TrueLife - Dr. Sebastian Marincolo - The Fourth Wave

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/🎙️🎙️🎙️Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce our esteemed guest for today, Sebastián Marincolo, a true Renaissance soul whose journey through the realms of philosophy, linguistics, and the intricacies of the mind has illuminated new paths of understanding.Dr. Sebastian Schulz, as he’s academically known, earned his magna cum laude Ph.D. through a critical analysis of neurophilosophical theories of consciousness. Mentored by luminaries such as William Lycan and Simon Blackburn, his academic lineage reads like a who’s who of influential philosophers.What sets Sebastián apart is his unparalleled exploration of the cannabis high, spanning over 25 years. As a researcher, he delves into the potential of cannabis as an altered state of consciousness, and as a philosopher, he weaves together the threads of personal experience and scholarly insight.Sebastián’s journey is not just confined to the ivory towers of academia; he has ventured into the uncharted territories of photography, producing the limited-edition macro photo art series, “The Art of Cannabis.” Through his lens, he brings to life the visual poetry of his unconventional research.A published author, his latest work, “Elevated,” invites us to reconsider cannabis as a tool for mind enhancement. This groundbreaking book explores the vast spectrum of mental abilities that cannabis may influence, challenging preconceptions and igniting a dialogue on the intersection of consciousness and creativity.From being mentored by the late Harvard Assoc. Prof. Emer. Lester Grinspoon to taking on roles as Director of Communications and Marketing for one of the world’s largest cannabis producers, Sebastián’s journey has been marked by a courageous exploration of the uncharted.Today, as a freelance writer and communications consultant, Sebastián continues to shape the narrative around cannabis. His presence has graced international news outlets, TV shows, and podcasts, breaking through the strong taboo that often shrouds the topic of cannabis use.Join me in welcoming Sebastián Marincolo, a philosopher, photographer, and trailblazer in the fascinating terrain where consciousness, creativity, and cannabis converge.https://www.sebastianmarincolo.de/en/home/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. Hope the sun is shining. Hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back.

We've got an incredible show for you today. The one and only, ladies and gentlemen, if you've been with the True Life podcast, you know this guest, you've read his books, you are as enthralled as I am. We have with us today. Allow me to introduce our esteemed guest for today, Sebastian Marancolo, a true Renaissance soul

whose journey through the realms of philosophy, linguistics, and the intricacies of the mind has illuminated new paths of understanding. Dr. Sebastian, as he's Dr. Sebastian Schultes, he's academically known, earned his magna cum laude PhD through a critical analysis of consciousness mentored by luminaries such as William Lycan and Simon Blackburn. His academic lineage reads like a who's who of influential fluosophers, philosophers, philosophers, thank you.

What sets Sebastian apart is his unparalleled exploration of the cannabis high, spanning over 25 years. As a researcher, he delves into the potential of cannabis as an altered state of consciousness. And as a philosopher, he weaves together the threads of personal experience and scholarly insight. His journey is not just confined to the ivory towers of academia. He has ventured into the uncharted territories of photography, producing the limited edition macro photo art series, The Art of Cannabis. Through his lens, he brings to life the visual poetry. The author, his latest work elevated, invites us to reconnoissements.

consider cannabis as a tool for mind enhancement. This groundbreaking book explores the vast spectrum of mental abilities that cannabis may influence, challenging preconceptions and igniting a dialogue on the intersection of consciousness and creativity. Sebastian, thank you so much for being here today. How are you, my friend? Wow, it's always great to hear your introduction. That makes my day. Thank you.

And before we got on the show, I just thought about the, term altered states of consciousness again and I wondered if it would be better to replace it with modes of consciousness because altered state always suggests that there is one like default mode of consciousness like the wakefulness state which is the state of consciousness and everything else is kind of bent or altered or you know twist And I'm not so happy with that. I wonder what you think about it because you've talked to so many guests about altered states of consciousness.

And because, you know, after years and years of research into the subject of the cannabis high, I came to the conclusion that we are going through every day, we're going through various kinds or emotions. of consciousness with or without mind-altering techniques or substances. We are, during our sleep, we are in a weird psychedelic state. Daydreaming, ecstasy, when we are in rage or fear, we have that kind of tunnel vision. We are in a tunnel of perceptions, very different. orgasm, you know, all these, these are all altered states of consciousness, which are naturally in us, you know, that we are going through them and our brain shifts towards those states or

trends, you know, it goes into these states naturally when we're dreaming and, you know, we have melatonin putting us in that condition. And so I always, you know, I always, when I hear altered state of consciousness, I always think, Something is, you know, we need to think about our terminology maybe. What do you think? Yeah, I agree. I'm wondering, can we change consciousness with awareness? Like maybe we shift that linguistic model.

Because I think awareness is a great way to explain consciousness as well. And you could also say we have the sort of changing of awareness, the same way we have changing, you know, awareness doesn't seem as as loose as consciousness. Consciousness just seems like this giant cloud where awareness seems to have a little more focus to it. I don't know. Can we change awareness with consciousness? Well, maybe that's an argument not to exchange it because consciousness is a much broader term. Right, right. You can say, I'm, today I'm conscious, but I'm not aware of the fact that my body is aching right now because, because I'm talking to you and I'm really focused.

Yeah. So, yeah, so it's difficult and it's always, but if you look at, you know, consciousness seems to be much more of a term that has been used in our natural language and has a long story now. It hasn't been there forever, but if you look into old Greek or other languages, probably has different connotations,

but there are other words. but terms like altered states of consciousness are more recent and are certainly more of a construction terminology that comes from a more technical realm. Actually, I'd have to look for when altered states of consciousness first appeared. I think one who popularized the notion was Charles Tart. And I'm happy to have it, you know, it's not like...

Yeah. it's deeply wrong, but it's just, I just wanted to mention the fact that we, often we tend to think of altered states of consciousness as something that needs to be twisted, you know, something that is in a way unnatural also and needs to be induced with the technique or with mind-altering substances. And it doesn't really speak to us in our human nature. in our human nature certainly is not that we only have this one mental or this one condition, this mode of consciousness, which is this rational, logical wakefulness state. You know, so even though, and I've said that before here, this is, of course, in that rational mode, when we are talking about this consciousness, we are, of course, in that rational mode. and we are therefore we are reconstructing and i call this therefore the rational reconstruction there

we are reconstructing our existence as being rational because we are always in the rational wakefulness state when we do that so we are kind of caught up in in that perspective right so but but it's i think it's important to be inclusive you know and and to acknowledge that our nature is different yeah but okay so but i don't want to take that to a far. That's all right. Maybe sometimes I think that the altered states are just the beginning of the evolution on some level. Like it seems like a few people find themselves in these altered states. Maybe you can shine some light on.

For me, like if I take psychedelics, all of, like the first time you take it, it's like this novel experience and you have these different ideas about things. But then you take it again and you become more comfortable with the territory. And pretty soon, you may not be able to. get back to a peak experience without taking them, but you can begin to see the world through that psychedelic lens without taking them. Is that what's happening in the brain? And like, well, like, is that what's happening? Do you think that after a while you don't need to take these substances, that you can, you've had the neuroplasticity or you've had the change of mind that you can

see the world through that lens now? That is a really interesting question. For instance, I have, I've made the experience that, and that's a while ago, more than 20 years ago, I used to be able to really trip on cannabis, not large doses, you know, when I would close my eyes. I could, and I remember once I wrote that in my book, I tell that story in my book, The Art of the High, that I remembered an animation movie, made hand drawn by a friend of mine, and she used for each and every frame, she would hand draw the whole picture. Usually you would only have the animated parts in new sequences, but she would draw a whole landscape with a tree and everything new. So if you would look at the animated movie, everything would kind of go like this, and, you know, because everything was changing from image to image, you know, from sequence to sequence.

And I remember two years after I watched this animation, I got high and I tripped in that style of animation. And I saw something, but it was not a memory of the movie, but I saw like, I kind of vaguely remember it now because like 20 years ago. But I remember like birds coming out of a cage. And then I was flying after the birds, like as if I was a flying camera following the birds and they turn into something like, If you ever watched Frank Zappa's Baby Snakes with a guy who's doing the trick animation movie, kind of was like such a trip. And I remember that after that and after that experience for several weeks or so, I was better able to imagine things without taking cannabis.

So while I'm, I'd say I'm a bit skeptic about saying that you can reproduce, the whole psychedelic mode of thinking without having a psychedelic, if you've used it for a while, I'm pretty sure that you can easier access some states like enhanced imagination without taking it after a while. And another anecdote, which I have told you before, is that of the guy who once contacted me and said that he was traumatized because I was, I had been writing. writing on cannabis and empathic understanding and arguing based on my research that cannabis can help tremendously for those who are on the autistic spectrum, who are having some of them, most on the heart having problems to empathically connect and socially interact with others. And he said that

he was traumatized and he thought everybody else was an extension of himself. And that was the phrase he used so that he thought he was alone in the universe and everybody else. as kind of an illusion or an extension of himself, then he smoked cannabis, and then while he was high, he would feel, oh, no, there are other people out there. So he could empathically connect to them in a way that he would realize

on an empathic emotional level, oh, no, there are other people. And he also told me, and I'm telling you this now, at this point for a different aspect of the story, which is that he said, he could connect for a while after smoking cannabis, he had that feeling, but after like five or ten days it would go away

slowly. And then at that point, he was still able to remember that he had that feeling, but he didn't have a feeling anymore. He was still like, he was again like, oh, no, I feel like I'm alone in the universe and everybody else is an illusion. But I remember that I had that feeling. And so he came to me and asking me about what he could do, et cetera. But so, yeah, I think there are lasting effects if you, that you can. can use, but that's an interesting, that's a really interesting research topic in itself. Because of course, this could have, could be seen negatively too. You know, you could say, oh, do I want to have lasting effects?

Do I want to, like, for instance, have this kind of paranoia, but I guess this has to be, or do I want to have this flashback or whatever, you know, if I can't control it? But I guess that has to be answered for each psychoactive substance differently, probably. But it's a really interesting phenomenon. Yeah. Shout out to Crystal Phoenix Rising. She says, good morning, guys. I'm a big supporter of cannabis.

Cannabis helps my anxiety and my nerve pain. Yeah, I think it's an interesting time right now, Sebastian, for cannabis, especially here in the U.S. Like we got Trump that comes in and we have RFK and we have 10 penny and all these people that are talking about, you know, they were big supporters of Rogan and all these guys that are really trying to push psychedelics, especially in DMA and psilocybin, to try to help veterans, to try to help well-being. And I think everybody's kind of waiting with bated breath over here because we don't really know what's going to happen.

We don't know what's going to happen. We'll be more of the same. We're not sure. But what's your thoughts on that? May you guys have been paying attention to that over here? Over there? Yeah, yeah. I certainly have been paying attention to that.

And it was an interesting day here in Germany because the day that Trump became elected, our government fell apart. Literally, it was the same day that they kind of broke up the government coalition of social Democrats and liberals. And the Green Party, they fell apart because the liberals kind of wanted to get out there because they were losing. And so they were going to have now elections early next year because of that. Otherwise, it would have gone on for another year, I guess. And here we're also, you know, waiting for decisions because we're probably going to have a chancellor and we're going to have the lead taken by the conservatives here by the Christian Democrats Party. And they have announced that they want to take back the new regulation of cannabis here, the legalization measures that the new. law, which they won't do, probably won't do, but maybe they take, you know, probably they

take, or maybe they want to do something with the social clubs or not allow the social, social, we don't, we also, we're in a limbo here and we have to wait and see what's happening with that. I think they're not going to touch medical cannabis and they're probably, they're not going to touch anything, but we're going to see. As to, as to Trump. And what's happening over there, I mean, I guess we're all here. Many people are in shock.

I kind of saw it coming, I'm afraid. I knew it would be tight, but I saw the imminent danger. And, you know, for me, it's a very emotional thing to observe because I remember when I was six years old, I saw the American Army tanks driving by on the street, and we gave. them the victory sign and our parents had told us that the Americans had freed us from fascism and therefore we have a democracy now and now we're in a democracy we're seeing your democracy endangered and of course I know that a lot of Trump fans would go and say no come on he's not don't take him literally on this and that but he

has already announced a lot of things that you know would go into the direct of direct fascism and fascistic states. So we're worried here. I think here in Germany, if you would make a poll, I'm not exactly sure, but I think 80% or so would be against Trump or even more. So as to psychedelics and Kennedy, I followed that quite closely. I mean, I lived in the States for two years. when I visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And as a researcher and during my graduate studies. So I'm really following what's happening in the US. And I'd say it depends on, because it really doesn't matter what they're saying. I mean, it's an interesting choice to give him, that was the deal to give him the health part. So that is a strategic alliance, but I think Trump doesn't really care if he, and now it's all about lobbyism, you know. And if there are some lobby groups in the pharmaceutical world that support Trump, and I'm not aware that I can't say it right now.

And they're coming along and they say, you know, fuck that. Sorry for that. And they say, listen, don't, you know, don't go down. Don't put it to schedule three. for some reason because there are a billion, I mean, the statistics are pretty clear now. Wherever you introduce cannabis in a state medically, you know, people use less anxiolyic medicine, less antidepressants, less opioids, et cetera.

So it's across a big spectrum that, you know, the other pharmaceutical, other medications are going down. And because cannabis is such a versatile and healthy plant, and because we do have an endocannabinoid system that's involved in the regulation of so many bodily and mental functions that can be helped by cannabis, that, of course, that's the problem with cannabis.

It's so helpful that there are so many lobbies, and not only in the medical realm, you know, but also in the industrial and other realms, There are other lobbies that are there and they don't want to have a competitor. So we're going to see, I think, as to the political question, whether Trump is going to allow more or is going to go for a schedule three or so, he never sticks to what he says if he doesn't, you know, need to at the point. And we know that he can turn around 180 degrees. So I'd say it's now behind the, you know, what you can see,

there are going to be some battles with lobbyists and then we're going to see what's happening. I think the other interesting question is if you are working in the psychedelic realm, if you are interested in psychedelics or psychoactive other substances like cannabis, maybe you want to call it a psychedelic too, then what can we do or what can you do to have an impact on society? maybe you use the new regulations that come with Trump, but what can you do to avoid that society falling apart or slipping into a dictatorship or fascist state?

And I think that's an interesting question for the community over there, because I see a lot of potential there because those substances are amazing for healing purposes, mental, healing and that's that's exactly what you need to prevent of slipping into a state that will be controlled by fear yeah i want to let me let me let me let me push back i want to take the opposite side of that just so that i can hear your point of view and make it a more interesting conversation aren't we already in like a fascist regime like it seems to me if we can agree that the lobbyist i think it was don doy who said that government is the shadow cast upon people by business and like i think

we already have a fascist regime. I think even Chomsky says, we're all fascist. It just matters to which degree how fascist we are. You know, and it, it seems like whatever administration comes in, they just pick their team of multinational corporations, whether it's X or whether it's Facebook. You know, whether it's pick your defense contractor. That's going to be the one we go with. Is it, do you think it really, like there really is a chance of it becoming more fascist than it already is? Oh, yeah, definitely. Why? Why do you think that? Well, have you ever been to a concentration camp here?

No, one in a half. Yeah. No, seriously. And this is something we heard also about Gaza with that raging war over there where people ask, could it, could it be worse? Yes, it could, which is a sad thing to state because it is a nightmare. And it could get worse with Trump. don't know, you know, maybe not. Maybe it doesn't get worse, but it could get worse. And of course, your society could get much worse. And I agree with you. And I'm a big fan of Tomsky and his work. Because I think he is right. And basically, this is also what I discussed a lot with my friend later in Lester Greenspoon, who is a big mentor of mine, that you are, of course. Of course, you and we are living in oligarchies now, and it's certain, you know, the military industrial, the prison industrial complex and various other players of the banking complex,

etc., are basically using the government, you know, to do whatever they feel like they should do. But I think there is some moderation. Of course, you still have some citizens. have some rights to speak up, you know. And of course, if you look at social media, you can already see there is mass control. I, again, I want to, I'd like to point to a documentary series

that I'm not sure if you've recommended it to you or here again, the century of the self. It's a three, I think a three or four part documentary, must be already 10 years old. It's amazing because it takes you from the 50s or 40s in the states where you have a society that, you know, you need a lot of products and then it only slowly goes into a state where you have overproduction. And then you actually need to be able. You need to advertising. You need to push something on people.

You need to tell them you need more. You know, you need a second car and you need a bigger car and you need this. that and how that unfolds and it tells you about edward bernays who was the um the nephew of of stigman freud and he he came up with the term public relations instead of uh the mass manipulation of propaganda you know so he didn't want to use propaganda anymore but so he he was actually advising governments and others and then it goes into how of course um And that's what I never really thought about much, is that what happened in the United States, and this is one of the most important claims in the movie, is what happened in the United States after the 50s was a big reaction to what happened in Germany with the Holocaust and with the Nazi regime coming up.

Because Germany had been, excuse me, Germany had been a democracy, the Weimar Republic, pretty open, liberal. democracy and then you know the Nazis came up and the whole system flipped and so in the 50s in the States people thought about how can we control the masses so to say how can we influence the masses for this not to happen again maybe with spreading psychoanalytic schools and you know treating people because I mean there was there's an exchange I read between Einstein and and Sigmund Freud under the impression of the First World War not sure what the title there's a there's a book out there with a conversation between them and where Freud thought there is a death wish there's something like not a libido but something that

people have and have something like a death wish and or a drive you know, for killing and aggression. Under the impression of two world wars where people just killed themselves in insane numbers, people were, of course, afraid and thought about democracy and how we could prevent something like that from happening again. And so you can see that these very early attempts to really control people with PR or with other measures.

And of course, we're seeing that now with social media, you know, where people want to control how the discussions go. And we're living in a really controlled society. And of course, it's not going to be different with Trump. I mean, I think it's going to be worse, much worse. And this is what I think. I think we still have some abilities and still have some freedom to speak up and to do things. you know, and we have fought for women's rights for a long time,

but now they're going away. And you're seeing how they're slowly going away and what consequences that has. And that could only be the beginning. And if it's going worse, I mean, again, I think the society we're living, people like me and you probably are marginalized by things like shadow banning, you know, because we can talk as much as we want. there's so much noise.

Right. There's so much noise out there that nobody really cares, you know. Right. But still we have kind of like a, we have a little chance to speak up and maybe some things spread and maybe some things grow as they do now, you know. But this could get much worse, much worse. And I'm afraid that in the States, if there are not a lot of, people really take in action now and getting back on their feet after that blow,

that it will get worse. Because there are now some people who really give a shit and they about what's happening to people and how they feel. And it's a lot about controlling them. And we've seen how Trump can play public relations, how they know how to spin doctor everything. And that's a dangerous situation to be. And if you know, if somebody says I can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, you know, and you see, you know, what he, where he wants to go, that is dangerous. And I'm really worried about what's happening over there. So many brilliant points. And like, I think that this is such an incredible point for psychedelics especially.

There's a great story if people want to look. look it up between Terrence McKenna and Romdoss. And Romdoss tells Terrence McKinney. I'm going to paraphrase the story. I won't do it as well as he did. But it's something along the lines of there's this rampaging warlord moving through a southeastern Asia kingdom, I don't know, a thousand years ago, 10,000 years ago. And he's rampaging through and he's violent.

He is just horrible. He kills maimes, rapes. Just he's a violent individual. But the people that he makes the most examples out of are the people in the clergy. Anybody who's affiliated with a church or a spiritual sort of connotation, he takes those people and just crucify them. And as he's making his way through the southeastern territories, conquering everything, having no problems. And he finds himself at one of the last strongholds. And he burst it into the government halls.

And they're like, oh, great warlord. They're all afraid of them. And they say, every one is left except for one monk. And the guy's furious. He's like, what are you talking about? There's one monk that dares. Doesn't he know who I am? And he spits coming out of his mouth.

They said, where is this monk? And they said, oh, he's waiting for you in the temple. What? He's waiting for me? Oh, he's furious. He storms over there. Boom, he busts open the doors. And there's a monk just standing there meditating

peacefully with a smile on his face. This guy's like, what the? And he walks up to him and he sticks his finger out. And he starts pointing him, hitting him in the chest. And he's like, hey, don't you know. No, I'm the baddest warlord. I've been murdering people. How dare you stand to me?

Don't you know who I am? I could take my sword and run it through your belly without blinking an eye. And the monk just stands and smiles. And he says, and don't you know who I am? I'm the man that could have your sword run through my belly without blinking an eye. And there's this beautiful pause that happens. And McKenna says, well, that's what happened in the 60s. When they came with the guns, we ran for the hill.

You know, and like I see almost this next fourth wave we could call it, like happening. Like you can see it shaping it. Is it going to be a Nixon regime? Is it going to be like, hey, these young kids are starting this, this drug is escaping the medical container. And look at all these veterans using them. Whoa, these guys were pissed off a little bit. What are they going to do?

And that might be the tension that either sways it one way or another way. What's your thoughts, man? Is that is, are we at a pivotal moment? Could you see something like that happening again? Could it be tried to put back in the bottle or what's your thoughts on that? Yeah. What comes to my mind is Timothy Leary. Yes.

Claim tune in, turn on tune in and drop out. Yep. And I'm trying to find. I don't have my what I think the chapter titles and what hash is did to Walter Benjamin, a book that I published in 2015, was. turn on tune in and inspire and stay in and inspire or something like this and I think it was turn on tune in and inspire and what I meant is that and in you know in relation to your question what what could happen now with psychedelics from the point of view from the government and from you know what you see in people

they could use a lot of people could use it cannabis or other psychedelics to to just run away and use it for escapism you know just be like okay right if that i don't want to i don't want to deal with that anymore i'm going i'm going to go along with that i'm not going to act politically anymore i'm just going to go in a tunnel and take my whatever i need and watch my lotus flower and be happy I couldn't blame them for it. And that's why I started our conversation also with, or why I said that before, is that we need to think about as a community, how can we use those substances for something better, namely to turn on, tune in, and then to use it on, sorry.

Minor, man, it's minor. Makes it more authentic. And then to... to use that, use cannabis, use psychedelics and other substances as a tool to, in various ways, heal people, to inspire people, to connect them again, to overcome trauma. Because there are many things you can do in that situation. The important thing is to understand, and I think that's something, we've seen that. I mean, in the 60s, when Timothy Leary wanted to just spread LSD in the population, like a million trips or so, and he thought that would do it. Well, I don't know.

You know, maybe it could have a great effect. But maybe I believe, I tend to believe that these are tools. And a tool is crucially dependent on your knowledge and your knowledge. ability to use it. And so everybody, I think, who knows how to use these tools should think about how to use them now to empower people to come back to their senses, to heal, and to change their society for the better. And even if it's just with your neighbor connecting or, you know, doing educational work, doing healing work, introducing medical cannabis or ketamine or whatever, there are a lot of ways. And then we also have to, I think it's a much underrated question of how

society shapes our relation to psychoactive substances in general, because we tend to think of there is a human and he's just a white paper and then comes LSD and then this happens. So gets addicted or he doesn't get or she or whatever. And because it's in that substance, it has certain effects and they do everything. And to give you a bit of a better understanding of what I mean is if you look at cannabis, for instance, in the last decade, or like the decades before 20 years ago or so, when mostly there was a prohibition all over the world, was that you had a very, you had a society

where a lot of people were under stress, a lot of people were traumatized, and then they would turn to cannabis mostly to use it against stress. And cannabis works well if it's like of poor quality, especially if it's of poor quality, if it's aged, you know, if you have not the greatest genetics. And if it's kind of what I call mind fragmenting. If you're sitting there, you're couch locked stone, not high.

And you don't really, you're in the moment, but you forget about the past, forget about the future, and you're distressed because you don't have to think about those things anymore, but you can't hold a clear thought. You can't really, you don't really get insights or, you know, you don't have what you could have. But it helps you a lot to deal with the stress that's imposed on you on society. Now, I think that's something to think about because we're always looking at substances from the point of view of our needs.

And we use them as adaptogens, you know. And usually the term adaptogen is right now confined to or we keep it for those substances we need for mostly for stress. or, you know, to come out of a stressful environment or for certain purposes, which is more narrow of what I mean, because I think psychedelic or psychoactive substances generally are used as an adaptogen, as a psychological adaptogen to our environment now.

You know, people use it for whatever. And most often for stress or other situations, but then it could be for sexual pleasure or it could be for, as an antidepressant or for medical reasons, et cetera. But I think now is the time we have a lot knowledge. We have gained a lot of knowledge in the last years and decades about those substances. And now it's the time to yield that knowledge and to think ahead and use our imagination to think,

how can we use those substances, not only for healing, not only for medication, in the sense of, you know, antidepressant, exhaletic, et cetera. but also to inspire people, for people to ground them again, to get back to connect with their own emotions, to connect with others using those substances as impactogens like to, for empathy to enhance their imagination, which is incredibly important because if you come in the state that we're in now with our society where you are afraid of what's coming,

where the pressure is up, you know, then you tend to refrain from the world and your imagination goes down, you know, because you're only looking from one day to the other. You're not, you know, you're not free. You're not emotional free to really take a deep, deep breath and to go out there. So I think this is, it's a real task now for the whole community to go through that phase and to inspire others. And we have mighty tools for that.

Yeah, it's really well said. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I was just talking with Alexander Plezner, who's amazing young woman and she's been working a lot in a psychedelic field and she's sort of opening up what I think might be like the new South by Southwest and, uh, she's having this conference with like, you know, are people in architecture, people in finance and like all these sort of psychedelically adjacent companies sort of come coming out and saying like, yeah, I use these. here's how I use them in my business.

And that to me is like what this fourth wave or what the inspiration you talk about can be. Like we have a new sort of, you know, if we can have a new sort of architecture, like living buildings, you know, when you start seeing the way things can be done. Like, oh, like you can see outside the window of the medical container. If you just wipe it down a little bit, like, hey, look at that out there. You know what I mean? Like so I'm hopeful. You know, I know that there is a lot of money being.

being spent on patents and it does seem to mean that the bulk of the work is currently in the medical container for a reason. People want to find a way to make money from it. People want to find a way to do this for a living. And that's acceptable. I get it. And like there is a lot of people that can use it in a way that's meaningful. But I think you touched on something really beautiful too in that the work is done with the individual. You know what I mean? Like you can take these substances, but you got to do the work to figure out how to become the best version of. You know, yourself. You're not going to say that piece of paper is not going to hit that molecule and then everything's better. It's in fact, it might even get worse before it gets better. Maybe we'll

see that on a societal level. What do you think? Yeah, yeah. That's what I mean, you know, a hammer is a great tool, but if you don't know how to use it, this, I can't, it seems like I can't turn this off. That's all right, man. Minor. Don't let it about you. But if, you know, if you don't know, you can build a house or whatever with a hammer, but if you don't know how to use it, right, you're going to hit your finger. And, you know, same with psychoactive substances. You know, if you, you can use cannabis or somebody could use cannabis or LSD or psilocybin mushrooms to, to overcome a lifelong trauma. If used correctly and with the right, guide, so to say. But if you're using it, if you're driving a car and you're too high to drive and you lose your sense of time and you don't kind of get confused in traffic, you can run over a kid. Yeah. You know, it's as simple as that. Yeah. And so it needs skillful use. And what you what you call

the medical container is, I think, to a certain degree understandable from the point. of view of society that has been told these are incredibly dangerous substances and they're all bad, etc., etc. So they only want to let them in with a huge amount of evidence, you know, and with a huge amount of knowledge from people who are renowned in their business. But of course, we are seeing because of that, I believe that we are pouring the baby out with the baby water because there's a lot of there are a lot of things we know that can that psychedelics and cannabis can be used for and we don't have the medical evidence for it yet because it hasn't been possible for decades to work with it and there are of course ethical problems.

and there are other problems. So, and what happened, so my research also draws on a lot of the knowledge from the subculture, from breeders, from, from seed genetics, from, but also from scientific disciplines as a philosophy of mind, from linguistics, from cognitive sciences, from knowledge about the end of cannabinoid system. And I've tried to put that all together in my new book,

elevated cannabis as a tool for my mind. enhancement, which came out last year for Laritas Press. But so I think this is important. It's a tool and we have to look at where is the knowledge, how can we use it not only for those medical uses, but for inspiration and how can we foster an environment for communities where they can. We have the legal framework now to do that, you know, where people can meaningfully connect.

and come into a conversation to use those substances safely and for inspiration and a lot of enhancements that might have a huge impact on society. That's good. I got an awesome question coming in here from Neil from Temecula and he says, In a world dictated by inherited narratives, how might altered states serve as a great editor of history, rewriting not our only collective myths, but the very meaning of freedom and identity? Thanks, Neil. That's a beautiful question. Yeah, so I give you an example. I used cannabis myself because when my first book came out, high insights on marijuana,

which was basically a second doctoral thesis, it kind of fell in a hole. I almost found an agent in the States in 2010, but then he jumped off because of also issues. A lot of agents were like, hey, great book, by the way, don't know who to sell it to. And then I thought about in the next years, I thought about, okay, how can I, how can I do something? How can I write something and pierce that public opinion? How can I get over the narrative that is so strong that people wouldn't even look at your hypothesis or discuss with you? I mean, the problem was not that people were against it, but they wouldn't even look at it. They wouldn't even, you know, consider it being like, oh, no, you know, I talk to you.

You know, that's it. So, and that's why I came up. up with and I used cannabis for my creativity I used to think about that during a high and I came up with my photos series which took cannabis again which turned the view of people to the plant because in terms when I when I look about narrative when I look at narratives it's not only language but it's also imagery and the imagery was dominated on cannabis it was dominated by people but you would see, you know, crumbled material and always like the same kind of whatever junkie on the street or, you know, bullshit stuff. And then in 2012, in Germany, I came up with macro photography,

which is now pretty popular because a lot of, a lot more people are on it. But in 2012, this was, I'd say, this was already something that made it big in the national media here with my coffee table book here. This is the high. In English, it would be the positive potential of marijuana where I coupled essays with outstanding imagery of the plant where I said, I take a look at the plant as a plant and not as a drug. Let's just take a look at the plant from a macro view. So you need to turn and change perspectives. And I use the cannabis high to come up with ideas of how to step back. And then I, for instance, one of the tricks, the rhetorical tricks that got me in the national media here was in one essay. I started the essay telling the story of Watanuga La Hele,

who sits at the Kalangi Root Festival. I told you the story again. But this is good to answer the question here. And it's Watanuga La Hele is from the Western Africa. I said, I'm not a telling the story in the first paragraph of my essay is sitting in the Western African Republic, and he's using the Kalangi Rood to get intoxicated, and there is a lot of rape, and statistics say about the Kalangirut Festival that a million people come there. There are a lot of driving accidents, and 70,000 people die of the side effects of the Kalangi Rout intoxication, and the active ingredient is tetralin, et cetera. And then I start my, I give a lot of statistics of, you know, violence and under the influence of that substance.

And then I started my second paragraph asking, why couldn't we have cannabis instead of, why can't we have cannabis if they can allow such a toxic substance in the Western African Republic? And I wanted for everybody here to bring up those racist, you know, inherent racist feelings of, yeah, you know, they're Africans. They don't know better, you know.

And then I come up with the next question, I say, no, listen, maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the right question would be, why haven't you realized that there is no Western African Republic? There is no Tetralin. There is no Kalangirut festival. And there is no Watanuga-La Helle. What I really described is Rudeigua, Wulgem, the German Bavarian engineer working for BMW, who sits at the October Festival, unique drinking alcohol, and all the statistics about, death and violence and rape they're all applying to alcohol these are the

official statistics for alcohol and so that got me in the national news here with the Spiegel online and with in on television I mean that was part of it but that so so that was a rhetorical trick where I really and see this is what I liken the question from that the interest raises that you've really got to be aware of those old narratives and you have to maybe you can use your imagination, your different angle that you may also get from cannabis or other psychoactive substances to spin them and to empathically understand where a lot of people are because they have been fed those narratives for all their lives.

And then you look for something which, for instance, here would be cognitive dissonance because they all kind of know that alcohol is a drug and they're using. it and it's dangerous and all that but it takes them a while you know to to run into that contradiction and because they have been conditioned and and this is for instance where my linguistics background comes in like linguistic conditioning is very strong we need to be aware of that and I I run into problems a lot in the States because then people are like that that is woke thinking or something because you think about language,

and how you should or should not use language if you want to express a thought. But it's basically it's a very, it comes from analytic philosophy, the understanding that the way we use our terminology defines our thinking because our thinking is based in notions and in terms and in theories that are built in those notions and mostly also on metaphors that are important. So my example was, for instance, one of my examples was, if I, so linguistic conditioning, if I go to the zoo and you're, you're, when I tell my kids, listen, today we're going to see animals and elephants. And next time I say, hey, listen, look over there, you know, in this movie, documentary about Africa. There are elephants and there are animals too in the movie.

I've never said that animal, that, sorry, elephants are not animals. But the way I put it, why would I put it this way? Why would I say elephants and animals if elephants wouldn't be in the category of elephants? It wouldn't make sense, that statement. But this is what we've been told all our lives about alcohol. This rock star died of alcohol and drugs. He used alcohol and drugs. He uses alcohol or he is, this is, we alcohol and drugs.

But alcohol then is not a drug, is it? Right? So you kind of, you separate that mentally and you've been conditioned to do that. So again, back to the question, I think, yes, we have to be really aware of the strong narratives. And we have to be careful with our knowledge, what we pick up. Also in terms of metaphors, like metaphor of war on drugs makes no sense. There's never been a war on drugs. There has always been military enforced or police enforced repression of certain groups of users of certain psychoactive substances, but other substances were fine.

You know, it's never been a total war. And it's not a war in drugs, it's a war in people. And it's not real a war because wars are between countries, et cetera. So it's a tragic thing happening, and it generates suffering on an epic scale. but the metaphor war on drugs is fundamentally flawed. So we need to think about our language. We need to think about how we talk to people, how we convince them. And we need a lot of empathy and we need to understand where they're coming from

to be able to change those narratives, I think. It's such a great answer. When I look back to my growing up, there was always drugs and alcohol, drugs and alcohol. And it is. it sort of separates. It's this false wall between the two, but there's not. It's like that old, that old adage of if a crime-fire fights crime and a firefighter

fights fire, what is a freedom fighter fight? Yeah, absolutely. That's not funny. Yeah. So that is something really important to think about because we need to, to, look at where people are and how they have been conditioned and taught. And from the standpoint of a philosopher who is, you know, in philosophy, you always have a discipline which is called epistemology.

Sorry, epistemology. I kind of confused. I mixed in epidemiology in that word. No, epistemology. So what's the nature of knowledge, basically. So what do we know and what don't we know? How do we generate knowledge and what is true? So if you look at what people have been told in the last decades,

I've always said that the situation of a substance, especially a cannabis, is like somebody coming to your village and every source, every respected source, you know, the police chief, the mayor, the newspapers, your neighbors, and maybe some other people have all told you, the guy who's coming as a sex offender and he's killed some kids. Now, you have a choice. Do you let your kids, your 10-year-old kids walk by his gardening in the evening

or through his garden if they have to go to school or don't you? of course going to be like, hey, you know. Yeah. Okay. Then comes the police chief or then comes, you know, some newspaper and says, hey, you know, maybe this guy was wrongly accused because we've seen that, would you now flip and say, okay, then everything

is fine. I'll let my kids go in there. No. No. Now now the burden of proof is on him. You know, the burden of proof to remove the last little doubt whether he's a killer or a sex offender.

needs to be removed. And even if the mayor and the newspaper and your neighbors, they all come and say, hey, listen, we just heard that, you know, this guy was in a battle with us or his last wife was cheating on him. And then she did this and that. And then she spread the stories. Sorry, still you would be like, yeah,

but, you know, before I let my kids go in there and then they get kind of sexually offended or killed, you know, maybe even that is not enough. And that is for some people the case for some people in our society. They have heard from all sources that they respect and that they take to be reliable that LSD is toxic or, you know, addictive, highly addictive, or people are going to jump out of the window, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what I mean by you. You have to empathically understand where they are.

And you have to understand also that some people are maybe they really don't give a shit because they're lobbyists. And they may say something like, I know it's not really dangerous, but, you know, I'm an alcohol lobbyist. I'm a politician who doesn't care. But if you treat everybody like that, you're not going to go for it because a lot of people are convinced and also some politicians. and they are convinced that this is dangerous. So you have to get into their mindset, and you have to take it one by one and understand, you know, what are their information needs and how can you convince them

that it may not be as they think it is. Yeah, it makes me think of Huxley's the island. You know, and some of Huxley, I think, believed, isn't it a great book? But I think Huxley believed, like, psychedelics should be for, like, a small group because it'll never be accepted. it and it is dangerous and people down here shouldn't have this, you know, but that book is pretty amazing. What's your thoughts on, on Huxley's book and maybe some of his thoughts about psychedelics? Yeah, this is a great book and I think he, because he also introduces the idea of having it

as a ritual, you know, for adolescents, basically. And I think these are really interesting ideas because obviously he had he had a long story with psychoactive substances, you know, thinking about Soma first and his brain new world. Right. Something which is basically used in a negative way to uphold society where you have alphas, betas and gamas, et cetera, and then everybody made happy in that unjust society. but then proceeding to the doors of perception, one of the most important essays on the use of mescaline

and other substances generally. So I don't agree with Huxley that it should be a substance only for a certain circle of people. I think it can be for mostly everybody, probably maybe not everybody and you have to think about which substance and you know if people have preconditions and et cetera but it i think it's it could be a substance for most of those substances we're talking about could be for everybody but only under the right counts under the right coaching counseling et cetera conditions um so so i'd phrase that a bit differently um what i totally

admire, I mean, what I've said before, and I've written about that in my first book, high insights on marijuana that came out in 2010, is that Huxley was very early in his thinking about psychoactive substances because he knew psychology. Donald Broadband at that time already came up without thinking in the 50s that, I think 56 or so, it was that the brain and C.C. Broad philosophers who came from the evolutionary angle, and I'm not sure if you're aware that Darwin, sorry, Huxley's grandfather was Thomas Darwin,

sorry, Thomas Huxley, who was Darwin's bulldog. I didn't know that. Meaning that he went around the country to popularize Darwin's ideas. So Huxley had a very special. strong background in evolutionary thinking. And that was early in the 50s. It started only in psychology to take hold that our mind and our mental states have been shaped by an evolution and are the products of a long evolution.

And so Huxley is one of the central ideas in his the doors of perception, which were the inspiration of the rock group. The doors? The doors. Was that our perception is shaped by our evolution not to be completely open to reality and to be like, oh, you know, I'll look at all the shades here and I'll look at, I swallow up everything that I see in reality and try to give an accurate, realistic picture. No, our perception is basically our brain is there to funnel us towards those.

aspects of reality that are important for our survival. If I run away from a lion, I'm not looking at the color of the sand or the shades of the brown of the tree. I just run and look for, where is a tree that I could run up to and maybe escape that beast? And so I'm like, I'm really,

I'm hyper-focused. I'm in a very special mode of perception or mode of consciousness. I'm in a tunnel and the adrenaline helps me to really look out for, okay, how can I escape, either fight or flight, fight or flight or freeze maybe if it's an animal where I can just freeze and it won't eat me. But we know now, and modern cognitive science has, of course, confirmed that, that our perception when you want,

through a door just in a normal situation, you don't look at the shades of the door and the exact, oh, there's a little scratch. You look immediately, you look at the doorknop. What's important for you at that moment is how do I manipulate the door knob or the handle to go through, walk through the door? How do I approach it? How do I locate myself so that I don't hit the door in my head, et cetera? So that's all you want to know about the door in that situation. That's how we look at our environment and our reality. And the door of perception basically has the ceases that that psychoactive substances like mescaline,

they help us to overcome those automatic restrictions and then to see a chair in itself. When we look at the chair, we don't look anymore and that's what Huckley says in his essay. I don't look at, I look at the thing in itself. I don't look at how can I sit on it and, you know, how high is it working? How can I move it to sit on it? I look at, ooh, the sades and, you know, the structure in the wood, like an artist or somebody.

Like you look at the object. And I think he was, this is an interesting idea and this is a good perspective on the subject, even though I believe that it's of course a simplistic view. It's a lot more happening with psychoactive substances that can change the ways we relate to our environment that can give us great ideas, et cetera. But so let's take it from there. And I think Huxley was really important for the whole thinking about psychedelic substances like Meskolin and others, psychoactive states, because he was one of the first also to integrate the whole evolutionary picture into things. It makes my mind race with the possibilities of thinking in the future.

But the question in my mind right now is, is it that linear focus thinking that leads to abstraction? Or is it the other way around it? It seems like we're drowning in abstraction. And it seems like for so long we have been down this tunnel vision, focus, we've got to get here. But it seems like it led us down a tunnel of abstraction. Yeah.

There is this lovely book by Ian McGilchrist. The Matter with Things. Or the... The matter of things, the new one. Yes. The Master and is a mystery. And his idea, and I think he... I basically think that this is a great look at our cults.

is that there is left and right hemispheric thinking. And our left and our right brain hemispheres are always kind of struggling over control. And out of that struggle comes something important in his main example. By the way, this is really important for the understanding of attention also with cannabis, I think. So his explanation is when a hen is picking on seeds

and looking for food, the left brain hemisphere controls a tight focus of attention, and you need, so the hand needs to be able to really focus on a narrow visual field to control, motor control the beak to pick up seeds and food. But then if it's too hyper-focused, it doesn't see the predator flying up there or hiding in the bush, the fox, you know, or the bird predator. So there needs to be another system that is kind of in competition with the system of what holds my attention here that may be like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, and you're like, oh, oh, you know.

And if those systems are calibrated in a way that, you know, you can focus, because if you're not focused at all anymore, if you're always going like, oh, oh, oh, like a squirrel, then you may not be able anymore to focus and to really take up food, et cetera. So you need a balance between those hemispheric styles of thinking. And in attention, you can see how that could work, you know, and how that could go wrong. And his theory is that we're going back, if you look at cultural, times like if you look at the Renaissance or periods like the Renaissance where it was basically

in balance art and science we had kind of a balanced society at least in some parts but then today we would have like a more of a left hemispheric thinking style I think he's on the right track with that I think that's an interesting idea whether he's right with the details of all that. There's another question, but I think it's an amazing, amazing book and a game changer in not only how we see human nature

and perception, but also how we see culture is evolving. And of course, I believe that cannabis, and that is interesting, I believe if you look at, and I actually wrote to Ian McGilchrist, but he told me that he doesn't have much,

That was years ago. He said he didn't have much experience with cannabis and he's more of a scotch drinker. And sadly, I must say because I thought that I wrote an essay about Carl Sagan's hypothesis that he has in a footnote of his Dragons of Eden book that he says, cannabis might suppress, so to say, when you're high, it suppresses the left hemispheric thinking. So the right hemisphere comes out stronger. And I think I talked about that with Lester, who was a Lester Greenspoon, who was a best friend of Carl Sagan.

And I told Lester, I'm writing about that. And I think that Carl was onto something. And he was like, yeah, but, you know, Carl was always like easy with the hypothesis. and do that, die, I should be careful. And I was like,

yeah, but you know, I've looked at it from, you know, from a perspective of, because, I mean,

Sagan was really advanced at that point. He had read a lot about the current state-of-the-art knowledge about what we know about left and right hemisphere, like Roger Sperry and all that.

He was amazing what, you know, what he had gobbled up intellectually at that time. And, of course, today we know more with Ian McGilchrist and the work of others. But I said,

based on even our new knowledge, I'd say it's an interesting hypothesis because if you look at anecdotal evidence and what's happening, most of the functions that you would say, or that Ian McGilchrist and others would say are more right hemisphere based, like the empathic understanding, imagination, episodic memories, or our ability to remember episodes in our lives, pattern recognition, introspection, humor, the understanding of humor, and other

more right hemisphere-supported cognitive abilities, they seem to become enhanced during a cannabis high, but the one exception I'd say is hyper focus of attention because that happens too with cannabis in a way. And the hyper focus of attention on a certain view is more left hemispheric. So I'd say it's interesting to ask whether Sagan was onto something with his thesis about the left and right hemispheric things. And I looked into the receptor distribution, but at least some years ago, I haven't looked it up again.

there was not much, much on whether, like, the left or the right brain hemisphere, we would have a different distribution of endocannabinoid receptors. So that's not easily to prove on the neuronal level, as far as I understand. But I think it's an interesting thesis. And the only thing I'd say is to consider is that we usually tend to be hyper, This is one of the basic effects, I think, during a cannabis high, is that you're hyper-focused. And you are, for instance, you're in a, if we are talking normally, I'm paying attention to some stimuli that are coming from the environment. If we're talking when we're high, we're really focused on the conversation.

We may not even, you know, we may not even see somebody walking by or something because we're so hyper-focused. or when we watch a movie or when we eat something, you know, we're absorbed by the mousseau Chocolat or whatever, a dessert or whatever we're eating. We are the dessert, you know. So the hyperfocus seems to be something that's very prominent with cannabis. And a lot of the other effects seem to flow out of that hyperfocus, like the intensification of experience.

And the more detail you have in seeing or hearing, touching things, if you're more focused, of course, you have more detailed in that experience because you're not sharing your attention. But that might be interesting to look at on a neuronal level what's happening there. So I'd say I have a more nuanced thesis on how cannabis affects hemispheric thinking, so to say. I don't think it's just right or left wing suppression or something, but still an interesting way to think about it. Yeah. That's fascinating to think

about that aspect of it. It's super funny that you've written to Ian McGillcrest and he told you he was a scotch drinker. I can't get over that far. That's hilarious, man. We should send him something. We should, that guy should be, I'm hopeful. If anyone is in the sound of my voice that can make it happen, that would be an incredible speaker

to have at like psychedelic science 2025 just to get him, right? That would be amazing. Because I think that there's a lot of information there that really resonates with this community that's not really being talked about. In fact, you know what? It kind of brings me back to some of our earlier conversations we've had about your theory of mind and about how eventually some of these terms like love and whatnot will be like the folk psychology.

Have you revisited some of these things and thought about how the left brain paradigm or maybe some of Ian McGillcrest's work has fits together with some of your theories? Well, yeah, that is a good question. I think I'm, yeah, that is a big question, actually. It is a big question because I think we can learn so much from psychedelics and from psychoactive substances as they enhance various cognitive abilities. And because we can see how the mind in general works and how the architect. of the mind is. But first of all, I'd say,

we need to understand that enhancement never means it gets, there is a total enhancement. There's no, never there is a total enhancement during nothing. But when I say enhancement, I'd use it in a way that I say our imaginative abilities are enhanced during sleep, during the REM sleep when I'm dreaming. sleep when I'm dreaming. That doesn't mean that I have enhanced cognition in the sense that I could do math work or something that needs an enhancement. It always depends on how I integrate

because we know from researchers the benzol ring for instance has been probably found by what's the name daydreaming, like a scientist daydreaming, forgot his name right now, about about a certain molecular structure, and he thought about a snake biting itself. And so he came up with the understanding of the benzol ring, the molecular structure, and a chemist, and, but it very often happens that,

or also if you use lucid dreaming, for instance, like a good example would be Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali used lucid dreaming for his painting. So he would have, I think he had a metal ball in his hand or key. So I think he had a metal ball and he would, that's a technique for lucid dreaming. And then he would sit in his chair, fall asleep. And as soon as he would fall asleep, the ball would fall out of his hand. And then he would kind of wake up again and he would be remembering his dream.

So that's not, strictly speaking, lucid dreaming, but it's kind of like getting back to your remembering the beginning of your dream, and he would use that for his paintings. And I think, so when I talk about these enhancements during psychoactive, during a high or, you know, using a psychoactive substance, I never mean that, you know, you have a totally enhancement or something, but it's something your imagination might be enhanced, but some other cognitive abilities decline.

But back to your question, what have I learned or did I get back to my theory? Yes, I think I'm much more aware now that I think I have a different way of looking at consciousness because it's a lot more inclusive And I think that is a very interesting broadening of perspectives because we tend to think of our consciousness, of our wakeful consciousness,

as the model of what consciousness in general is being narrowly defined or being minimally defined as, you know, having a being here, you know, having an inner point of view. But then if you, we know, basically that first of all we are

we're going through different kinds of consciousness modes of consciousness as I say we're alter states like sleep and ecstasy etc but also think about now think about babies when they you know or kids we just talked about our kids

I just give you a scene I remember my two year old daughter a few years ago sitting on the lap of my dementia heavily dementia as an Alzheimer's dead in the last stages of Alzheimer's year before he died. And he was, he was hardly able to smile, but he always, he loved to make kids smile. So what he would do, he was sitting there with his baseball cap, and he would just look at her. And he had like a stone face.

And if he would have just looked at him, you would be like, oh, you know, this guy doesn't, he probably doesn't understand anymore what's happening. but then he looked at her and she would my kids would always look at him for like they knew if something was coming and then he would just tear his head down to make them laugh you know and you would understand he's still there no way you know he's still but that was a little scene but what i what i meant to say convey here is that i looked at them too and i thought to myself what do i know about the perspective and the consciousness of a two-year-old how she sees the world how she perceives the world how she perceives the world how she feels how she has is going through emotions how she's not being not able to have some

emotions that i might have you know full mature love relationship with but her love is maybe an ocean of more or deeper or bigger or more intense love you know and at the same time i looked at my dad you know and i said i remembered that my mom told me that uh in the beginning even in the beginning stages of his Alzheimer's, he was asked by a doctor how old he is. And he at the time he was in his mid-70s, and he said he's 40. And I thought, okay, if he's in that stage already

not able to understand how old he is, he's probably seeing me. And he might think, oh, that's myself or that's my dad. Maybe he thinks he's 20. And he thinks I'm his dad. So I kind of started to get into the levels of confusion, into the perspectives that my dad has,

and then his short-term memory being disrupted in that way. And I think we are very restricted empathically to include states of consciousness and modes of consciousness in our world because it's hard for us to replicate them, you know? But of course, if you take psychedelics and cannabis, you are stretching that. You're going through different states. of consciousness and you get a better understanding of whatever a bat might feel and and you might have

you know you get all those reports of people who think they they're starting to turn into animals or something when they are because their apathic understanding is so enhanced during a psychedelic state or so they're getting into the minds a worldview of other people, animals, etc. And so you stretch your you widen your understanding or what's out there. And now think about the future. And the future is,

and I'm talking about the near future, our future is going to be really shaped and our society is going to be shaped by Trump. But what's coming now with AI is completely changing our years. And we are not, we haven't even started. I mean, in the mainstream,

the discussion of, when will we start treating those systems as conscious and as having human or some rights, maybe not human rights, but maybe some artificial intelligence rights. Because if you look at it, we don't treat a mouse or we don't treat a cat like we treat a stone, do we? But we also don't treat them like humans, ethically speaking, morally speaking. We allow for experiments with them, for them to be tortured doing an experiment to be killed maybe with pigs, but we don't allow for people to torture them unnecessarily. So there are already nuances. We are all like, okay, you know, we grant some

kind of consciousness, maybe or some kind of perspective to the mouse, some kind of personality to a dog or maybe to a dolphin or to a monkey. But so we are aware of the fact that there are shades, so to say, you know, that there's not one type of consciousness. Now, there are artificial types of consciousness coming. Some of them might even shine brighter

than we do, you know? And this is something that Philip K. Dick brilliantly took up in his, if you read his, I mean, if you watch the movie already, Blade Runner, it's amazing.

but if you read the novel it's not a novel it's a short story um uh two android's dream of electric sheep right have you have you read the novel yeah that one a scanner darkly like uh so vitalis or whatever it was called there's like a bunch in there that are just like yeah yeah so so he was pretty far out there we're thinking about those things and um and basically blade runner one of the running themes is that maybe those artificial intelligence become more human than we are in a certain sense, you know, and valuable and sensitive creatures. So in that sense, I think my work on cannabis and altered states or modes of conscious,

different modes of consciousness has definitely changed my understanding of how, what minds are, how, and that, of course, about the architecture of our minds about the role of the role of synesthesia in our thinking i don't want to go into that that would go to far now but and other things so it has changed my view of the architecture of the human mind but it has and how how many diverse modes of consciousness we all have but it has also broadened my view of my view of how many types of consciousness are out there. And that's fascinating.

Yeah. I love that, man. It's so interesting on a lot of the levels. And last night, my wife and I were having this conversation about, we're sitting at the dinner table and we're talking about chat GPT and you can use chat GPT. But if you use it, is it really something you did? And I was like, it might be. And she's like, it's not. you didn't do it.

You chat GPT did it. I said, okay, well, if you put something in the mic, if you go to a copier and you put in a piece of paper and then you copy something,

did you copy that or did Xerox copy that? And she's like, I don't know. It was just turning to this really fun debate about like, at what point in time did you do something? You know, did you copy that or did chat GPT do that? And what is,

what is AI? Is AI something that has scraped the internet and so it's part of us? Like, it seems to me that what AI is, doing is it's compiling all the thoughts and things that we have done before and putting it in a place where you as an individual can access it. And if you access that, did you go into the archive and get it? And what does that mean for our future? At what point in time do we start seeing who's responsible for what?

And the rabbit hole that took me down is like, whoa, maybe this is the end on some level of like not exactly patenting things, but withholding information on a level. And what does it look like when all of us can use someone else's idea and make it better? You know, maybe saying I'm not responsible for that idea, but if I can have knowledge to that and then create off of that idea, it seems like I'm hopeful that is what transpires. But what's your thoughts on that? Yeah, it's fascinating. It's a huge subject. I just watched a short video by my friend Jason Silva.

Jason Silva was actually the first one to reach out to me. Jason Silva and Michael Bacchus. And Jason Silver talks to an impersonation, like an AI avatar of Carl Sagan, with Carl Sagan's voice, fed with Carl Sagan's work and giving answers that, and we're going to see that in the future a lot. You're going to have an AI fed with ideas

and with the whole work of Aristotle. But if you have like, a personality like Carl Sagan, it can imitate the tone of voice. It can maybe in the future imitate the face, the facial expression of Sagan, etc. And of course, in the future, you're going to have an AI robot sitting there, a Carl Sagan robot talking to you. Yeah. And, you know, the question is how much, of course, you would have reacted really, like, it depends on the level of whatever you have in sophistication of the machinery and of the knowledge. but there are so many, so many things that are going to develop,

and it's almost impossible to trace. Like as a writer, I must say, very often you feel disencouraged to produce something because, you know, I wonder if I write a book now, and after I write the book, I feed an AI with a really intelligent prompt and say, hey, write me a book about this subject, give it a better title, and write it from the point of it. of you of Sebastian Marinkalo's work, here's all his work, what would you write? And then I compare those two books and I'm like, oh yeah, this is actually much better than what I've written,

you know, because I'm now on a cognitive decline and I forgot that 10 years ago. I already knew, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it might be, of course, it probably avoids a lot of errors and and has an infinite amount of more knowledge, you know. But then again, of course, maybe it weighs information differently and maybe my individual approach and perspective is still important and makes a difference. Maybe it doesn't make it better, but it makes it more interesting for some people, et cetera.

I don't know. But it's an interesting time to live in. And we all have to really delve into the subject and see how we can use AI as a tool and how we can shape our future. So because one of my favorite thinkers, Stanislav Lem, the greatest, maybe with Philip K. Dick and a few other greatest science fiction writer of all times. some of you may know the book Solaris he wrote I think in the 80s about the he thought about always AI

as superseding us in evolution that basically we are a transition humans are just a transition between animals and then human or monkeys and come humans and then comes AI forms of life so he thought of evolution

going that path very early on in this, I don't know, 70s or so, he started to think about that. But he also warned us of an arms race, and that's what we're seeing right now. We're seeing an arms race between China and the States. And so AI is shaped very much by our needs and our dreams. And again, this is something that I find extremely important, And I'm going back to the philosopher, a German philosopher who shaped much of ours of, yeah, who wrote a book,

The Geistéutopi, the spirit of utopia, like about utopia, which was Ernst Bloch. He was at my university in the 60s. And he experimented with Walter Benjamin with hashish. So Walter Benjamin, the philosopher, had experimented. with Hachers because he wanted to have a profound illumination, as he said. And he experimented with Ernst Bloch. And Bloch wrote books in the 50s, and he influenced the whole generation with his books.

And he wrote about, interestingly, being a neo-Marxist, he came from Marxism, and he influenced here in the 68 student revolution, Rudy Dutski, which was our student revolution leader here in the whole movement. And he was a friend of his. And he was really, he had a deep impact on that. He was also in the States and had a deep impact on that generation. But interestingly, as a neo-Marxist or a Marxist, you think that your environment shapes your

thinking and who you are and how you're going to act in the world. So that's basically the Marxist thing. is that your environment has a lot of influence on what your upbringing is and what you're going to think and do in the world. But Ernst Blanche thought, what is really shaping humans as well and importantly is their ability

to think of a utopian state, to think towards the future, to come up with ideas of what they want to live towards, what they want to, you know, how they want society to look, how they want themselves, where they want to be. So they're living towards a goal and their imagination helps them. And under the impression of, in the 1928 in the Roaring 20s in Berlin, under the impression of experimenting with Hashish with Walter Benjamin, he said and he wrote in his book, and I quoted that in one of my essays, he wrote that he wrote that, he thinks that hashish is

interestingly better for this like getting clear about your utopia and helping you in that because you are still yourself when you are in a high and it's not like with he's comparing it to opiates and opioids

or opium actually and he says it's like a daydreaming and that helps you to come to a positive utopia and to live towards that and so he He and Benjamin, they saw the individual enhancement potential of a substance like cannabis. And he also saw what it could do on a level of our society, you know, that it could have a deep impact.

And we saw that kind of dreaming. We saw what happened in the 60s, how people started dreaming about a different future, how they, how they deconditioned themselves. from that goes back to the question we had before, deconditioned them from old narratives, old habits, and started to think about new ways of living and completely, they imagined new societal structures, new structures, new structures of families, et cetera, et cetera, of living together. And I think we have more knowledge now than in the 60s

about how to use those substances. And so I think with, what's coming up. It's a huge shock for all of us. But we are a really connected world now. And ideas can matter incredibly in a short amount of time. So we need resilience. We need resistance from the psychedelic community. And ooh, the lights are going off here. Nice. Yeah. I'll put this over there. And, um, And so I think we need to get back to that understanding that those psychedelics can do more than just healing, which is amazing. I mean, the potential they have for anxiety disorders or depression or traumatic experiences, especially if you think about traumas, you know, traumas or victims are becoming.

those who act out their aggression on others, et cetera. So if we overcome trauma as individuals, it has a huge impact on us as individuals. But think about societies that have been traumatized by war and then using psychedelics or cannabis or other substances to overcome that trauma, which helps them to stop from going into a repetition of the whole story again, you know, inflicting pain on others.

And so I think we need to use those substances now to heal and then to really create new utopias because, and that brings me back to AI with the last sense. Think about ancient Egypt where somebody had an idea and it's like, hey, why don't we build like a building with stones, like, and we call it a pyramid. And then like 10,000 dead slaves later and 112 years later, this thing comes into existence. And now, if you have an idea of that importance, you know, you can do it in a few years. With the means of protection, we have, we're going to a dream society. We're going to a society that could fulfill their dreams.

We're going to have robots. and they're going to have the energy from the sun. We give them a prompt and they run and they do it. And that's already happening. It's going to become even more. So our dreams matter. And our ability to dream and our ability to daydream and to come up with utopia for our society as well

is becoming increasingly important and increasingly impactful because it has a direct impact in a, in a well-connected, usually connected to society is global-connected society, where you have those butterfly effects that can have an effect all over the globe in zero time and in a huge dimension. So I'm saying that also to give people hope, and because I think a lot of people are in shock still, and to be resilient and to work on whatever they can do in that realm.

Yeah. To change society. I love it, man. Just that the simple sentence of our dreams matter. Like, I think if people can hold on to that and sit with that for a minute, it does take us back to the whole idea of psychedelics being a catalyst for change and the rapidness with which change can happen right now. Like, again, being, I feel like I'm in a privileged position where I get to talk to so many

amazing people. I have some other people that I'm talking to from Grass Valley got a company called Geo Ship. they're making these incredible domes with biosuramics, you know, that like stop the, that drastically cut down the cost of heating and cooling by like 80%, you know, and you can build one of these domes. I don't, I forgot exactly what the price is. So I wouldn't say, but it's a lot cheaper than buying a house in California. I'll tell you that much for sure.

And, you know, what. And what happens is like, like, and they've got ton, they've got a, they've done a really cool round of funding. And, but like, these ideas. started with someone's dream. And maybe this idea of the medical container and psychedelics healing, maybe that's the first stage. Maybe you have to heal before you can run.

You got to walk before you can run. But maybe we have to go through this collective healing before we can start building the collective future. Because what can you really build if everyone is, you know, damaged? You can't, you're not, you're surviving. The wave of psychedelics is, this fourth wave is kind of doing. It's like, okay, this first tide is healing. Okay, this next tie is going to come in and allow some of these people that have healed before to start moving through on their dreams.

And if you just look at it from that level, like each individual that creates a better version of themselves is an actuality creating a better society because they're fixing their relationships. They're fixing their dream. And some people are finding the courage to live that dream, which is that might look like decoupling from a job that you hate or decoupling from a relationship that is not productive for you. That looks like pain, man. That looks scary. But in reality, it's, it's healing, man. I'm so bullish on the future. And I know that there are pitfalls.

And I know that if you grow mushrooms and sometimes you could, it could get infected the same way as society can get infected with bad ideas. But I'm really, I'm really thankful for it. And I really see this evolution coming to fruition. And I think what you say about our, the dreams matter is really important. Yeah. And I, I'd add to what you said. I totally agree that we need that healing to be able to dream again. Yes.

Because also, of course, a lot of people have negative dreams and they're living towards because they have fears and they're traumatized. And so their dream is to build a wall and to disconnect people. Yeah. And so I agree. that you need a lot of healing for more people to be able to have positive utopias and to dream. But then again, I'd say at the same time right now already, we have some people who, and we need to work on our resilience.

We need to work on connecting and keep those little fires alive. And then we have to build on dreams that even if we can't reach them right now, we have to put them out there in you know with you already have amazing abilities now you know you just write a prompt and your AI spits out images that where people are like okay now i can see how that thing looks you know i can see how your building or how your city could look and i think we have to start using those those people who are willing and able to put out positive utopias they shouldn't let others call them dreamers or just dreamers and you know stick stick to their little whatever circle but we need to go out there and inspire people with whatever we can come up with

in terms of also political dreams because we need a new structure in our society that that is crucially important and everything you see right now and how cannabis psychedelics etc. or use has to do with that. So that's why I emphasize always, don't, don't tune in and drop out. Don't, you know, stay in, stay in. Turn on, tune in to substances, whatever, or meditation, whatever you need.

And then inspire society, take people where they are and try to stay in society. Don't just disconnect. and retreat in your little realm, but try to change society. This is where we need to go now because otherwise, we're all going to go down soon. This is, we need that for survival now. Yeah, we should change that motto to tune in, turn on, tune in and drop in. I could infiltrate the system and take it over.

Yeah, drop in. That's nice. Turn on, tune and drop in. That drop in and inspire people. Yeah. Our friend Mark Davis is here. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. I talked to Alisa Maximo and her AI ventures. She's great. She's great. I wish her a lot of success.

Yeah. She's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So what's your dream? My dream is to not only inspire people, but to have. conversations that people can turn to for inspiration. You know, and I, I, I left. I, I was inspired by living. I was inspired. I became inspired because of COVID in a weird sort of way. For me, COVID was this giant wake-up call because I was working as a UPS driver. I've been doing it for 25 years to make a pretty good money. My wife was, she was working, make a pretty good money.

Our kid was going to an awesome school. We lived in Hawaii. But something began to happen. And it was happening before COVID, but COVID was like the real sort of padded two by four moment for me. And I just began realizing everything I'm doing is not who I am or who I want to be. Like I'm working 70, 80 hours a week. I get treated like garbage.

The place where I'm working and I have to walk through two bobwire fences and then go through a metal detector where they check all my bags to see if I'm bringing in a gun to kill somebody. You know, and it's like, what, what am I doing here? And then I go into the place

I'm working and I realize, they don't really see me as a person. They just see me as a number and they want more production from me. And they don't care about creating a new system where everybody produces more and we all win. They just care about me doing more. You know, and I would have these incredible discussions about like production and what does it mean?

And it just fell on deaf ears. And so I left that. Like I said, you know what? And a conversation with my wife. And by left, I mean, I was escorted out by security. And, but yeah, I couldn't do it anymore, Sebastian. I couldn't do it.

How did that? I despised it. Yeah. Did you, did you? So here's how it happened. Fall into a catatonic state? I fell into a rebellious state. Like, I, I, I've been doing it for a long time.

And for me, it actually, it actually. happened through psychedelics because I was being a real asshole to people. And I remember there was this guy at my work and I was just, I was just being an asshole. And one of my friends pulled me aside and I was talking shit to this guy and my, my friend's like, dude, George, you're being a dick to that guy. And I'm like, now I'm just busting his balls. And they're like, no, no, you took it too far, man. Like you're, you are zeroing in on the things that that guy is, that is, he's really worried about and you're making them public. Like, that's, that's just a dick move. Don't do that. And I, I went home that night and I took a giant dose of mushrooms. And I thought,

to myself like, am I being an asshole? And the first answer is like, yes, you are totally being an asshole. And I was like, okay. And I said, why am I being an asshole? Especially to that guy. And then this, the second answer was like a two-part answer. It was like, you don't like him because he's weak. And then it's like, no, you don't like him because you're weak. And that guy shows it to to you. And I was like, oh, man, I got goosebumps telling this story. You know, and I had to go back and apologize to him, be like, hey, you know what? I just wanted to take. tell you and everybody right here that I'm a total asshole. Some things I said were way out of line and I'm super sorry.

I hope you accept my apology. And I'm a weak person and I'm sorry for that. And it manifested man and I'm sorry. And he was, he was super cool. He's like, you are an asshole, man, but I forgive you. You know, I'm super thankful that he did. But that was the catalyst that began the inspiration for me. Like I go, you know what?

I need to, I feel like I'm weak. I should start standing up for myself. And I did. And I started feeling good. And then I started standing up for other people. And I'm like, hey, man, you guys stand up for yourself. And that culminated in me talking to insurance execs that came in here. I started questioning the policies of not only the middle managed, but the upper division

management. And I pointed out holes in the argument about productivity. And when they couldn't answer those, they realized that it's not a bug. It's a feature. That became a huge problem. And then I was pulled aside very kindly and told to shut the fuck up or I'm going to lose my job. And I did it. And so I lost my job.

Yeah. Excellent. So that's the dream. And this is why, see, for me, that's an interesting, that's really an interesting story to me, because insights, the phenomenon of an insight like this, an important, like, aha experience where you go back and you take psilocybin or in my case it was cannabis, and you come up with those, with those deep insights that have a lasting effect on your life, this was the first thing that I found interesting in cannabis.

And I wanted to know how does that happen? That's why I wrote high insights on marijuana, so which is, you know, it's insight on marijuana. It gives you insights on marijuana, but it's insights on when you're taking marijuana. And this took me through the whole catalog. lock of what I now call the multi-dimensional high, which is that cannabis has effects on all kinds of mental abilities, including pattern recognition, memory, mind racing, attentional focus, imagination, empathic understanding,

introspection, et cetera. You call it, you name it. And it can culminate in those insights. And I try to come up with why that happens from a cognitive science point of view and how we can see that this happens sometimes if you were controlling the environment right, et cetera. And I think it's interesting because it's a double myth. A lot of people think that insights in general are a myth, because usually they think it's just a lot of unconscious thinking and then you come up with something. But then in Germany, a guy called Max Wertheimer started, who was like the grandfather of Gestalt psychology. He started to think of insights in the 1910s in the beginning.

And he interviewed Einstein because he was his friend and he was the most famous personality in the world who came up with those amazing insights as a physicist. And so I looked into all the Gestalt psychology and the insight psychology that started in the 19th. to come to a better understanding of how insights happened. Because he said before that inside psychology for a long time in psychology, it was like, oh, yeah, you know, that's just a myth that this is a special type. It's kind of mystery. And people, they just want to brag. They want to say, hey, you know, I had this.

It came because it was connected with the notion of a genius. And the genius, if you look from the old times, from. Greece, I heard a great philosophical talk about the notion of a genius. The genius was somebody connected to the gods. And then later, so the gods would come and the genius is a special person. The gods put an idea in his head. And then later in romanticism, it's not a relationship to God, but it's a special kind of relation to nature. So there are geniuses like Beethoven or Bach or others who have a special relationship.

to nature and nature reveals it secrets to them in like in a flash of genius. And so a lot of people thought, you know, no, if you look at psychology, there's, you know, these are subconscious processes, but they're just like others. And you think you come up with something, but that's basically self-promote. But then if you look at Gestalt psychology, there is, and from today's in modern, like Robert Sternberg, psychologist took up the subject in the 80s or 90s or so with a book with a collection of essay. So I think we pretty much know now that insights are a special thing happening in your brain. You know, it's a special thought process, facilitated, and we know what the facilitators are to some degree.

And I connected that to why insights can happen during a cannabis high and, of course, during other states of altered states of consciousness or modes of consciousness and so I find it always fascinating to hear people like you're talking about their insights as being a catalyst for really something

like where they changed perspective or they had an empathic insight or an introspective insight and then it very often has such a profound meaning and such a profound impact on their positive impact on their lives and truly your story is a witness to that.

Well, think about the word discover. Like, discover sounds like you figured something out or like you had an idea, but really it just means to take the layers off. Like you discover it. Like, that seems to be the insight that I just discovered this thing that was always there. This is why I'm so pissed off. I got it. You know, I discovered it.

It's not like a light bulb went off. I guess that brings up the idea of the metaphor of the light bulb going off is that it lights everything up and you can kind of see. around in there. Yeah, but it's also discovering. It's interesting that you mentioned that. It's also interesting because it seems like very often you come to these kinds of insights because also of a mood modulation effect of psychoactive substances because maybe that's the first

time you're not afraid anymore to think about your self. forced to think about yourself and you're not afraid anymore of the consequences of your thinking it just takes you down that rabbit hole. You're not afraid anymore to think about your your death, your sickness, your whatever, or your weak character as you may say or your certain weakness in your character. And so that's part of it. So there are a lot of effects of those psychoactive substances like synesthetic effects, etc. And others on your, for instance, taking your tour to episodic memories way back and being so for you to be able to really get into the situation again maybe and reflecting on it etc etc there are many so that's basically my answer there are many cognitive effects that can come together to come to those insights and so basically I say yes insights are a special phenomenon and yes insights can happen during a high, it's not a myth.

And it doesn't automatically happen, but it can happen during a high or a psychedelic state. And we have a lot of stories about it. And I've tried in my work to uncover, to discover the mechanisms behind it. Because, of course, they are mostly unconscious. Yeah. So interesting. So this is what took you on your path.

Yeah. And you know what? Talked about them. Yeah. Yeah, it's, and I think there's something to be said about having the courage to follow the discovery. You know, and I think that speaks to the idea of growth and uncomfort. Like you can't, growth and uncomfort never coexist. They just don't do it.

And the thing is, once you have, once you discover something or you have an insight, it's like, okay, now what? Are you going to breathe life into that? Are you going to blow on that ember or are you going to just try to pack it back down? And it's sort of like that reticular activating system. Like once you see it, you can't unsee it anymore. Like, guys, right there. It's right there. I see it.

You got to do something. And that's where the courage comes in. That's what doing the work comes in. Like, okay, I've got this thing. What does it mean? Does it mean I could lose my house? Does it mean I could lose my relationship? Does it mean I could lose everything?

Right. Yes. Oh, shit. Shoot. I could lose everything. Okay, what do you really have? You know, they start taking this mental inventory of like, You know, you went through this life and you just said you were, you hated it.

Like, what do you really have? And you got to make that that list of this is good, this is bad. This is good. This is bad. And you know, you start finding these beautiful metaphors like the next, each step reveals the next. And then you have to reinvestigate your relationship with uncertainty. How comfortable are you with uncertainty? What happens if you leave here?

Are you going to make it? What if you don't have health insurance? Oh, no. Is that the end of the world? Maybe. be at you really have to begin, you have to get rid of everything so that you can rebuild. You're going to be pruned down to the very core of who you are so that you can become the very best of who you want to be.

And it's hard, man. Like, I'm still doing the work. I'm still figuring it out. But that's the inspiration, man. I read your work I get inspired. Having this conversation is inspiring. Learning new things is inspiring. And it's, it's this constant state of wonder I'm in now that drives me to become the best I am.

Like, I'm so curious. And like, it's so thankful to have to have had that experience where I lost everything. I know that sounds crazy, but you hear it in near-death experiences. You hear it deep psychedelic experiences or the people that face traumas is like, I'm so glad this happened to me, which is when you get there, like, you know, you're moving forward, man. Yeah. Well, I'm certainly already the best that I can be.

I don't, I'm not enough. It's hard to be humble when you're the best. You know what I mean? No. On the contrary, very often, you know, I don't know if you have that too, but very often I stumble in the situations or decisions I make. And I think, I'm thinking to myself, man, you know, given my education and everything I know and everything I've done, this is so stupid. What you're doing is, you know, you're acting in a way. This is just ridiculous.

Yes. And I call that, this would be a subject for a whole episode. Also, empathetic black spots. You know, there are visual, sorry, blind spots, empathetic blind spots. This is something that I could write a book about because I think we're systematically not seeing things, for instance, and others empathically, we're kind of blocked because of our own history, because of, like you, and I'm sure you were a decent person before you kind of hit on that other guy, you know, or not hit before you. started to actually get on his nerves and really try to find the weak spot in it because you had your own weakness. But that's what I call also an empathetic blind spot. It's not like you don't have, you're not a guy who wouldn't be able to empathically think and put yourself in the moccasins of

others. But you probably didn't see it in this situation because of something in here, because it kind of hit a nerve in you and you didn't want to see it and you kind of blocked it. So there was this black hole, black spot in your empathic field of vision, so to say. And you didn't kind of realize what you were doing. And I found that very interesting in the whole subject. But let's not get into that now. This is too long. Well, we'll come back.

We can go deep on Carl Jung in the mirror and all of that stuff. I think that that is fascinating to see ourselves and others and understand that these. I'll go, we'll go, we'll go far too. down this rabbit hole Sebastian but we're coming up on two hours my friend you've been incredibly gracious with your time I love our conversations go man so much fun thanks for your time it's always an amazing trip and I hope for for the listeners too and uh let's let's talk again soon I I mean things are unfolding rapidly in the States and we're all you know same here yeah and we are very close to war that's happening. So it's like I said, interesting times and really

interesting times for the whole psychedelic movement also. Yeah. And let's see where this goes. Absolutely. Let's do a panel. I really liked when it was you, me and Andy on there. And I really am moving towards at least getting some shows that have more of a group feeling together. I think we found a different idea. So I got a few people in mind. But before we leave today, I would love if you could tell people where they can find you, what you have coming up. If you can tell them where some of the books that you got out now, what might be the latest books you're working on and where they can find you what you're excited about. Yeah, for those who are still here. Yeah.

Let's say, I give you my last three books maybe. Yeah, let's check them out. Here is elevated is elevated is now cannabis as a tool for mine enhancement is basically the state of the art of what I put out on what the title says cannabis as a tool for mine enhancement where I talk about a lot of the enhancements

that I think can come out of cannabis if you're using it correctly as a tool, creativity, insights, introspection, empathic understanding, introspection, lovemaking, sex. I also introduce thesis about the endocannabinoid system because I think it's crucially involved in higher cognition in the architecture of very complex mental abilities. So this is for those who are really interested in psychology,

cognitive science. It's very dense, I'd say, but it's also, it's not a, It's not dissertation thesis or something, so it's easy to read still. The book that came before in 22, and this is published by, I have to say, I'm really thankful to Richard Raza for editing it from Helardis Press. Hilaritas Press is the publishing house of the daughter of Robert Anton Wilson. I'm really very grateful, and it was amazing to work with him. And of course, it's a blessing to be published alongside this great author. The Art of the High is your guide to using cannabis for an outstanding life

is a book built on my work that is a minimalist guide for all those who want to use cannabis for all those enhancements that I just mentioned. And it's really a short read. It's like you read that in a day. And it has some stories about myself, about others, anecdotes, but also gives you practical advice. It shows you how to use cannabis. Talks it a little bit about the terpenes entourage effect

in the cassativa issues, et cetera, but then goes into how to use cannabis for creativity, et cetera, with just a few pages. And I think it's a really good introduction for those who want to use cannabis for inspiration, for creativity, and other enhancements. And I don't have, oh, I'd like to talk about in my new course, maybe the mindful high is because I just announced it in German and I'm going to give it in English. It's based on also course that I gave for Greenflower Media in LA in 2016, but it's far advanced now.

and where I put that in a master class in a workshop. And for all for companies or here for social clubs, I now offer a workshop for up to 40 people where they can learn about an approach, how to use cannabis for all those announcements that I'm talking about here on a very practical level. And it's designed to also connect people, people and to get feedback and to get them to talk and to get them to discuss stuff.

So it's not only teaching, but it's also really a workshop where we have a meaningful exchange. And it's also meant for cannabis social clubs in Germany because those people, it's not really a social club. As you may know, the social clubs here are able to grow cannabis and to distribute it, but they are not allowed to have club rooms and to have people consuming cannabis together in those club rooms. So it's not really social. But so something like this,

educational things might be interesting for them. And of course, it's international interesting. And I'm giving those classes in English as well. And so one, maybe one book mentioned before is in 2015, what has just did to Walter Benjamin is a book, not only about cannabis and how it can individually enhance cognition and mental abilities, but also how it affected society through doing so with essays on the philosopher Walter Benjamin,

but also on John Lennon and the Beatles and on Carl Sagan and others. And there's an essay in it about the early evolution of jazz, which I think has been much shaped by the use of cannabis. And cannabis had a huge impact on people like Billy Holliday and Louis Armstrong. And it's interesting to really see and to really look into their biographies how much it impacted them, how much they use it not only in their lives, but also to go on stage and to perform. So that's a book that also already looks a little bit more at how cannabis, the cannabis high shaped our society in a positive sense. So that's basically the other books are a long time ago. so let's let's not talk about them now it's awesome not a long time yeah well i think that they can go

to your website and uh you have such an incredible depth of of not only books but papers that you've written that i like i enjoy talking about them i think you're phenomenal at it and i i really hope people within the sound of my voice go down and they i don't think you can just pick up one of your books i think your books are like gateway drugs like you take one and at least the next one at least the next one at least I think the art of the high is a good start for people also to give as a present or something for for Christmas because it's an easy easy read and it can really help people to change their and it's for beginners as well as for those who are really progressed users of cannabis and I always get positive feedback because a lot of people told me wow this is really

very compressed very dense and but it's easy to read and it's fun to read and it's it really changed the way i relate and i use cannabis and it gave me so much so that's an easy read and from there if you really want to go deeper and you can read elevated or you know what has she did to walter benjamin or can go to my recently published for instance an essay um for reality sandwich on um on cannabis as a mind enhancing tool also and uh so go in my my work that's online also on essays they're public and you can read them or on my blog and my website sebastia marinkalo d.E so um yeah thanks great to hear that from you yeah absolutely um ladies and gentlemen go down to the show notes check everything out

that's all we got for today i hope you have a beautiful day out there it's a couple more days in this week and thanks for hanging out with us today that's all we got aloha aloha