parts. There's tales, teachings, and practices, right? There's exercises throughout the book,

so the reader can kind of, you know, not necessarily have to have had my life story, but be able to take away some of the experiences I've had and draw a correlation to their own experience and find out what's causing the sense of separation. But my wife is like, dude, you've had a really wild, interesting life. Like, you need to talk about your life in the book.

I was like, ah, who cares? I'm not a celebrity. You know what I mean? When I think of memoir or biographies, they're by people that are noteworthy and have some level of fame and notoriety. And I still don't think I really have that, at least at scale. So I thought, who cares about my story?

But as I started writing about it, I was like, shit, I've lived a lot of life in these 55, just about 56 years. So I appreciate you asking it. And now it's fun. I'm giving myself permission a little bit to not feel, I don't know, narcissistic for talking about me in my life. It just there's a side of me that feels that that's really boring. Like, who cares?

That's just the inner critic, though. Yeah. The critic is going to say, oh, you're playing small. Say it, right? Yeah. But you're playing small. And it's the same inner critic that says, oh, you're Mr. Big Pants now, huh?

You want to show off to all your friends, right? It's the same guy coming from both angles. Totally. But now that, you know, the book is done. and it's about to be out in the world. I think there is a lot of value in story because that's part of the human experience, right? It's like we learn through stories

and parables and metaphor. And so many of the spiritual books that I've read that have been really impactful, and my book is ultimately a book about spirituality, it's kind of embedded within the meta message or meta theme of the book. But I relate to people through story. It's like sitting around the key,

campfire. And my name is Luke's story. So that's going to tell you something. I was called Luke Shoemaker. I'd probably be a cobbler, you know, but maybe I was put here to tell stories. So to answer your question, yeah, you know, I think a way to summarize my childhood, which is common of so many people that have fallen into addiction, as I eventually did, is, you know, I come from just a long line of alcoholism, dysfunction, incest, abuse, just. a lot of really sick people. And the interesting thing about that, too, that I really uncovered as I was kind of tracing some of my history and my family history, that's really interesting because I think you

can draw a parallel for humanity as a whole, the collective, in the sense that if I look at my family line, I don't know that much about my family history because we're so fragmented. There was really never a nuclear family to carry those, to carry that history. story forward, but I've interviewed my grandparents and my parents and tried to learn as much as I can once I started working on myself. But as far back as it goes, people are pretty sick and dysfunctional. But what's interesting is that each subsequent generation has gotten a little more conscious, a little healthier to the point that by the time it trickled down to my parents, just divorces, abuse, infidelity, alcoholism, all the things. My parents actually, on their own,

that they were divorced, each, you know, were driven to a point to really start looking at themselves. You know, my dad went into therapy. My mom had her own path. She's kind of a private person, doesn't like me to talk about it. But, you know, she found her way back to herself and worked on herself. And I was really informed by my parents' willingness and drive to evolve. And I would say that I've put much more work into either than either of my parents have and objectively, no judgment, but have evolved probably much more than either my parents. I wasn't able to have kids. I tried for a few years, and it didn't pan out for me, unfortunately, which is another

topic we could perhaps get into, is dealing with the grief of that. But my little brother has kids, and they had wild births at home. They're obsessed with conscious parenting, teachings, and books. I mean, they're doing everything you could possibly do, which I'm sure you and your wife do with your kids, obviously, they're doing everything they can to kind of reverse the course of the family line. And I would suspect everyone's going to have their problems and, you know, their own personal evolution. But I suspect that my brother's two kids will probably be even healthier than any of us. For sure. You know what I mean? Yeah. And then if you look at

the collective history of humanity, I mean, we went from, you know, Viking hordes, raping and pillaging indiscriminately for no real reason, maybe some religious wars and some motivation. But, you know, these colonizers as they're called, I don't like that word because it's overused as such as anything else these days. But let's just say, you know, these kind of rapacious civilizations that would travel to other areas of the world and just randomly just kill all the people for no reason, right? That kind of evolved into slavery because someone figured out, hey, instead of killing all these people, we could just put them in chains and put them to work and own them, right? Which is, of course,

terrible and is still prevalent in some parts of the world. Actually, I heard recently that there's more slavery now than there's ever been. But the level of warfare that we came from, even looking at World War I and World War II, I mean, now there's different kind of information wars and sort of psychic wars going on. But in terms of like overall bloodshed, we have over vast stretches of time, I mean, hundreds, thousands of years, become a little more civilized and a little more sophisticated and evolved, right? So it's like I'm looking at my own family and I'm looking at the human family. And that gives me a sense of hope. It's just that the progress is so slow, especially with the collective, right? I mean, we're talking about just eons of time where now

we're at a place where I think that the nefarious forces, you know, in this duality that we find ourselves in have always been present, you know, Waitiko. I mean, it's an energy, right? It's part of the polarization. And so you get people that take on a body and incarnate. And I believe that certain souls incarnate in certain places and certain cultures, because that's where they are in terms of their evolution, right? And so what a gift it is for me, there's so much gratitude despite how much pain I

experience as a kid and how much pain and suffering there's been in my family that, man, I must have been to at least a pretty evolved place to come into the family that I came into, right? Because it could have been much, much more worse. I mean, I didn't experience a lot of violence and things like that, just other forms of abuse. So it gives me hope, A, that I came into this experience prepped for what was in front of me. And I believe that I chose the experience that I had and the family that I had. And who knows how far all of our souls go back. in this sort of constellation, right? But now when I look at the world and how disconnected we are,

which is what I've been focusing on for the past three, four years and writing this book and just trying to get to the root of human suffering, I think that now you could look at the world and think that things are more evil and dark than ever because it's just available to us now. Information is shared more readily due to independent media like this and the internet, of course. but in reality I think what's happening is the number of people that are awakening and have awakened

has reached such a critical mass that the dark nefarious side of humanity that has wrestled control of our entire civilization all over the world I didn't say all around the globe all over the globe if you know, you know. It's like the darkness has always been there. It's just so many of us are awake now that it has nowhere to hide, right? And so all that's happening is we're just shining a light of consciousness on something that's been prevalent and running the show for so long.

And that's happened in kind of a microcosm in my own life, you know, over the course of my own growth and evolution, especially in the process of writing this book and just like really going into all these crunchy memories from my childhood and so on, I'm becoming so much more refined now and my light is becoming so much brighter that my ethical moral compass is becoming much more narrow. So what might have been acceptable to me a few years ago, oh, you know, maybe a brand wants to pay me to promote their shit. And it's like, ah, it's not a bad product, doesn't harm you, but like, it's not, it's not that great. But as long as I'm not harming people, I know there's no bad karma in it. I'm just giving a random example. Towards now, it's like,

I can't say or do anything that I don't truly believe because my integrity has zeroed into the point where there's just no room for any of that. And the only way that has been possible is by really going in and exploring some of the things that I've experienced. So when I was a kid, come into a family that's very dysfunctional, very fragmented, divorced parents, and really experienced a cultural duality in that my mom was very progressive and liberal, born and raised in Berkeley, smoked what we called pot in those days, you know, and like listen to Marvin Gaye and Neil Young, and it was cool, you know what I mean, burned incense and whatnot, right? And my dad was like a staunch Republican,

listened to Hank Williams, chewed skull, hunted and fished his entire life. Like his whole life was about hunting and fishing and just being in the outdoors. And he's a very rugged guy. He's a rodeo star, really. You know, he's a very successful rodeo athlete, I guess you call. Rodeo man. Rodeoist cowboy, maybe cowboy. So mom's kind of a quasi-hipy.

She doesn't like to be called that because in the 60s hippies were kind of dirty. She's like, oh, I was a mod. you know, whatever you want to call it. She was very liberal, dad, very conservative. So I'm kind of caught between these two worlds and both sides of the family are, you know, carrying all of this trauma and, you know, addictions and all this kind of stuff. And so as a result of that, I started to fragment too because I didn't really have a center point. There was no kind of gravitational grounding for me to find my own identity because I was kind of split between these two. worldviews and two different cultures. And in the middle of that, you know, my mom's taking care of me

working nice as a waitress when my parents divorced were out in the Bay Area in Concord, California. And so she would hire, you know, babysitters. And one of my teenage babysitters molested me when I was around five or six. And that was the catalyst for just immeasurable suffering and and acting out. And so I'm six years old. I'm vandalizing property. You know, the police are coming because I'm lighting pine trees on fire. I'm reading porno magazines. I'm reenacting the porno magazines with my little girlfriend down the street behind a house. I mean, like very sexually active at six years old. Have my first beer at six. You know, it's just really that trauma just sent me into a tailspin of acting out and violence and juvenile delinquency and all of that.

But that was really the externalized reaction to the pain. Now I know what happened and what I really uncover in my book is that, you know, I'm kind of split already between the two parents. But before I had a chance to form my own identity, I mean, you're a parent, right? You see these stages of development of kids. And I was in the pre-ego pre-there's a me stage, right? And so it was not only that I always thought, well, my innocence was stolen, right? It's like five and six-year-old kids aren't supposed to be reading hardcore

porn magazines and being touched in inappropriate ways, nor drinking beer or splitting kids' heads open. Or one time I filled a Coca-Cola bottle full of piss and, like, poured it on this kid's head. I mean, just weird shit, you know what I mean? It's like, I was just, you know, I had, I didn't know how, I didn't know how to communicate what had happened to me. And I was ashamed. And, you know, part of the grooming process that pedophiles used and it was used on me is there's an incremental buildup of secrets, right? It's like, oh, I'm going to, he would let me watch Three's Company, which is like so innocent now. But it was a

sitcom and it was like some people that lived together, but they weren't, it wasn't like polyamory per se, but it was like adult themed, right? There was new. wants to it that was definitely kind of sexualized in nature. And so that wouldn't have been something I was allowed to watch. So he would let me watch that. Don't tell your mom. Next time he would come over, he could see that I didn't tell my mom, you know, and then it kind of escalated like that. And so I didn't know, I felt like I had done something wrong that I would get in trouble if I told someone, you know? And so I started to become so encapsulated in my own world, full of all this shame and self-loathing behind the secrecy and behind just knowing something was wrong, that now I am disconnected

from myself before I even have a self, right? Because I'm still kind of part of my parents at that age. I haven't differentiated into my own individual identity. So I have no identity, and then my identity is fragmented, what I call the loss of inner sense. It's not just the innocence that there's things you shouldn't see or know at that age. It's the inner sense of who and what I am and where I belong. And that really started to draw me into myself in this experience of feeling unlovable, unworthy, just different, outside, alienated, disconnected, isolated. And so I didn't, you know, really have friends as a kid because I didn't, there's no capacity for real connection or intimacy. I had kids around and kids I'd run around with, but I don't know anyone from my childhood or my teen

years or anything. Like, everything was always fragmented and disconnected. And so, you know, I experienced that trauma and was just so completely thrown off kilter that I, because of where I lived and the era in which I live there in the Bay Area, you know, at the end of the 60s when Hayd Ashbury started to get full of, you know, harder drugs, crystal meth and heroin and what. not and a lot more violence and all of that, you know, kind of the flower power era was coming to an end. Really, I think the catalyst for that was Altamont, which was a concert where the Rolling Stones played and someone was murdered in the audience. It's just kind of a famous rock and roll turning point where the hippie movement of peace and love started to turn dark and there's the show

jumped the shark. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, the stones hired the actually the grateful, the story is just kind of interesting. The Grateful Dead used to use the Hells Angels as security at this time, right? So, and I had a lot of experience around that kind of, you know, the biker culture when I was a kid at the same age. So they recommended the stones that you hire the Hells Angels and the Hells Angels, one of them is the guy that, you know, you stabbed this guy and murdered him. So, you know, I'm born in 1970. By 1975, 76, I'm still in that area. I have all this trauma. And what happened at the end of the 60s is all of the drug addicts and people in the drug culture moved out to the country. And that's where I lived. And so there was just drugs.

everywhere. Everyone's parents, the drawer was full of Coke and hash and weed and crystal meth and it was just everywhere, right? And everyone grew weed. The cannabis industry was, you know, underground and illegal at that time, but it was totally normal for people's parents to have like a pot guard in the backyard. So it was like the perfect storm of a traumatized kid coming from a completely fragmented family, experiences trauma, and then there's just mass availability of drugs, which is exactly what a kid like me needed. And so I started. using and experimenting with drugs when I was eight, nine years old. I mean, I did Coke the first time.

I was probably nine or ten. Damn. I got like shit-faced drunk the very first, well, not the first time I tasted alcohol, but the first time I intentionally drank alcohol knowing what it was, blackout drunk, alcohol poisoning. And at that time, my mom was dating a dealer who was an arms dealer and a drug dealer. And so, you know, no fault of hers. It's just, she didn't.

know what I had going on inside. So she didn't know that I was already using drugs on the down low, but then having such availability really skyrocketed my addiction. And so by the time I was, you know, 12, 13 years old, I was full-blown addict, you know, walking around with like, I used to go to the head shop. We used to have these things. Well, I don't know what they call them now. But it's like, like, what are those ones in Texas? The head shop? There's like a chain of them. Oh shit. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Head shops like where you buy drug paraphernalia.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, where you get your bongs and water pipes. You're supposed to call water pipes. I mean, I would have like a camo jacket and had all these pockets. I was kind of like a little stoner. That was the identity I took on, you know, in the early 80s. And I'd have a little mirror, you know, in a razor blade. And it was like in a little velvet case. And they'd even have like Coke mirrors that had like bands on.

I'm like, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, you know. And I was a little metalhead. So I have that. And then I'd have like my vizine, the bonaca, you know, like the breath freshener spray. And then all kinds of different pipes, you know, these pipes that you could take apart. And they had a little chamber in the middle where you could resonate the bud. I mean, I became very proficient in, you know, the acquisition and use of drugs and all the tools necessary to do them. So my parents have no idea. I'm 12 years old walking around with this trench coat full of all kinds of drugs, you know, speed, cocaine. We didn't have crack back then and just smoked weed constantly.

I was very psychologically addicted to your cannabis. And, you know, if you're a kid and you don't have a source of income and your drug habit is supported by skimming off adults around, I mean, ultimately, you're going to run out here and there. And so that started to happen. And when that happened, I started breaking into houses and just robbing houses. And I would go in like a little cat burglar, just houses in my neighborhood. and I wouldn't like ransack the place. I wouldn't leave a trace. And I wouldn't take all their money or drugs or anything.

I would just pinch, you know. So I could keep going back in. So I was like, oh, I see he goes to work at 9 a.m. Boom. I go in. I just take a little bit that would be unnoticed, you know. So I was actually quite clever, you know. That's a little budding criminal.

But, you know, one of the stories in the book is that came to an end. One time I got sent out to live with my dad in Colorado. And there were no drugs out there, man. I mean, my dad was super straight. And so, and I was in a little tiny town outside of Aspen. And so it was very hard for a 13-year-old kid to get the kind of drug supply that I needed. So I started casing out the neighborhood and I found a house down the street that had a couple weed plants growing on their back porch.

And I was like, bingo. So I go break in, couldn't find any weed in there, but stole a bunch of other shit, just anything of value. This time I was, I was leaving a trace. I've gone past the point of like being undetected. I didn't care. So we stole a bunch of liquor, a bunch of brandy. I remember it was brandy because when I got arrested, subsequently, and my dad had to pay restitution.

They were like vintage bottles of brandy that were worth a bunch of money. Oh, shit. Which also stacked up on the charges, you know, because I was hit with all these charges. And now it's grand theft. Yeah, if it's over a certain dollar amount. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny.

When you get arrested for doing one thing, you know, the authorities, they stack on a bunch of, you know, a bunch of counts on your rap sheet. and that's how the plea bargain system works. It's like, oh, okay, well, I'll plead to the breaking and entering, but not the grand theft, et cetera. So I'm in this house. I'm stealing a bunch of shit. We still is brandy, and there's too much stuff for us to carry. So I put everything that I wanted to steal that I couldn't carry in the middle of the living room. We go to my house, go in the garage.

We still didn't have any pot, so I just drank a bunch of brandy and got shit-faced. And then went back to the house to get the rest of the stuff. I'm in the house, and I hear keys in the front door. Like, oh, fuck. I mean, talk about panic, dude. You don't know, I mean, you don't know who's coming home, right? I mean, this is a couple of, like, skinny hippies, but it could have been some dangerous people that wouldn't be too stoked them robbing their house. So I hear the keys, and I go to open this door, and I think it's a closet. I'm like, I'm just going to hide in this closet, and then when things quiet down, I'll make a run for it. So I opened this door, and I'm facing the homeowners on their front porch. They had like a front door in the living room, but there was a side door in one of the bedrooms that went right to the front porch. I opened the door and we just stood there, just bewildered. You know, everything just like time froze and we're just going, we're both going, what the fuck, right? And then I run for it.

They catch me. And, you know, subsequently I was arrested and it resulted that arrest because it was my first offense and I was only, I think it was 13 or 14, I got probation and like a stern warning that if you break the law again, you know, we're going to, we're going to levy all these charges against you, basically. And so, of course, I broke probation. I got caught smoking weed at school. It was in Colorado in the winter, and so you could see your breath.

So my technique was I would like, I have my little pipe and my little one hit or whatever, and I would go into a garbage can, like one of those drum kind of garbage cans. I would dip down in there so no one could see me. And I'd take a hit and then I come out and just blow it out, and it would just look like condensation, you know, which worked most of the time, but some kid saw me and radden on me. And so the judge in Aspen and Pitkin County Courthouse finds out, we go back to court. And it turns out he had a history with my dad. They were like arch enemies, which didn't help.

Yeah. Over, I don't know, real estate shit, zoning laws. I don't know. My dad had had interactions with this particular judge, which I found out later in life. So the judge gives my dad an ultimatum, says, listen, you know, he broke probation. So you have two choices. You get him out of the state of Colorado. immediately. I forget there was a period of time at which I wasn't allowed to be in the state,

or you're going to be sent to a juvenile correction facility. And I actually looked it up when I was writing the book, and it sounds like a gnarly place. And they were going to send me there until I was 18. And I'm 14 now. And thank God. My dad was, I mean, by today's standards, he wasn't rich, but he definitely had more money than my mom. And so he started researching these troubled teen programs, which now is, you know, there's a lot of whistles have been blown and the nature of some of these programs is pretty sketchy to say the least. So they send me to this place in Northern Idaho. And, you know, so I'm a kid who now has taken on this identity of kind of a stoner and drug addict and a little metalhead and was really into that, you know, that kind of sense

of self that I had pieced together. And they sent me to the school in Northern Idaho and first thing to do is cut your hair off. You can't wear any clothes with logos. You can't listen to what they call it unacceptable music, which was like any rock and roll. You can't talk about R-rated movies. You can't wear black. I mean, just the whole thing, you can't leave for at least the first year.

You can't talk to your parents. You're totally cut off from the world. Now, I didn't have any friends at the time, so it wasn't that big of a hit. I was very isolated. But essentially, I was indoctrinated. into this very strict boarding school for for kids like me. And unlike the other kids that were there, they were all rich kids.

You know, like Barbara Walters' daughter was there, one of the Walton's, like the Walmart family, one of their kids was there. I mean, those are people with like old money. I never been around people with money my entire life. I'm like a white trash kid from suburbs of Northern California. So there's, I'm already like stripped of my identity, but then I'm thrown into another culture. in which I don't really belong and I don't fit in anyway, even though all of these barriers to connection have been removed and we've all been made sort of anonymous in a sense, right?

So long story short, I mean, we could go on for three hours just about that school, but what I didn't know then and what I know now is that that school was had evolved out of a cult, like an actual cult called Synanon. And Synanon was formed by a few people that had done. defected from Alcoholics Anonymous in Southern California in, I think, in the 60s. And basically, they created their own little offshoot recovery program that used force and coercion and control and really mind control and manipulation to keep their members intact. And it kind of devolved into a legitimate and very dangerous cult, which, you know, people ended

I'm going to jail and people were killed and people that tried to defect. I mean, it was like a really dark organization. And that was the basis of the school I went to, which in the book, for legal reasons, I had to use a different name, but it was called, I can say it here because I don't give a shit. It was called Rocky Mountain Academy. I called it Timber Ridge Academy in the book. And it was a sister school of a school in San Bernardino, California, which was the first one called C-D-U. C-E-D-U.

So essentially these cult practices of like really intense group therapy where there was a lot of screaming and intimidation and also a lot of the tactics used for mind control such as sleep deprivation, which was one of the tactics used at this particular school. And also the tactic of ostracization wherein if you misbehaved, you would be put on something called bands, which meant no one could talk to you. and you couldn't talk to anyone for extended periods of time up to solitary basically. Yeah. So you could be amongst the populace.

You weren't locked in a little dark room like you would be in, you know, solitary in prison. But you were totally cut off from connection and that was the punishment. So there were all kinds of things like that that went on at the school. What was difficult to reconcile decades later when I started looking into it was that it really saved my life. I was brainwash. I was abused. yet at the same time, it was still a step up from where I was headed. So when I got out of that school, I was like a little preppy.

I was wearing like pink, you know, Iazard shirts and no more heavy metal stuff. And I really had the best of intentions. And I didn't really resist at that school because I really had nowhere left to turn. And kids that would try to run away or resist would get punished with things like me and put on bands or just really intense, like long form, what they called. they called them raps and we'd think of it as group therapy but they were very abusive and confrontational verbal abuse yeah just hardcore i mean none of the staff were had any credentials whatsoever these weren't like therapists these were ex-hippies and ex-cult members and people that had kind of been um had taken on these pop psychology principles on things like that there was a

lot of role playing and just things that were popular in the 80s in terms of therapy i think a lot of those things have kind of faded away because they were either abusive or ineffective. But it was just like an amalgamation of all of these different psychological reprogramming techniques. I'm sure well-intentioned to help us kids. And it did help me because my brain was really dirty, right? I needed to be brainwashed. I was fucked.

My life was headed somewhere, you know, which was, if I had gone to juvenile hall, well, detention center, not even like a holding center, but like kids prison. I mean, I don't think I ever would have gotten out of that cycle, you know, as most people don't. A lot of people say, like, it would have been dead or in jail, you know, and have a hearty laugh and like just hearing that at the age at which you were entertaining these things, that is a valid statement that are in jail. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Totally. Hey, guys, quick break to tell you about the kingdom within, which is the name of my digital community on school.

It is nothing short of phenomenal. We've got such a great group of people that are in there right now, people that have all come for very, reasons from health concerns to wanting to optimize, to relationships, to parenting, you name it. We cover a lot of bases because we're basically diving into the wellspring of knowledge I've gathered from my life as a fighter as an optimization coached on it and all the amazing guests I've had on this podcast who I've learned from and taken a deep dive into. And it's really about the things that matter most. You know, we start with health and wellness, foundational principles of the body, the mind, and then about connection. How do we connect to ourselves? How do we connect to our

loved ones and others that really matters. How do I connect to nature? How do I connect to God? All of these things, I think, are the sweet sauce of our existence. And we get real nitty-gritty on different programs and protocols and very practical. And then we also scale back out and talk, what does it mean to think holistically? How do I see the bigger picture around my life's objectives and goals? And habit formation, essentialism, all the things that actually help us figure out the correct balance for where we're at in life. So much good stuff. I love the people that are in the group.

I would love for you to join. If you sign up now, you get one week free. No charge at all. Just jump on, go scrolling through. It's like an old MySpace page. You just go scrolling through there. You can see every video we've recorded and watch those old videos. You know, videos are about an hour and a half where we do a live teaching once a month.

And then we have about a 90 minute plus live Q&A. that'll give you a feel for who's in there, what they're about, what people are working on, and how I teach. And I think it's going to be incredibly helpful for many of you. If you're listening to this podcast, I can tell you would love being in the kingdom within. And I'd love to have you there. All right, back to the podcast. Check the show notes for the kingdom within.

And we're back now. Actually, let me try that again. All right, guys, we're going to get back to the podcast now, but check the show notes. And I hope to see you there at the kingdom within. So, you know, I get out and I have no real, I have great intentions. I've done a lot of healing. You know, that's where I disclosed that I was molested and I got support with that. And, you know, I shared some of these shameful secrets and, and learned a lot of kind of psychological principles and values, you know, honesty and fellowship, brotherhood. I mean, a lot of just moral conditioning, which was very positive. So when I got out of there, I would have never thought of like breaking in someone's house. Like that was done, right? I had come to a level of consciousness where things like that weren't acceptable, directly hurting people and things like that was just not, you know, it was no longer part of my experience. But they didn't, they had no understanding of the nature of addiction. So I was given no directives like, hey, you need to get into

a 12-step program. If you, you know, drink one beer, you're going to fall back. You know, there was just no warning. It was just like, drugs are wrong. That's what got you here. So don't do that when you get out, okay? I get out and I'm like an unsocialized beaten dog, you know, And I go back to this little school, like 200 people high school in Colorado, and I'm a complete alien. I mean, we don't speak the same language. I've just been indoctrinated into a cult for two years. I mean, I just did not relate, to say the least. Kids are playing football and hunting and fishing.

It was like, what? So instinctively, I just kind of started molding back into that old little, you know, heavy metal kid identity, but knew that I should. do drugs. And there were a couple other kids in the school that had earrings or dyed hair or whatever. And we were the little outsiders. And so I made those couple little friends. And this really speaks to the nature of addiction and what we call in recovery is the phenomenon of craving. And only addicts understand what this means. I smoked weed. I was probably out of there a few months. My friends were doing drugs and stuff, but they were cool that I didn't. I didn't really pressure me or anything. But I still didn't feel like I belonged with them either.

You know, it's like everyone's smoking weed and drinking beer and I'm over here like the teetotaler. It was awkward. And also I was still just so uncomfortable. I needed some medication. So I'll never forget. You know, they finally kind of talked me into taking a hit or two off a joint and I've been sober then for two years. And I got so fucking high. I was straight up hallucinating, couldn't walk.

I was on the floor. Damn. Just hammered from a couple hits of weed. And from that moment, it was like you lit a fuse on an M80, you know, and I just immediately was addicted to drugs again. But now even worse, you know, which is also the progressive nature of addiction, too, that's crazy is that addiction progresses even during periods of abstinence. So I didn't start, when I started back up, I didn't start where I left off.

I started as if I'd been going strong for two years, right? Just boom. Damn. Start taking acid. First time I took LSD was in. in my home-et class, sophomore year, which, by the way, I got no education in that school either. They totally fake the whole academic curriculum. So I also came out, and I had only made it to sixth grade.

Oh, wow. And then I went to that school for two years, and somehow they, I don't know, they fudged the paperwork or something with school credits and then popped me into my sophomore year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's the one before you're a senior?

Junior. Junior. Okay, yeah. So I got, sophomore, junior, senior. Yeah. So I skipped, like, a bunch of grades. and went into my junior year. And yeah, and then, you know, I knew what acid was.

I mean, I grew up, you know, idolizing Jimmy Hendricks and all the, you know, the 60s rock stars and stuff. So I took some acid. I'm in home at class. I was just like, start tripping balls and we're making casseroles and shit and everything's melting, you know. It's like, I'm home. I'm home, man.

This is it. And then it was just, you know, from 16, that was 1986, 16 to 26 when I eventually got sober, that 10 years was just an accelerated free fall into the abyss of addiction. And you didn't get in trouble again because you at least still held the moral compass of not fucking with other people, not hurting people, that kind of thing. So you were able to make that addiction work per se for a decade because you had at least some moral compass install. Exactly. So I used my entrepreneurial instincts and just figured out if you deal drugs, you can keep yourself supplied without having to rob, you know, steal from people and things like that.

So, you know, to condense a long period. So that was, you know, that was kind of the cult indoctrination and the double-edged sword where I did find a home and a family and I felt loved and I had real connections, you know, authentic friendships there. But then we all got out, I mean, I don't think any of the kids that I knew from that school were successful. I mean, many of them died, overdosed, got, you know, sent to prison for various crimes, a lot of us suicide, addiction, and so on. So, you know, years later, after I'd been sober for a very long time, I was just reflecting on that. And I'd stayed in contact with a couple of kids and ended up doing drugs with them in my 20s in Hollywood. You know, I used to actually buy weed

from one of my peers in that school. It was a funny story. He was this, he's a Chinese kid, And he grew weed in his basement in the valley. And I made up a term for his weed. I called it Pretendica because it was female buds, like, you know, male plants are full of seeds and stuff. It smelled amazing, beautiful buds, like just the chronic, the dank, dankest weed. And it did not get you high one iota. It was the weirdest fucking thing. It was like, it was like near beer.

You know, it was like TH free cannabis before there was even a can't. of his industry. So I digress. But, you know, I'm looking at like, okay, this place saved my life and I received so much love and care there, but also was really harmed and exploited. So how do I reconcile that a place can be healing and harmful at the same time? You know, and that's a lot of what I explore in the book is really expanding our perception outside of binary good, bad, right, wrong, and finding that there's actually someplace in the middle where you can acknowledge, quantify, accept, and in some cases even celebrate both. Because all of the harm that was caused in this cult boarding school also propelled me back into addiction in such a profound way that I was only able to last for 10 years.

And I eventually pulled the plug. I mean, it's just like the show is over. I just couldn't take it. Once you get heroin and crack into the equation, I mean, it's like you get, you guys. only pull that off for so long. And to your point of not, you know, getting thrown back into a facility, I was so traumatized by being locked up in that place for two years that even when I moved to Hollywood when I was 19 and got really into like hard drugs and, you know, spent a lot of time on the street and interacting with, you know, gangs and all this kind of wild shit, I was so

paranoid of getting arrested that I never got caught, you know, because I was super paranoid. Like me and my other junkie friends, you had, if you live in Hollywood in the 90s, you could only get crack on the street. No one sold heroin in Hollywood, which was super annoying. You had to go all the way to downtown L.A. And there's, you know, different areas that are controlled by different gangs down by MacArthur Park. There's a famous song about MacArthur Park. They probably didn't know in the 60s it was going to, you know, turn into like a hotbed of gang activity and heroin dealing. But what most junkies would do is you're dope sick. And so you're fiending like every second counts, right? So you go, you know, there's a little whistle in a sign from the guy in the corner, these like

Latino gangbangers. Oftentimes they'd be in a wheelchair, like the O.Gs, you'd know that the guy in the wheelchair is the guy holding. He's the boss. He's in some kind of gang fight or something. So, you know, we go down there, super dangerous, but there's cops everywhere because they're waiting for little white boys to come down and score. That's what's keeping the machine alive, and they don't like that, right? So my dumb-ass junkie friends will go cop, and because they're dope sick, they pull over right there and use, and the cops are waiting for them, and they go get sent to L.A. County jail. So I saw that happen over and over again, and I would just resist that.

And I would just weather the storm until I could at least get back home. And then I would medicate myself and get rid of the withdrawal. So I was really, really paranoid. And even my apartment, I lived behind the Chinese theater and I sold drugs 24-7. I mean, it was like a convenience store. It was just nonstop. But even in that, I knew that if I got busted and I was only selling weed, that the charges would be much less than if,

I was selling crystal math or heroin or something like that. So I never had large quantities of hard drugs in my operation because I knew I could be busted in any minute. It was so obvious. People just at my buzzard stuff all day, all night. And I started selling drugs, all these rock stars, you know, and things like that. And, you know, I really got swallowed up in kind of the rock and roll lifestyle and the drug culture in Hollywood.

But thankfully, you know, the experience at that school really taught me I do not like to be locked up at all. And it's still, I think, my worst fear, you know. is being controlled in that kind of way. That probably stems from my childhood of being totally out of control and having my body used in ways that I didn't agree to. I need my space, man. Do not invade my space and do not lock me up.

So I did manage to make it through that whole period. But at the end, I know I'm going on and on here, but at the end of that period, another really interesting happened. Well, I was also selling mushrooms. And I don't think I realized at the time that if you have like, you know, five pounds of mushrooms, you might as well have some Coke just due to how they're scheduled. I didn't realize that. To me, mushrooms are like the same as weed. Anyway, I sold mushrooms.

I used to have these big five-gallon, like cat food buckets, and they'd be full of shrooms. And people come over to buy weed, and I put some weed on the scale and then offer some mushrooms. And it was pretty good for my business because now I had like two offerings. And I was really good at marketing, actually, as a dealer. I used to like roll big fat splits. and then I go to parties and go in the middle of the room and just blaze weed and share it with everyone, just pass out my little car. It's funny to think about.

It's like half baked. You got the little smiley face. Yeah, totally. But anyway, there's a really beautiful thing that happened again, that like decades later, I discovered I was in a cult and kind of had to reconcile that. Also decades later, I realized that plant medicines, well, fungal medicines in this case, had really ceded my sobriety, which is crazy. Some 20 years sober, fast forward, I go sit in my first series of ayahuasca ceremonies.

And, you know, it's a whole other story there about just the intersection of addiction recovery and psychedelic medicines. But anyway, I felt called. I felt like there were some things I was stuck on. And I definitely was even at 20 years, a very dedicated recovery. I go sit with ayahuasca. My life just completely starts to transform. It just levels of healing that I just could not achieve by any other means. and I was someone who worked really hard on myself for two decades straight.

I mean, I took my program, my growth, my spiritual evolution very seriously, going to India. I mean, all the things, right? I was still really stuck yet 20 years. Ayahuasca healed so much and really brought me back to the sexual abuse and showed me so explicitly and clearly how profoundly that had impacted me. I just kind of wrote it off. most addicts I know were molested. Big deal. Move on.

Go to therapy, talk about it a little, is what it is. You know, it's like, ayahuasca showed me like, no, dude, you got fucked up from that. That's the core wound of your entire incarnation, right? Anyway, I get out and I'm starting, I'm learning how to kind of understand and redefine sobriety.

Now that I've drank ayahuasca, and I'm still sober, I consider myself to be. sober, although some might not. And then I had a memory that a few months before I went to rehab, I used to just take mushrooms all the time just for fun. And what would happen when I took mushrooms or acid, which I did a lot in the 90s, going to dead shows and stuff like that, just partying, right? I would take some psychedelics and then I would start to think about dark shit, right? Just realizations about myself and my life or my childhood, and I couldn't handle it. And so I

would always get just wasted, drunk and smoke weed and do Coke and do all kinds of other shit. I remember one time I was on acid and at a concert out in San Bernardino, like way out in the boonies and we're frying on acid. And on the way back, we stop in downtown LA and we're like trying to score heroin, you know, and all the dealers, they would leave at night. You couldn't really score heroin at night for whatever reason. But you could score a crack all night. So I guess crack heads are up all night. Maybe junkies actually go to bed. So we, we score some crack and go back to my place high on acid and we're smoking crack. I mean, that's dark, dude.

I mean, that's like not a good high. I'll say the least. My heart's racing right now just from fucking cocaine memories. Yeah. So my experience of psychedelics was like trying to escape without the understanding that that's the exact opposite effects psychedelics have. What I call it in my book is inscape, right? You're trying to escape to get out of yourself.

Psychedelics take you to the core. of yourself. But one night I had taken a bunch of mushrooms and had one of many, but probably the worst bad trips ever. I just went totally dark. I had like a kind of a nervous breakdown, just crying. I'm sobbing. I'm with my buddy. I'm in my building downstairs in his apartment. Guy played in the band with and he just wants to party with me and drink beers, smoke weed, and be high on mushrooms, you know, and I start just telling him what a loser I am. And I'm, you know, I know I'm going to go to jail soon. I just had this sense of impending. doom, having these visions of just getting arrested or getting beat up, because I had some narrow

misses out on the street at nights, people jacking me and shit like that. And, you know, I managed to escape unharmed in those cases. But I just felt like something really bad is going to happen. And then whatever, drank enough until I passed out and forgot about that. A few months later, really hit a bottom through heroin withdrawal and check myself into rehab. And the rest is history. next thing you know, I'm sober for 20 years drinking ayahuasca. After I drank ayahuasca, I realized those fucking mushrooms got me sober because they showed me something that I couldn't unsee, which was that I was at a dead end. And also that there was just a mustard seed, just like a microscopic speck of worth that my life

and myself had just a modicum of value that was worth saving. So there was this sense of hopelessness. Yet at the same time, it's like, I don't think my life was supposed to be like this. I'm not supposed to be on drugs. And also there was, oh yeah, there was also like a lot of, I had a level of understanding, having been sent to that cult boarding school that I wasn't supposed to be a drug addict. When I got out of there, that wasn't the plan. And those mushrooms that night was like, dude, you had it.

You had two years you were on the right track and now look at you. you know, your band fell apart, had a record deal, just nuked it. So many opportunities in the industry, people that we met that wanted to help us. I mean, just playing with my heroes, you know, like if you had told me when I was 14 years old that I'd be, you know, hanging out with the people, I was hanging out with the playing and bands at them. I mean, I never, it was like, I was living this dream that was also my worst nightmare, you know? And so it's a beautiful kind of full circle moment that it's like the medicine showed me how broken I was and then 20 years later came back to heal the broken parts and has continued to do so.

That's fucking beautiful, brother. So that's the arc, you know, basically. There's a lot of details in between, but yeah, I had a really rich life experience. Even by the time I got sober at 26, I mean, I'd lived a lot of life. I'd experience a lot of things that were really dark and painful and caused myself and other people a lot of pain. But it also, I don't know, I think brought me to a place of desperation and teachability that really set the stage for my recovery. And I was not one of these guys that checks into rehab and is having second thoughts, right, or reservations or any of that. I was completely surrendered.

I completely surrendered my life to God the first day in rehab. And, you know, it's a great lesson in that is that, you know, God's not going to intervene in matter how much you believe in God, how much you love God. God doesn't touch, you know what I'm saying, without invitation. Yeah. And so, you know, those first prayers, that first day I woke up in rehab, I didn't believe in God, I didn't have any kind of religion. I was in a completely secular family.

That was my next question. Had no concept of spirituality, God, nothing. It's just when I woke up the first morning, it's another really great story in the book. But, oh, man, it's just so funny, just looking back. I love my little self, you know, myself back then. I'm just like, God, dude, you really put yourself through some shit. But I quit. I kicked heroin like a week before I checked into rehab.

I used to do this thing I'd call going train spotting. He was like, I didn't know how to get into a detox. I didn't have the money for like a proper medical detox. So I would just like pay one of my dealers or drug buddies to lock me up and just don't let me, don't let me out of the room. There's a movie with Nick Nulte where he does that. I forget the name of it. But yeah, he gets handcuffed to the bed and he's like, no matter what. Yeah.

You know, this certain amount of time has to pass before he can, unlock this. I don't give the fuck what I say. And God bless, you know, those otherwise unscrupulous drug buddies of mine, they wouldn't let me out. And I didn't have, I didn't own a car. I mean, I'd have a car for like five years, dude. I had a car when I first moved to Hollywood and I was always getting these eviction notices. I had a stack of eviction notices because I couldn't pay my $450 a month rent from my little Hollywood studio. And then the addiction, the eviction notices started stacking up. And so I traded my car, my little VW bug, to the landlord in place of my rent, you know, for $400 bucks for a long time. So if I would go

on these self-guided detox, you know, missions, even if they would have let me out, I didn't have any money to get a bus or a cab. And like the dope spot was super far away, which I would kind of do intentionally. I'd go like the last one before rehab was way out in the valley, like in the kind of the pornography industry, part of the valley, Kenoga Park or something, North Ridge. I don't know, somewhere out there. So I took into rehab. I'm not coming off heroin, but I'm coming off opium. I wasn't like strung out on opium, but I was using opium, tons of benzos, painkillers, tons of alcohol, weed, crack, coke, crystal meth.

So I'm detoxing, but I'm technically not addicted to opiates. So the morning that I woke up going, where the fuck am I? What have I done? I was like panicking. Dude, you check yourself into rehab? What were you thinking? So I go to the nurse's office and tried to get some meds, you know, some clonopin or something, you know, whatever they would use to detox you.

And she checked my vitals and she's like, you're not in withdrawal. I can't give you anything. It's like, oh, fuck. Like, I'm sober, dude. I haven't been sober in 10 years. I mean, not for a minute. Never. Maybe I might have sobered up when I slept.

But I would wake up in the middle of the night and, like, do bong rips. I was very opposed to being sober for a minute. So she says, no drugs for you. You're going to have to just sweat it out. And I'm like, I can't do this. And I'm also out in the middle of the woods. So I couldn't run away. I had no money.

My mom's not going to come pick me up. She just dropped me off the night before and paid for my rehab. Actually loaned me the 10 grand for the rehab, which took me. It took me five years to pay it off in my sobriety. And she made me pay it back. to her credit, I was invested in my recovery in more ways than one, right? I was like, if I relapse, I'm still going to owe my mom that money. And I had enough moral character at that point where I wouldn't just burn my mom.

So at any rate, the nurse says, no drugs for you. And I said, what do I, you know, how am I going to get through this? I'm dying. Like, I can't do this. And she said, well, in recovery, we pray to God to remove our obsession for drugs and alcohol. So go back to your room and pray. I'm just like, what? I mean, it was like psychological torture.

I'm like, no, I need what's in that medicine cabinet now. Like, I need it real bad. I'm not going to make it. Nope, not going to happen. So I go to my room. I mean, I think I prayed actually once before that, but I wasn't willing to surrender all the way. I prayed to just, God, could you, whatever you are, could you get me off heroin, but I still

want to do everything else, you know? So God's like, yeah, it doesn't work that way. You're all in. You're either surrendered or you're not. There's not like an in-between. Oh, I'm half surrendered. No, that's compliance. That's going along with, but you're not fully conceding to allowing your will to be guided, you know?

So I go back to my room and I earnestly prayed. I mean, it was an authentic plea to something that I didn't believe in and had no concept of whatsoever. But left with no other options and having. really exhausted any possible way out, that's what I did. And I said that prayer, and then I started unpacking my shit, my little backpack or duffel bag or whatever. I mean, I didn't feel, nothing happened. There was no mystical experience.

You know, the curtains didn't, you know, flutter in the wind, the bright light. Like, it wasn't a spiritual experience in the classical sense. But I know now that it very much was. It was just a little more covert, you know, the way God was coming into. that opening that I had allowed. So I'm going through my bag, and I find a 10 milligram volume, little blue volume. I mean, I know what those look like, right? I know those guys too.

Yeah. When I would be really high on crack, and if I didn't have any heroin, I would take a few of those 10 milligrams, and I'd chew them up and hold them under my tongue. I mean, I knew about sublinguals back in the 90s. Oh, yeah. I'd snort two milligrams, an axe crushed up. Yeah, so I'd hold it under my tongue, and then I would hang upside down, you know, to just force a blackout.

Oh, that gangster. So I found that Valium. I saw it and it was like, like in the book, I said it was like finding a poisonous viper in my bag, you know. I saw it and grabbed it and ran to the bathroom and flushed down the toilet. And then sat on the bed and went, what the fuck, dude? That was a Valium. What are you doing? And in that moment, I knew that something had happened.

Something had restored me to sanity. I just followed the nurse's guidance. And those are the words I use. God, please remove my obsession for drugs and alcohol. I want to be free. I want to live. Just help me, man. I can't shut this valve off.

You know? And when I chucked that volume, went and sat down, it was like, who did that? I didn't do that. That wasn't me. Something is here. Something's listening.

Something is helping me. And that is what I've been unpacking and contemplating and integrating for almost 30 years. It's been almost 30 years since that moment happened. You know, that was the proof that I needed. There was something there. Now, that said, I also got deeply involved in recovery for, you know, years and years and there's all kinds of different, you know, other therapies and all sorts of things to help me. heel. It's not just like, oh, I said that prayer, I threw away the volume and then just went

back to living my best life. I mean, I rearranged my entire life. I moved out of my apartment. I cut myself off from all my old friends, just completely reorganized my life. And so there's a lot of work that went into maintaining the grace of that prayer and still is. But that's the one kind of keystone for me to this day is that it's like, I have proof, man. I have empirical evidence that when I truly humbled myself and truly surrendered at depth, God is right there who's going to happen. I've been here all along. You just didn't ask.

Or you didn't ask with enough sincerity. Right? And so I'm not going to interrupt your free will or whatever we call that, right? But it's like, okay, you're here and you're an individual expression of me that we call Luke and you're having this little experience. And I'm just going to let me, God speaking, I'm going to let me have the experience of you and you take it wherever you want to. Paul says that one of my favorite quotes from check is that God,

God says yes. Yeah. Always. Yeah. Always. You want to do that thing? You want to, you want to fucking jump off a bridge? You want to hurt that person?

The answer is yes. Yeah. And God, you know, said, yes, you can eat that value, you know? Or maybe there's another response you can have to discovering that, you know? And ever since that moment, and, you know, now it's been many years I've been working with, you know, anthogens and things. Not much lately. It's become much more

kind of sporadic. I have no plans to work with medicine at any point now, but I also don't get invitations anymore, which is interesting. Those first few years are just like run into people like you or I run into Aubrey.

Hey, want to come see with Bufo? I was just like, wow, okay. And I said no to 90% of them, but the 10% I said yes to really trained my discernment, you know, when it's a true, legitimate call for my highest good. and when it's just curiosity or novelty or wanting to escape or something like that.

So I've, you know, I've been, had a lot of medicine experiences over the past few years, but to this day, with the exception of nicotine, which I'd love to talk about, to this day, what's crazy is I have never, ever once, even for a moment, thought about using heroin, alcohol, cocaine, any of those drugs. It's just like there's like this force field around me. And it's the same way with pornography now. Same thing. It's just like, dude, I don't care what is happening in the world or in my life,

how much pain I'm in, how much temptation, whatever. There's just this non-negotiable, absolute, you know, solid brick, rock boundary between me and those things that I know will kill me. or at least, you know, if not emotionally and psychologically or spiritually cut me off. And, you know, a few years into recovery, I had nose surgery for like a deviated septum because I melted my preteen nose with Coke. And I went in for the surgery and, you know, it was really, really an extremely painful recovery. And so they prescribed me Vicodin. And I remember at the time I was really concerned.

I talked to my sponsor. I'm like, dude, I got to take something because this is just, I literally can't. walk, you know, I'm so fucked up. And my sponsor, thankfully, he's like, dude, your recovery's solid. Don't worry about it. Take the medicine as needed. Not even like take what it says in the bottle. When you feel pain, take it. Just you're cool, which was, you know, amazing that he had that kind of faith in me and also that I had my own faith in my recovery. But what's interesting, just in terms of how God transformed me, even on a neurochemical level, I hated the feeling of being on those opiates.

Interesting. It was horrible. It totally cut me off from God. I was mean, irritable, just racing thoughts, just my, the piece that I'd been able to kind of accrue over those first few years, maybe it was, I don't know, to get itchy face. Just the whole thing, you know, pinned pupils. I mean, I was high, right? But it wasn't a high.

It was like torture. I mean, it was awful. I couldn't wait to get off them. And even now, you know, years ago, I remember learning about crazy. Cratum, and for years I knew about it, I was like, nah, it's like an opiate. I can't fuck with that. And then eventually I got a little more educated. This is even pre-Iawasca.

I started using cratim here and there. And I hadn't really seen anyone have any problems with cratim at that time, but I just knew go easy. But there were times where I get the really strong extracts and things like that. Yeah. Those are a different ballgame. Yeah. And if I feel that opiate feeling, it's really uncomfortable. I actually hate that feeling.

So I got tons of cratim in my house. I may have jars of it from years ago. And it's like if I use it, it's probably a couple times a week. I take maybe a capsule or two, maybe a teaspoon. But I know what the threshold is when I'm going to feel that opiate feeling. And it starts to cut me off from reality, from spirit. So how is an ex-heroine addict able to moderate and totally control something like Kratum, where I've seen non-addicts get on that feel-free shit or whatever

and get strung out to the point where they're suicidal, lose their wife, lose their job. I mean, I saw this when I interviewed the feel free guy years ago. Me too. When he came out, I loved his story, a brutal story, no on why it was created, but beautiful, in my opinion, if it's a plant, I feel like that that is something that God has presented for us to work with, right? And obviously there is, you know, the difference between medicine and poison is sometimes

dose, oftentimes, right? And context. See in 70H and shit like that, those pills, all that come from it. even just feel free. I remember when they were, as a former college athlete, you know, I see feel free at fucking USC Trojan Stadium

in Ohio State and P. And I'm like, that's a problem. Like you're introducing this shit to college kids that have no reference point. They're all drinking beers and you've got something that one,

one glass bottle of two ounces would floor most people. Yeah. It took me a long time to be able to drink one bottle. Right? Like I had to work up to drinking one bottle. The first time I got it, I was like,

plant medicines and I've taken cratum and Kava and whatever, it's no big deal. I drank a full one and went hiking here in Austin. And actually that time, the first time I drank a whole one, I did actually like the feeling. I was on a hike with my wife and I started realizing like, dude, you're saying really weird shit. Kind of like when you're

drunk and you're just like, oh, you're just being, I don't know, just having a little too much fun, you know? Loose, yeah. Yeah, it's real, real loose. And I actually liked it that time, but as I started seeing other people in the community, I have very serious problems with it, that kind of gave me pause. And even I promoted that product early on

because it was not a problem for me. So I was like, just don't be an idiot, right? But eventually I kind of reached this point where I couldn't within my own moral compass continue to promote it because I saw so many people being harmed. And really my issue with that was, and it's kind of a sidetrack here, but maybe helpful to people, is that the company didn't explicitly warn you that it is a mind-indultering chemical and that it is potentially addictive. Yeah, it's, it'll, you get fucked up on it. If I go buy a nicotine product, it says, the first thing it says is like, this is an addictive chemical warning, right?

It's like the feel free guys are like, oh, it's just like this beautiful plant medicine. It's like there should be a huge warning on there that says like, do not, you know, operate heavy machinery. If you have a history of addiction, beware, this probably isn't from you. And so, you know, I found that to be problematic. Whereas a lot of people really vilified the company, I think, as a whole, just for creating the product. To me, the product isn't bad, but because there are very serious risks involved, you have to let someone know that there's a potential for that.

And then it's on them, right? Yeah. It's like who's responsible for that? Because a lot of people, I'm like you. I don't want big daddy government fucking poking its nose in and saying what I can and can't put in my body. And as a dad, you know, like I'd look at college. I was a fucking knucklehead kid. That was like the height of my drug experience

was in college at ASU. Number one party school in the nation every year I was there. Oh, really? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, wow. I just talked about this in another interview,

but all of our fraternities and sororities got shut down because a porno was filmed at Theta Kai, which all of my homies from high school were members in. They weren't in the porn. But it was someone like Captain Stabbin, you know, like some traveling fucking doofus

that had a funny name like that. Right. And the fucking, the dean of the school was like, you guys are done, like shut down the entire Greek system. I really tried to reform, you know, what ASU was thought of. I mean, there was a Simpsons episode where... What state is the ASU in? Arizona State.

Oh, okay. Yeah, this is in Tempe. I know nothing about... It just cracks me up, though, because there was a Simpsons episode where, you know, it's like the end of the world flood. And, and Ned Flanders is on his boat. And he's like, thank you, God, you've damned the righteous and spared, you know, and spared the, or you've damned the wicked and spared the righteous.

And he sees Homer who's still alive. And he's like, looks like heaven's easier to get into the Arizona State. Oh, that's funny. So, like, they've done a lot to repair, you know, the image. But while I was there, it was gangbusters. Yeah. And having kids now, you know, like, I've initially with plant medicines was like,

man, I can't fucking wait for my kids to do this and have a totally different trajectory than me. And as I'm watching them form in each stage, it's like, oh, there's something to nurturing these stages and allowing them to form an ego, become themselves. And I hear about lots of people, you know, they're, Maladoma Patrice Somei, right? 11 years old is when they have their right of passage. You know, like these are different cultures. And I don't know that our American modern kids need to have a right of passage at 11

years old. I don't think they're ready for it. Even in the house like ours, they're just not ready for it. My son's first experience will be fasting. with no food, no water this year when I do my vision quest. It's his choice. He saw me do it the first year. He wants to sit.

So he's not even going to have a day alone. He wanted to have a day alone. And our brother Ken, who's guiding us, he's like, why don't you just fast with me by the fire? You know, 15 hours and go home and have dinner and sleep in his bed. I'm like, brilliant. Cool. Right? So like there's little introductory ways where we can do things that help bridge that gap.

And I think those are necessary. But thinking about my kids, thinking about plants and all this. And then seeing that shit in colleges, I was like, damn, that's a red flag. That's a big red flag. And I just pictured me in college. If I had fucking feel free, that would have been a part of the arsenal, along with the Valium, the Vicodin, the Coke, the X-C.

I wish Feel Free would have been around when I was addicted to heroin. Could have saved me a lot of rough, dope sick moments, you know. But yeah, so all that is to say, you know, just kind of tying a bow on that is, you know, the way Great Spirit has worked in my life is really incredible. credible because it's changed me in such fundamental ways in terms of like addiction and recovery and my relationship to different substances where it's like surrendering my will to God and doing, you know, a lot of work around healing and recovery has now put me in a place

of empowerment and discernment to where I just don't have those kind of strict boundaries that were necessary in the first 20 years of my sobriety, right? Apart from nicotine, I just have not had any problems with any substances at all. But if you were someone who was kind of more an orthodox thinker in realms of recovery, someone who's on the abstinence path, you could look at my life and be like, dude, you're not sober, right? So it's like, what is sobriety even? And how do we each define that? And it's up to each one of us to do so.

It's tricky, though, because there's so much self-denial and manipulation in the addict mind that if I didn't have that kind of foundation, I can see how it'd be really easy to justify, you know, using a little more credum or, you know, the micro doses get a little bigger, whatever it is, right? I mean, even the past two years, I was like crushing Coca-leaf, you know, Mambay. Just a lot of people. I mean, just kilos, kilos, dude. I mean, so much when I was writing. I mean, it's a beautiful medicine.

It's so amazing for that kind of work. And I was, I don't know if, you know, there's such that alkaloid, the cocaine part of it is so minuscule, right? There's all of these other kind of constituents of that, the whole plant medicine. I think it's like green tea, honestly. Yeah. But, you know, whether I was addicted to it or not is debatable. I just know that it got to a point where I'd be waiting for the UPS guy. You know what I mean?

and feeling real edgy is a psychological kind of addiction or attachment. And that combined with the umbile, you know, the really potent tobacco paste. So I'm on those just all day every day. I mean, I'm just constant. I'm like a dragon.

Every time I talk, just plumes of green powder coming out of my face. And, you know, my wife isn't, you know, she doesn't have the addiction history and she knows mine and has, it's been really great at helping me kind of, you know,

keep things between the guardrails if I start to get, you know, And she brought up a few times like, yeah, really, you're really hitting those two pretty hard. And she is very respectful of indigenous traditions and the shamanic path and totally gets it. She's like, dude, you know, you're speaking of cultural context and coming of age. She's like, I get it. Like Alejo, you know, Alejo, the Wachuma crew, right, from, where are they from Columbia? Yeah.

I've sat with them a number of times, beautiful people. And I watch him and his whole crew and family. They're crushing the Mombie and Ambien. I'm like, see? This I told my wife. It's like, what? It's fine. She goes, dude, they're on a completely different life path.

There's a cultural difference, right? They're not a guy living in a big house in the suburbs in Texas grinding out a book. Like, it's part of their spiritual practice. The way you use it has nothing to do with a practice. You're using it as a tool and good for you, but don't conflate the two that like, I'm working with these beautiful medicines. No, dude, I'm grinding a book out and I'm wired to the tits on nicotine and like, micro, micro, micro doses of cocaine, you know.

So you could look at me sitting there right in my book, walk in the room as like someone in recovery and be like, that motherfucker is not sober. That's not sober. Am I high? No. Am I sober? No. Is it a problem?

It depends on how I contextualize it. Well, that's the, that's the, I don't want to just sit here and say, well, Uncle Paul says one of my favorite, you know, things from Czech is his, and I'll paraphrase this, but it is his definition of addiction. addiction is anything that prevents you from living the life that you wish to live, from you achieving your goals and not just from like a goal standpoint, but being in your Dharma, right, actually living your vocation, being in your highest version of what yourself is,

even if you don't know that yet. Right. So he's like, I don't give a fuck if you drink a bottle of jack each night. If you're healthy, you have a great relationship, you're able to get all your work done, your finances are locked in, you're grounded, and all the other things are great. I've never met a guy who drinks a bottle of jack that can check all those boxes, but that's just the point he's making, right? And so I say that because you talked about inner sense when you go in with psychedelics

and you're more yourself. I remember interviewing right after your first ayahuasca and you've said, I felt more yourself than more sober, more you, more Luke than at any other point in your life, right? And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes. That was around the time we met. Right? And so when I think of tobacco and I've had many conversations with ayahuasca about snooos, nicotine gum, tobacco, all this stuff, you know, like, because I question this shit.

Like, is it, is a, you know, I think of it more truthfully. Like, could you call it an addiction? Absolutely. I think of it as a partnership that, that is, and even my DNA says strong, strong, highly likelihood for nicotine addiction. Mine must too, bro. My brain fucking loves it. But, I mean, having been hitting the head for a decade plus and playing football before getting

in the head for a decade plus, nothing sharpens my mind and gives me a greater inner sense than tobacco does. Yeah. And so I've come to terms with that as like a, this is a partnership I never plan on leaving. Yeah. And I don't give a fuck what the rest of the peanut gallery thinks. I love this medicine. I treat it as such.

And it is also, you know, while Hoppe might be a tool for ceremonies, snoo is going to be a tool that I use on an everyday basis in podcasts while I'm ready, whatever, you know, like that. That's a different tool. different form. Ambial is also a different form, but they're all beautiful. And the only one that would really matter, you know, the only person where it would really matter if they had a problem with it would be if all parts of me weren't in agreement on that. That's why the sorting process on medicine that has happened more than once. Like, are you sure this is okay? Are you sure this is good? And what you said, you know, your intention with it, right? You can, it's totally fine to have the

intention of wanting to bring the very best of you out onto those pages and using a medicine for that it's okay about these conversations with aubri it's totally it's more than okay to talk business with iawaska like that's your work you're doing to that's what you're contributing right and it's not just the way you're making money it's literally what you're contributing that that brings money back to you so that should be fucking important that should be of the highest of highs right that should come from a place of integrity that has a deep relationship and reverence for the earth herself, right? Like that ayahuasca is the best place to talk business.

100%. You know? Well, I think with, I'd like to talk about the nicotine thing more because I got some funny shit to share about that. But to the point of our personal relationship with any substance and the intentionality around it, I think that at a certain point, and this is kind of where it got to me in the past couple years where I would get an invitation and I felt called, I would kind of expect to go in there and like, oh, there's probably some dark shit. I still need to uncover. And even the last time I sat with

ayahuasca, which happened very near to where we're sitting right now, I'm laying there just going, all right, you know, what do I need to work on? And it was like, there's nothing to work on from your past. Not to say that, you know, I'm a finished product or anything like that, but it's like in the initial couple of years, it was like more about repair. and healing the past. And then it just naturally kind of evolved into more what you speak of that envisioning my future. And in fact, this book right here, this, you know, this baby, and this is really my only

baby, apart from my dog, this whole, the premise of this whole book and the impetus to write it came to me in a mushroom journey, you know? And I was doing some healing in that journey. And it was like a, you know, hard opener combo. I think it was with some sad. and beautiful experience with a friend of mine that I've gotten to know named Harry the healer. And it was the first time in sobriety or in my life that I'd ever intentionally worked

with psilocybin. You know, eye mask, music, proper healer, doing all the shamanic things on me. Amazing. I have my little dog there with me. I mean, it was a beautiful experience. And the first half of it was like, oh, there was some trauma in my body. Started getting that, like, Kundalini shaking stuff going on. And I realized, like, the reason my hips have always been so tight is.

tied to my abuse. It's like my body closed off to protect itself. So there was some deep work because I worked through that. I was like, hey, what about this book thing? And then the whole thing unfolded, you know, the purpose of it, the meaning behind it, why I was stuck on the idea, which ended up, you know, being revealed that it's because I wanted to write a book just for the benefit of myself. You know, I want to get paid more when I go speak, build my platform. Yeah. Like, I couldn't, I just couldn't get motivated and I didn't know why. And then the mushrooms you're like, oh, it's because you're trying to do something just completely selfish. Not there's anything wrong with that, but it's just you're at a place in your life where that's not

enough to motivate you. It's also out of alignment with who you've become, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that was a great example of, okay, yeah, these medicines can be, you know, incredible catalyst for change, transformation, and healing of what came before. I think what's even more interesting and exciting is what you're speaking to of like, okay, we kind of cleared a lot of runway here.

where am I supposed to fly you know in other words like looking at looking at light and expanding that light you know the the the brightness of my light rather than like digging back in those dark parts of myself so yeah so I think now it's like having had a few experiences over the past couple years where it's like I've been in ceremony and kind of nothing's happening on either side of that. Yeah, that's happening me as well. I'm not really like working on healing stuff. I'm not really getting insights or downloads. So like what am I doing here? You know, and maybe, I don't know, it seems like definitely for me with ayahuasca, it never explicitly told me like never drink me again. But I did get the sense that it's like, okay, you know, you went those 12 some odd journeys, you know, over a couple years and you got what I had to give you. And therefore, you're just going to lay here and feel really uncomfortable. I was like, okay, I don't know. Maybe I don't need to do that again. In fact, the last time I sat with ayahuasca a couple years ago, I mean, I'll never forget at the end of it walking out of there, I told my wife Allison, I said, okay, I need to tell you something. And I don't want you to ever let me.

me forget it. I am never, ever, ever drinking ayahuasca again. And she just kind of laughed. And I was like, yeah, okay. But it's kind of held true. And of course, the next day I drink some Wachuma and I was like, oh, I'm fine. I just got in my head. It was a really torturous night. I just like got totally captured by the mind, which has never happened to me in any medicine experience, you know, in the years that I've been using them intentionally. But still, like when I think of ayahuasca now if someone invited me to sit with it. It's like, I don't feel any call because it's not calling me. Yeah. It's there. It's always around, you know, if one were to seek it. But I feel like ayahuasca said, you know, you're going to have a really rough night. And that's kind of

the way I'm going to communicate to you that our work, at least in this space of your life, is done in the way we've been doing it. And you're welcome. And I said, thank you, you know, because I wouldn't be the man I am today without ayahuasca. There's things I could never have gotten to, you know, just artifacts and wounds in my psyche that just could just, I just couldn't reach them any other way. And so, but the thing is when, you know, the first few years when I would have these just, just life-changing experiences, I would walk out literally a different guy, you know. I remember one where I just, I was looking at my, my relationship to second.

sexuality and just how I had mistreated so many women and just really at the core of that mistreated myself, just no honor, no honor, no respect for my body, for my own desire, for my own sensations, just any of it, just completely disassociated from from the beauty of that human interaction, you know, the capacity for that. That took me into all this, you know, looking into porn and abortions that I participated in. It was like a really productive night. And ultimately, at the end of that night, what showed me at the core of all that was being circumcised. It was just like puzzle pieces, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, back to being a few days old and being a victim of sexual violence.

It's like, oh, hello, no wonder. I was kind of insensitive in my relationships and the way that I operated and, you know, in romance. and sex. Hello, the most sensitive part of my body was stolen for me before I had any capacity for consent. That's not to justify any of my behavior when I was just a fuckboy essentially for most of my life. But that is to say, I walked out, came home to my wife, and I was also terrified of having kids. You know, I just like, that's why I had all those abortions. It was just like, to me, that was on par with going to prison. Like, those are my two top fears.

Number one, prison. Number two, being a dad. Number three, being married. Being monogamous. That's like the hierarchy of my deepest fears, right? And that medicine showed me, you know, the wounds underneath those fears. And I came home to Alice and I was like, we need to have a baby like stat. She's like, what?

I go, yeah, yeah. And I shared my experience with her. So after some of those things, and also at that point, too, I was really looking at pornography and I had, you know, now that I was in a relationship and with the pornography addiction for me, it was like rather than one moment of sobriety where there was abstinence forever, just over the course of 20 years, just refining my own sense of well-being to the point where I started to notice it would really make me feel sick spiritually. It really cut me off. And then like I wouldn't touch it for a while, hot stove kind of thing. Like, okay.

And so it was an incremental. kind of weaning off that took a very long time. At the end of that experience, it was just like, it was the same as heroin to me. You know, I was just like, are you fucking kidding me? I don't want that dark energy in my field at all. And managed to maintain that for the most part for the few years after that with a couple slips that were very painful to the point where I'm like,

okay, I got the message, right? But when you have these kind of experiences where you walk in and then afterward, you're objectively different and the direction of your life your whole trajectory changes the way i operate in the most intimate part of myself which is my sex and my intimate relationships when that changes so profoundly for the better it's easy to become attached to that kind of outcome right so i'm like i need to go have more of those experiences because look what happens you know yeah but at a certain point it's like what has happened for me is just like yeah i'm not really getting the thing yeah you know About a few months ago, maybe a year ago, I had a body work.

Have you worked with Kyle? I want to work with Kyle. He's a little outside by pay grade right now. But I have put that on my bucket list. You know why he's outside of your pay grade? Because you and Cal told him he needed to charge more. I don't know if Cal did. But in the middle of that experience, it just, you know, the crux of it is, there's a very long,

many hours of kind of telling your life story. And Kyle's just kind of assessing you and feeling into your field and your vibe and, you know, maybe seeing what your blocks are and so on. And then he doesn't always work with, you know, people don't always take medicine. He doesn't serve the medicine or facilitate. But he works a lot of, you know, psychonauts and stuff. So it's optional in some cases. And of course, for me, I elected to do that.

I had an amazing experience. And during the experience, about halfway through, you know, I got my head in the little massage cradle, massage table cradle. And I'm just going, how have I stayed alive this long without this experience? It's like, what was I doing this whole lifetime without this? I mean, it was so beautiful, so profound. And it wasn't about healing the past. It was about finally, like, just peering through the, you know, the window into how awesome I am.

It was like a major upgrade of just self-love. I did just seeing how my standards, my whole life have been so low, man, the shit I've tolerated what I've put up with. from myself, from other people. I mean, it was life changing. Halfway through, I lift my head and I go, Kyle, I'm going to regret telling you this, but dude, you need to at least double your prices. Like, this is priceless, to be honest,

but, you know, what are you going to charge $100,000? I don't know. But it's worth more than that. You know, I think when I did it with him, it was $2,900 or something. I don't know what it is now. I haven't reached out to him, but... I think it's $5K, if I remember correctly.

Is it? That sounds about right. I want to, also something I want to do for Tosh, in particular because the body keeps the score. Yes. You know, and for both of us, because the body keeps the score, I feel that I have come to a space. Again, like you mentioned, you know, not a finished product, not by any means. Iawasca psilocybin, I feel like there's an invitation to explore these other paths up the mountain. And double down.

I mean, my meditation has never been better. my relationship with God has never been better, never been closer. Obviously, I'm exploring the Vision Quest, you know, no food, no water for up to four days. It's been my second year out of four years. You know, those are avenues, right? Valid avenues that can really work and have for thousands of years. So I want to know those personally, you know? Yeah.

But the piece with Kyle is like, absolutely have that on my bucket list. I mean, that entirely. That, I was kind of thinking, I'm probably done with medicine. at that point, you know, but it was one of those things. Do you know, Mark Gober? Yeah, yeah, Gober's been on the podcast. He's a super homie. Yeah, great guy, you know, high intellect and also a really sweet guy. But we were together one night at Cal's with a couple guys and he started sharing his experience. And I was like, give me the guy's number. Just boom. Like, who said that? I'm not, I don't need to take medicine right now. I got so much shit going

on and so on is the middle of my book. It's just, I really felt called. And then, you know, throughout the process, many, I mean, we're, it's like five hours. of bodywork, you know, just peeking on some, some cana and some mushrooms and some other herbs and things like that. And, you know, in the middle of it, again, told him to raise his prices, but also was like, dude, good job, Luke. Like, you know when you're called and when it's an authentic call. And you were called into Kyle's field because there are things that you don't even know are possible when you can truly be in your body and integrate these spiritual and psychological and emotional experiences and actually get them into yourselves. So it was healing, but more than anything,

it was just expansive, you know, so that was like, I think, well, I'm done. And I go, ah, shit. You know, it's like, I think if I ever, if I were to feel called again, it would be with Kyle. Honestly, like, I don't know that there's any other way I'd want to do it because it's just, it's just magic. It's just magic. Well, you're bringing so much through the, you know, there is no separation from source. There's also no separation from soul and body. You know, like, you're like, oh, I might grow up if you believe, then, you know, my soul's somewhere inside my body. And then later on, you're like, no, no, you know, like the body is like the crystallized form that's held within the soul. And that you can tell because the oric field is so much larger and our heart shocker

extends out and all this. The point is that if you're working on things spiritually, you must address the body. And if you're working on things, you know, in the inverse is true, right? Like, and I feel like that the fact that you can open up the floodgates, you know, from the third eye and all the chakras, and then actually get into the physical and talk through it, which is bringing it into the 3D reality as someone is manipulating who knows how to open the body and invite it to expand and open and unlock, right? Like, to me, I'm just like, dude, that is, that's got to be top. Top of the list. I mean, that brings up a really good point, right? you can kind of see this archetype in people, and I've lived both of these.

You see someone who is highly spiritually advanced, but is completely ignorant of and divorce from their physicality. Right. And then on the other side of that, I mean, it's all about balance and integration, like becoming a whole, right? On the other side of that, you have the hardcore biohackers who are obsessed with the body to the point where you don't really even sense there's much spirit in it. You know what I mean? Because they've neglected that part of it.

You know, this kind of false paradigm that you can, what I call it in the book, I think I say, something to the effect of you can't biohack your way to enlightenment. Trust me, I've tried. If you could become all that you're meant to be solely through your physicality, I mean, you're going to hit a limit. You know, there's a point at which you can only make it so far. But it's not a binary thing. It's not one's good and one's not, you know, to your point, it's like, wow, what if I just embrace the whole of,

of who and what I am and work to bring that all together. And that's really what that experience with Kyle was. Something else that happened during that, which is wild. All right. So speaking of biohacking, you know, like when you're in medicine,

like you don't want to touch your phone or like electronics or anything. Like I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to be around any kind of technology or video or like just devices or any of that. But, you know, knowing what I was in for with that work with him, I thought,

you know what? I'm bringing my big PMF. system out here because it's a bodywork thing, which normally if there was no medicine, I'd probably be like, hey, work on me a bit with these paddles and like, let's get in there. And I thought, I probably won't do it, but I'll bring it out anyway. So I said it there and I taught him how to use it just in case. And maybe, you know, again, everything kind of happened halfway through. We're talking five, six hours. Once I started kind of coming out of myself and being able to talk to him a little bit and interact more, more. I had the thought like, wow, I wonder what the

PMF would feel like, and I have this really, really strong PMF, it's called ARC. And I mean, if you turn that bad boy up, especially on like a lower frequency where it's a slower wave, like, tat, tat, tat. I mean, it'll like shake your whole life. Oh, yeah, I said on those back in the day. Yeah. They don't it. Hardcore. So I said, I think I need that. Doody, put that PMF on my back. And it was like lightning going up the base of my spine to the center of my brain. And I mean, it's not even something I imagine. I mean, I really think this is what happening. Just the electron flow, you know, up and down my spine to the point where my spine started going and like snapping into place, you know, it was incredible, man. And it was pretty

hardcore. Like I, it was on really, you know, an intense setting where it was like barely tolerable. But I thought, oh, man, now I just like, I just opened a can of worms here. I didn't, I didn't You know, you can like merge those two worlds, right? I mean, we're talking about, you know, some magnetism medicine. I mean, obviously, you know, this realm runs on magnetism and all these other kind of unseen forces. And I just never felt intuitively called to merge the realm of, you know, the medicine space in the ethers, which like as grounded as you can be is getting bolted with a bunch of magnetism. Yeah. It was wild, dude.

I had a DMT journey in Sedona on a biome. Matt. Yeah, yeah. And that was, that was a fucking beautiful experience. Yeah. So, like, I think about that, you know, like, what is the new, the new bed? Everyone's hyped on. That's like 160 grand.

Oh, the, the immortal chamber? Immortal chamber, right? I feel like, regardless of the immortal chamber, the world chamber combines, you know, light technology and all these different binore beats, these kind of things. I feel like we are going to remember and redesign, you know, work with ether, plasma, electromagnetism, light therapy, sound therapy, like, that will be a wave in the future that will for sure, for those who know,

that will be like the automatic on psychedelics where you're just like, oh, you have to do it in this thing, right? Like we're going to combine all these things that are healing, including, you know, the human there who's done so much work on themselves to attune to the body, right? Which is Kyle's gift, right? So, yeah. Well, brother, we could keep going for hours and hours.

It's been two. I'm going to jump on your podcast. here after a quick break. Cool. Where can people get the book and where can people find you? Yeah. So thank you so much. And also thank you for availing me the opportunity to just, you know, tell my stories and

share what I have. It's really fun after being so really isolated for a couple years, you know, this wild paradox of writing a book to really help people feel more connected and identify what's blocking them from a true sense of connection with themselves and other people. I became totally disconnected from all my friends. It was like the most antisocial period I've had outside of the years in addiction, which is just wild. So it feels so good to just like see you and give you a hug and sit down and chat.

And it just feels good to be able to talk and share after just being so kind of insular for so long. So thank you. My pleasure, brother. You know, giving me the platform. And it's really fun to have something to promote. I've never really had my own thing. And I promote stuff that other people build. That's how I make a living.

So, you know, now not like I'm going to get rich from writing a book, but it's like now I finally have something tangible that's mine that's really a gift to myself and a gift to my fellow brothers and sisters. So the book is called A Horse Name Lonesome. And you can buy it pre-sale right now, depending on when this comes out, at a horse name Loansome.com. And it'll be published on November 17th in a couple months here. So that's kind of the main thing I'd love for people to engage with. It's really, I mean, my heart and soul and everything I've got in me went into this book. I've never done anything close to this meaningful and never worked on anything as hard. And I'm a really hard worker.

I'm a productive guy and have been, you know, for a long time. But what this book took in terms of me to, oh, man, just take so much life experience and so much wisdom derived from those experiences in a way that is applicable, I think, to many different people's life experience. That took so much work to create something that wasn't just about me. It's like about you, whoever the reader is and the feedback I've been getting has been so beautiful because someone might not relate to some of the more hardcore elements of my story. And I'm sure some people are like, that ain't shit.

My story is way more hardcore. But the intentionality was, it's like, I'm only using the narrative kind of memoir part of it to just lay a foundation to show how separation happens to us, how we get duped into this illusion that causes us so much pain. And I truly believe that the illusion of separation is at the root of most human suffering. It's like, how could I ever betray you or harm you? If I truly know, not theorize, but know that I am you. Like, unless I'm suicidal, like, why would I, why would I ever harm you, right? I mean, imagine if the entire population, you know, if all of humanity really deeply understood that the separation that we perceive is so superficial and so temporary and that there's a timeless permanence. to the interconnectivity of all of us.

So it's been so fun to be able to go into my own life and use them as examples of points of disconnection. You know, the things that are blocking me from the experience of really feeling connected to you and loving you and having that experience with the cashier at the gas station and having that experience with people that I perceive to be wrong or evil. It's like true unconditional love with boundaries, right?

because the self-love is the foundation of all of that. Yeah, to be able to operate in a world where you know, or you really, really know that separation is an illusion. And it's just, it's a game we're playing along with. And to stop fighting with the game, too. You know, it's like accepting that we're in a duality for a reason because it's the basis of the Earth School curriculum. You have to have it in order to do what we're here to do if you're so inclined.

You know, so, again, thank you. And that's where you can find the book. And I'm so excited to just keep meeting people that have read it and benefited from it. It's just so rewarding, man. You know, there's a couple friends that have read it. And they point out a line that was meaningful to them. And I remember when I wrote that line. You know how many hours it got me to get that sentence or that paragraph to be what it is?

You know, like draft after draft. I mean, just, dude, the amount of refinement that went into it is just it's unfathomable. I'm really happy with the result. And then my website is lukestory.com. And my podcast, on which you've been a guest a couple of times, it's called The Lifestyleist. And that continues to roll on, you know, 10 years in and had some incredible conversations

with just the most inspiring, amazing people. And just when I think it's, I need to stop because it's just like, it's a lot of work. And it's not, doesn't pay well these days. I don't know if you've noticed that. Yep, I noticed that. Yeah. The industry has changed because everyone in their market,

mom has a podcast now and so on. So it's, it's not as financially secure as it was for, you know, a few years there. But, you know, just a couple days ago, I had Zach Bush on the show again. He's been on a number of times. And, you know, I just had one of the most profound, deepest, most beautiful conversations with the human I've ever had in my life. And I walk out of one of those. I'm like, ah, God damn, I got to do it next week. That's what keeps me going. That's what keeps me going, that exact experience. Some of them are less inspiring or it might be someone whose area of expertise is, you know, something that I feel kind of proficient in. And so it's not that awe-inspiring to me.

It's like, yeah, okay, I know kind of the way hormones work or whatever, right? I mean, you sit down with someone like that. I was just like, oh, shit. Like, I was missing a whole piece of the game here, you know, and I didn't know it. Yeah, Zach on Rogan, somebody sent me, I don't listen to Rogans often, but somebody sent me, Zach Bush on Rogans recently, and I fucking couldn't put it down. Yeah. I just got his book.

so I'm like a first chapter in on that, but I just love his mental framework around where we're at as a culture, as a humanity, where the earth is at. It's fucking brilliant, dude. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, you know, so that's really my, you know, apart from the book, the podcast is really how I just share every bit of value I possibly can with the world. And, you know, I'm on the social medias and stuff. Instagram, at Luke Story and all the different places where you can find people like me. But yeah, man, it's my honor and my pleasure to be able to share some of myself with the world. And it's nice to be received. Talk good, brother. I love you, Luke. You too, man.