TrueLife - Kiya Kersh - Be Yourself, Be Better, Be Authentic

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

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/http://www.kiyakersh.com/about/http://linkedin.com/in/kiyakershlead at  Enthereal to crystalize the resilience of Essential Medicine supply chains, including indispensable anesthetic ketamine, critical-to-care epinephrine, and other Essential Medicines using aromatic amino acids. That employs near-commercial bioengineering and developing high-value generative Al for enzyme and biology products.Kiya is also Director of Engagement and Transformation at Amore360, a company that helps businesses create and sustain positive change through immersive, inspiring experience solutions.With over 20 years of experience in technology and market development, Kiya leads cross-functional teams to deliver innovative products and services that improve resilience, adaptability, health, and performance with non-coercive approaches.Kiva's core competencies include transformation management, systems design thinking, technical due diligence, insightful analysis, unparalleled interpersonal communication, and strategic realization.Kiya has a strong background in chem/ biochemistry, microbiology, organic chemistry, structural biology and metabolic engineering, pharmacology, and computational bioenaineerina. contributina to multiple patents and publications in biotech, bio-based materials, and biofuels.As the founder and Chief Generative Officer, Enthereal creates a platform for the reliable bioregional production of Essential Medicines.Kiya's life goal is to alleviate suffering by applying continuous improvement for engagement, product strategy, and thriving cultures. 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. Fearist 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 had a beautiful week. I know for some people, the kids are back in school. Summertime is over. For some people, kids go back to school next week, whether it's college, primary school, middle school, whether you're an adult going back to school.

I hope that you find some love in this podcast right here because I got a great show for you today with an original thinker. The one and only, Kayakersh, director of engagement and transformation of Moore 360. Founder, chief janitorive officer, CEO of In The Real, Director of Engagement and Transformation, Prison 14, MBA and Finance and Strategy from the Drucker School of. management, MS and chemistry. Kaya, you are so much more. I'm so psyched you're here today. How's it going? It's going great.

It's great to be here. This is my officially first podcast. Well, congratulations. I'm stoked to be here on the, on, have you as, as your first podcast and looking forward to just figuring out what's going on in the world. I think we share some similar passions. And I know I kind of gave a brief background right there, I was curious maybe you could take us back a little bit and give us a bit of an origin story.

Maybe fill in some canvas here on who you are. You know, one thing to start out to say is there are so many different stories and lifetimes within lifetimes and stories. But, you know, grew up in a suburb of L.A., L.A. County. You know, I kind of think of it post-World War II. You know, my grandparents met about 45 minutes away from, you know, where I spent a lot of my early childhood. They met during World War II. You know, they were just kind of crossing paths, you know,

and going to different parts of the world. And after, you know, in the late 40s, they were both kind of available. And they said, oh, you know, let's get, let's see what happens if we get together. You know, and they eventually made their way to, you know, post-World War II, Los Angeles. And my parents met in this little suburb. And then we moved to the high desert outside of the L.A. Basin. Okay. So that was a lot more of like a kind of red state kind of environment.

You know, so I, you know, California people don't often realize that there's like the cities and then there's rural. Yeah. And it's not as, you know, it's a lot, it's a lot more purple than people realize, you know. So we moved to this, this area that's, I always thought of it as rural into transition of suburbia, but it never quite made it. Never quite made it to suburbia, you know. So you have, you have grocery stores and then tumbleweeds and then housing tracks and some dachshab trees. And, you know, I had this idea in my head from early on that college, I'm not sure where I even got the idea, but apparently my family says that before I could, before I was like preschool age, I was already talking about college. I have no idea what I was thinking. Okay. I don't know who planted that seed, but, you know, for a working class kid, first person, my family, who went to college for as many generations as anyone can remember, That was a big deal for them as much as it was for me. So go to college just over the San Andreas Fault, the mountains that Southern California are known for.

I lived on one side, and then I came back to the other side, closer to the beach and the ocean and everything, and went to a little college there. And while I was there, definitely I was open to so many things, searching as people are kind of set up to do. in college. And at the beginning of my sophomore year, during the summer, a month or so before that,

I met, I met this guy who, you know, when I tell these stories, it's impossible not to talk about him. So I met this, I met this friend during the summer and then right before school started, he said, you know, because he was, he was a year, he'd been around a year more than I'd had. So I was a year into this in a summer. He's two years and two years and two years. two summers and different things. And he says, I've been hearing about these things out in the desert. And, you know, we were both kind of, you know, we were interested in newotropics. And some of your listeners might know of like the Mondo 2000 guide to the new edge, you know. So this was something that I found, you know, before I was even in college, you know, just a hungry late 90s kid. You know,

I had a modem right before I went to college. Like the idea of technology of having fun with technology was like logging into a BBS, you know, bullet and board system where no one was there, right? You're just the only person that's longed on. And that's pretty cool. And then I had this modem. I went to college and I didn't never use it again because they had internet. They had these things called fiber trunks and all this stuff.

And so beginning of my sophomore year, classes had started and I was all I was already completely overwhelmed right I was like had all of these science classes you know I knew that my life for the indefinite future was just going to be more science classes really and I was just like I'm already I already can't do it right I already see that I can't do it well somehow I thought I couldn't do it even though I was a year into this right right like man this is and I'm I'm kind of waiting for a phone call it's a Friday night after the first week of classes and I'm like you know we

didn't have cell phones then or at least you know I didn't have one I didn't even have a pager then some you know some adults that had some special things going on had had cell phones you know and they were big they were like these things that bricks yeah that you lugged next to you right so I'm like flipping through organic chemistry and hexagons and some different things And that comes up later. That's important that we mention this, right? So I'm like, you know, I called them once, and I knew it was socially inappropriate to call more than once.

So I was like, I just, I have a feeling, I'm going to miss this train unless I, you know, my curiosity is telling me it's time to not do the right thing. It's time to be impatient and just go. And so I walked across campus. I had these cut off shorts. I had a pair of khaki cut off shorts. and I had a, it's kind of a weird story, but I actually had a button-up shirt that my teacher coach had given me

that had belonged to her dead father. But I know, I know this, right? So I have this, you know, short-sleeve button-up shirt, and I have this, like, kind of thin, thermal thing that's over that, that's kind of holy. And I go across campus, and there's this old Subaru station wagon that's, you know, running and people are in the back seat. And he's like, he's like kind of, I can see the expression on his face like,

I'm sorry I didn't call you. Like, you know, so it's like, and he's like, want to see, want to jump in the back of the Subaru? And I was like, yeah, sure. So I got to jump in the back of the very back. So I like curled up and fell asleep. And the next thing I knew, we had just turned off the road or they were like, oh, I think it's almost the road, you know. And so I wake up and they, the driver who I hadn't yet met, right?

They tear off the pavement and onto a dirt road. And now we're jumping up and down, you know, like on this washboard road. And the next thing I see, I'll never forget. Because it was a dry lake bed in all of these cars that had been parked next to each other in an arc. And it's not something you see every day, even at a festival now. on a dry lake bed. So when you find yourself on a dry lake bed at a festival, which inevitably you will,

because it's one of those things that you want to do. I mean, you do. Right. When you do, you'll notice that the cars are very rarely, if not ever, parked in an arc. And you look up and there's a full moon. And so, oh, right. You just wanted me an intro, right?

That's all good, man. It's here. Perfect. So what I'm telling you is the lead up to the first time that I took psilocybin mushrooms. And then since then, just to kind of like finish this whole and then we can like kind of visit some of these different moments as you please. After that and a few things that led up to that during that summer, I completed my chemistry degree and then I had my first couple of post-college jobs and one of them was working for a cryonics company.

company. Okay, not cryogenics, but cryonics is the, cryonics is the science of preserving people for later Dethong. Maybe not Dethong. Maybe we want to be a little more careful than that. But, but that's the general idea. I didn't quite know who I was being hired by. I was just like, I need a job and I better, I better put in a decent effort at this before I'm going to be able to tell my mom that, hey, you know what, I really gave this a good, a good shot. Right. I worked at that job for about a year and a half. And during that time, some things happened to that job, but eventually became clear that synthesizing MDMA was in my best interest.

And in the best interest of the community, as far as I could tell, because the quality had been flagging a little bit. And I was like, I know I like the pure stuff. I know I like the real MDMA. And I believe that that has more than three, more than therapeutic value, you know. And also I found difficult to find other work. And now I've really put a lot of analysis into that.

And, you know, maybe we can get talking about that a little bit. But just to kind of complete our overview. So I did that for about 10 years. During that time, I put myself through a master's degree. I paid for my own tuition that time. And after that, well, after that I was arrested. I did my master's research for a year. And then I worked for this company that is one of the few still remaining advanced biofuels companies.

And I made the mistake of not staying on the rocket. I didn't know about all this stuff. I didn't know about all these rules. like, if you're on a startup rocket, you stay on the startup rocket, right? But I was like, oh, you know, I have these loose ends in Southern California before moving to Colorado, which is where the company, and I mean, actually, you know, considering that the company moved and two months later, I was arrested, you know, the DA store in my house and I was arrested, it felt like a big mistake, right? And it felt like one of those mistakes that you just kind of,

I kept kicking myself for quite a few years. But eventually, you see, see that even when a mistake or an accident happens, things start happening that make it clear that, okay, this is just the way it is now and that we're going to find beautiful things, you know, in every path. But maybe one of the most surprising things to me was that, you know, when I, and by the way, I just, I'm so thankful that you're just letting me. Well, you're crushing. Let me pause you for one second, though, because you are covering so much awesome stuff. I think we can dig into some of it, unless you want to, you know what I mean? I'm just, no, the end is here.

So let me just, if you'll allow me. And I just wanted to, you know, I'm so appreciative that I have the chance. So when I was arrested, even though the previous 10 years had been, had been increasingly dark because I had selected a path that had kind of taken me into a corner. I painted myself into the corner. but and this is why it's so important that I get this out there right now, you know. So when I was first arrested, I still had a lot of the strength and power that I had had from basically being able to choose when I got to work, who I got to associate with, and that there was like a spiritual community for me to be a part of.

Okay, but about seven years into that, so that was 14 years ago, okay, that I was arrested. Seven years ago, so about halfway between now and then, was, believe it or not, the hardest time. So the last seven years have been harder for me than immediately after I was arrested. And this, in this, what the insight that this revealed to me and that I really, you know, feel important. to share with others is that basically what I'm seeing is that there are very few structures out there that are really set up to look out into the world and say do you need help do you need help we have a way to help you not not just not just a little cute advertising campaign but we have some real ways to help you we're not going to do everything for you but we're the folks that are looking for

people who are not plugging into where they could be aligned with more well-being, more connection usually, but sometimes more, you know, less connection is what people. So I think that that's a good, that's kind of a good huge overview, but also, you know, kind of how I see like some of the phases and, you know, some of the interesting parts. Yeah. It's an awesome overview. And thanks for sharing that.

It's trying to find a little nugget where I can dig into. There's a bunch here. Why was the second half much more difficult than the first half? You had said the seven years after you got arrested were easier than the last seven. Why is that true? Yeah. So, you know, there's this. there's this really interesting balance and interplay between self-empowerment and engagement.

So as we become, as our personal empowerment increases, it also increases our power to not only please people, but to offend people. Well said. Yeah. And doing anything, doing anything that changes, anything is going to attract attention. Some of it is the attention you want. Some is the attention you don't want. But we just say, oh, it's all attention that we do want. Because usually if we're making a change, it's either someone's making a change that's moving things towards the worse or people are moving it towards the better. And unfortunately, there are so many forces in this world that there are usually people on both sides, right? Yeah.

It does seem that way. And a lot of the times you hear the phrase, there's no such thing as. negative publicity, but, you know, right? But there is, I mean, if, if, if you are a rising star or something happened in your life and you have different forces pulling you, you're going to be pulled in one direction. It's hard to stay the course and stay straight because there really is no right direction. There's only the authenticity direction, right? And that's probably why it was difficult for you the last seven years.

Were you pulled in these different directions? The isolation. The isolation and, um, um, You know, as I, so I, there, there have been several, you know, since I was arrested, there have been several phases, I guess you could say, of taking the things that I had learned and applying them to the best of my abilities. And in some cases, finding some real resistance and looking, looking in the places where I believed there would be more understanding and more resourcing around people who are, well, people that have been dealing with trauma, frankly.

And so, you know, I'm really excited by there being so much attention brought to the treatment of trauma and an awareness of trauma. But unfortunately, in my experience, what I found was, like, for instance, and, you know, I can leave out names and we can still talk about things in an interesting way. But, you know, I work to volunteer for a nonprofit that was focused on connecting with artists and helping art, the voice of artists, raise awareness around at-risk youth. Okay. But what I found was the organization itself, it was competent in advertising. It was competent in partnering, but it wasn't actually competent in supporting those with trauma to succeed.

And so, you know, we can have like, we can have an event where we have some people teach some at-risk use, some DJing skills or some video editing skills. and you know perhaps they find perhaps they find someone to deliver these workshops that may have some experience with kids right so they get to say okay we accomplish something and that's real it's something that we need to celebrate right but now 10 years later we can raise the bar on what we expect as a society because now we are putting out there so much more training, so much more lip service. So I hope we can translate that lip service around an awareness about trauma to actually making our systems and programs so that they are trauma aware. And that's what's really lacking in the psychedelic space right now is that

people think that they're doing the right thing. Okay, trauma, we're treating trauma. Great. The studies show that people that are depression, you know, treatment resistant to more conventional depression treatments. But what I found is that at least for some subpopulations that have pretty serious trauma, and what I found is as we are peeling away the layers of communities, conditioning that we get more and more in touch with these these raw pieces of ourselves and that you know right now I'm excited by there being so much emphasis on this new you know what I'm calling it seems everyone is calling it a different number some people are calling it the third wave

but I think it's like the fourth or fifth wave um so I'm excited about it, but really this latest tie-dye rush has been catalyzed by, you know, some venture capitalists that said, oh, you know what, let's make, let's make commercial psychedelics a thing. I think, fortunately, it's the time that we see that society is ready to really engage with this conversation again. But to kind of like, you'll put the tie on this. So, you know, the isolation that we find, as we're getting more in touch with our authentic feelings, sometimes some of those authentic feelings are anger at circumstances that we've found ourselves in

or that we see are going on today. And so there's a delicate balance between being energized by that anger, but then finding that, okay, now it's time to convert that energy into, you know, more refined communications. And so I guess I'm trying to tell people that, you know, I'm kind of, I know that not all have the courage or inanity to really follow some of these things into the more challenging territory. You can go, you could, you know, you can go.

to psychedelic therapy with or without a psychotherapist for years you can go to dance parties that you know involves psychedelics to some degree for decades and we can feel like we have a certain homeostasis in our lives and then something may happen that will catalyze much more challenging periods of development than what most people are talking about. And I'm not intending to scare anybody, but rather to normalize that things are going to seem more difficult sometimes for more people as more people go deeper into this practice.

I think I'll leave it there for you to ask the questions and, you know, because I know that some of the ideas that I'm sharing aren't the most common ones. Maybe we can unpack them a little bit because I feel like we're moving towards these sweeping generalizations. And I wrote down something that I really like. And it says that we can't, something that you wrote says we can treat the underlying epigenetic changes that lead to intergenerational trauma with technology that exists today. Like that's an awesome statement. But I don't, I'm not sure a lot of people will thoroughly understand that.

So I was wondering if maybe you could unpack that for us. Yes. Okay. So what we're talking about here are the different levels that different things get stuck in our bodies. Okay. So with epigenetics, we're talking about these little changes that are made along the DNA. And so I'm careful in how I talk about things. So, you know, there's things that I think I know. And then there's things that we think we know as a society. And, you know, it's kind of like an everyday conversation. And I don't want to assume that, you know,

I don't want to assume that we're all, you know, thinking about the same thing. So I tend to try to talk about things in like, kind of like junior high school level. which is not meant to put that down, it's really to say it's understandable. Sure. So epigenetics, what that does is that there are these very small changes. One atom, in fact, one methyl atom, one carbon atom, that can be changed along the DNA.

And this can be similar and different in our different cells in our bodies. But what that does is it's another level of regulation. of whether genes are activated or not in our bodies. So not all genes that we have are constantly doing things. They get activated by different cellular programs. So what the new research is showing around psychedelics is that psychedelics, and these are just theories, right, by neuroscientists. But we can kind of like say, okay, certain results,

they seem to kind of point in. one direction and then we can start saying well it goes that far but then there's this limitation or there's some some qualification that we have to make to it um and apologies there's some construction going on yeah no worries um so with so with epigenetics um we're talking about changes that actually do get passed down right from parent to child and then potentially you know to other generations and first some some years ago there was a lot of talk about speculation that epigenetics had something to do with why folks experience intergenerational trauma like okay why why does it seem like i'm still feeling this stuff that maybe my ancestor

from several generations might have gone through but when i think about this it's like oh there's nothing else that i can come up with that explains why I feel this sense of, in my case, trauma and sexual trauma, right? Yeah. I have no recollection of ever having any kind of sexual trauma, although until some different family secrets came out, was I able to say, oh, you know, this intuition that I always had, now I think I have the piece that goes in, you know, the piece of the puzzle that goes in. that. So without having any kind of particular recollection of a trauma, although there's plenty of ways that childhood trauma happens, we can have a move. Some people can, you know, one of the kids in the

family is excited to make the move. The other one, not so much. And that can be a childhood trauma, just something like that. So with epigenetics, there's, there was some research, some studies, and now people have found that there are specific ways that we can use this knowledge to make therapies. But they're not psychedelics. Okay. So part of what, and I love that that's one of the quotes that you're home demo. Yeah. Yeah.

Is that psychedelics appear to be working on the level of neuroplasticity. Okay. How the wiring of our brain works and kind of creating a period that's, um, akin to what's sometimes called the critical window. In critical window, associates with this time in our childhood where we have a particular openness to new knowledge. And it comes with a price, too, that openness,

because we don't get to filter during that critical. And that's why it is something, that's why we want to take care to what we expose ourselves with when we now on on the other hand i believe that if you have one challenging experience for most people it is not going to ruin your life but there are certain people who's taking psychedelics could make for very long-lasting trauma so we i mean you know one of the nuances that we can talk about is um avoiding retramatization and are we you know when someone feels that they're being traumatized?

Are they being traumatized? Are they actually re-experiencing their trauma? So I guess you could say, as I'm getting back into all this, I know that the psychologists are going to have better ways of putting a lot of these things, because they've spent years talking about the stuff in the context of how do I sound like a reasonable person to my colleagues and whatnot. I'm coming from the perspective of,

someone who's very interested in the molecular structure of life and who we are and how health works on a molecular level. And then how does that molecular translate to living, the people-to-people level, you know, how our families are influenced by things that are going on, on our molecular level, how are our communities. And so that's why I talk about systems medicine and systems entrepreneurship. And, okay, so just to kind of like summarize what I was trying to say on the epigenetics and how that relates to all of this. So I probably, you know, we could get into one more level of detail of like, okay, here's how the molecular, the central dogma of molecular biology works.

You know, we have a gene that's DNA and then makes RNA and then the RNA makes a protein. And the protein sometimes is called an enzyme. Right. And an enzyme is a catalyst. And that's what my company focuses on, or at least. That was one of the first IP areas that we wanted to focus on. But to get to the epigenetics piece, so it's kind of saying we have the switch,

the epigenetic switch. And as far as I know now, because as a scientist, I don't know what's going to be discovered tomorrow, but I've not seen anything that shows that psychedelics translate to, epigenetic change. However, people have been developing therapies that do address these underlying epigenetic states in our DNA, which could very possibly eventually treat what is the root cause

of the anxiety, okay? Because we tell our stories, we tell ourselves stories about, oh, well, it's my choice that caused me anxiety or living a lifestyle it creates anxiety well life can be anxious but some of us really do experience life or particular settings in a way that's different and when people are finding what the really root level um of the molecular genetic phenomenon treating the neuron level and like kind of the brain connection level. So it's still a level that we want to work on. I'm not saying that we shouldn't. But there is a level that you work on that level.

And then some people are going to still encounter. They're still going to say, you know what? I'm still, you know, if I go a year or two without taking psychedelics, I start to feel that there is just something about me that leads me towards what society calls depression. I can find ways to manage it. I can smoke cannabis sometime. I can do these other things.

But if society says don't do those things, then in a few years, I'm predicting that people are going to feel depressed. They're going to feel anxious. They're going to feel these things because there are, I mean, you know, to get into kind of how I see trauma, we have a bunch of these systems. And AI is helping us kind of have like a new model to talk about this, understand ourselves. We have these different parts of ourselves that are wired together in this really clever way.

And they seem to like, they seem to be able to shift off and one activate when it needs to. But the more that we're intentional about this, you know, it's almost like comp engineering with, with at DPT, if you say, okay, use this model, then it'll say, oh, I know which one you mean. And great, now that we're on the same page, it's going to be a little bit easier for us to talk because you know the ins and outs of this. And I know that you know because you're calling me by name, you know. And it's the same kind of thing. We can have that relationship to ourselves where we're like, okay, now is time for less analysis.

Now is time for less logic and judgment or now is the time that we need to get out the math skills and we need to balance the checkbook and we need to make sure that people are paid and things like that. So the neurons, you know, we can generalize. That's the level of connections and kind of like what I kind of think that's. of it as our life experiences and how we've interpreted them. Right. And sometimes the different parts they get, the wires get a little crossed, right? But they, they get, some of our wires are crossed at a level where it's, it's a, it's a part, that a very fundamental part of how we developed.

This isn't something that is, that can be unnawed with any number of psychedelic truth. This is like you know for me and if you want to hear more about like the the psychology the academic psychology we can look at like object theory okay and what this is talking about is how we start making sense of the world as we you know just after we're born and we're starting to to like see that that there are objects in the world and that there is, we can interact with our environment and get things, get our needs met, right? And then we start to see that there are other figures, right?

And that's where we begin to have an understanding that individuals exist before we even completely understand that we exist, right? So we start identifying, oh, caregiver, mother, father. And then eventually we start to see, oh, okay, there are these group of people. And we often think of it in terms of family. But then that way of relating, that way of, oh, a person is kind of an object.

Then an object is an object. And then that these patterns they lay they lay a foundation. They lay us a backbone right how we relate and of course there is no there's no real life without emotion so like for myself at a very young age I learned to like completely not pay attention to my emotions and why did I do that who knows but at some level I found that okay as a coping behavior I could somehow I could I learned that I could start to ignore my emotions and then that became my full personality right and then at some point that that you know someone who is not

connected to their emotions cannot exist in society in a healthy way because our emotions you know do help us navigate we can't be completely We can't navigate completely by logic because logic, there's certain situations that logic can't solve. A life without emotion is devoid of life in some ways. And yet for an intellectual person, I know. I'm with you. I'm with you. But it's, okay, so let me ask you this then.

What role does language pay in then when you talk about object theory, you know, isn't it? language seems to be the limiting governor on object theory. Like we don't have the words to describe what that relationship really is. So it limits what we can experience. Maybe that is the shift that we're moving towards right now. And I think psychedelics, this shift in conscience, whatever we want to call it, I think we're moving to a new foundation. We're ripping away the scaffolding.

And we are on the cusp of understanding the world in a way we've never done before. And I think it has to do with language. What do you think? Well, what you said is true. We are beginning to learn about the world in a way that we've never done before. Besides that, I'm not sure. Me neither. Yeah, you know, part of it, and this is where I really appreciate what's, you know, the conversations is that there are more people who are willing to say, okay, there are things that we feel that seems like we know.

And then there are things that we don't know. And I feel like there's a, there's, it's a healthy thing. It is. It is. That there may be things that we don't completely understand. So, you know, taking MDMA was transformative for me because, um, well, at first I thought that it was helping me get in touch with my emotions. But then someone, uh, I met, I met Robert Jesse. And he said, well, don't you think.

MDMA, don't you think it helps you look at things without any emotion? And I said, whoa, yeah, actually. Okay, so that was like five years of me meditating on that and thinking about, okay, how is it that, you know, I mean, what even are emotions? And I thought about that for a long time while I was still taking psychedelics and MDMA very often. That was, that ended about 14 years ago. And then since then, more recently, I've been thinking about the molecular basis of emotions. And, you know, what, I mean, one way of looking at is that we have emotions, we kind of have our language interpretation of emotions. And then we have different kind of different fundamental emotions.

And then we have underlying things that the needs that emotions. kind of map to, but then because humans were, we're able to imagine an abstract so much, we've recruited emotions. We associate different emotions with, well, good and bad, neutral sometimes, you know, depending on the nature, the quality and the magnitude of the emotion. So, here's a good example. Okay. So discussed around, okay. content warning. We're going to get into some stuff that might offend some adults.

Nice. I'm going to grab my pen. I got to write down some of these notes and fast. Hang on. Okay, great. I normally have one with me, but for some reason I didn't have it. Okay. Carry on, my friend. Okay, so, like I said, content warning, we're going to talk about stuff that might offend some adults.

Okay. So, I mean, this is the good example because it's kind of so clear, but poop emoji. Okay. So poop has, before poop emojis, poop was more universally considered something that is just foul, right? Now with poop emojis, it's like cool thing, kind of cute sometimes, depending on the context. But it still is alluding to this thing that we know of as like, you know, for me, I'm going to use the example of a dog, you know, take the dog out to be water door, you know, to do a number two. And, you know, this is something it's like, you know,

we don't want it on the carpet. We'd prefer it to be outside, you know. And we have, that's an innate reaction. Like, you can teach a baby this, but, well, excuse me, I guess, I guess this is where we need to bring the psychologist in and say, oh, are, our baby, are human babies? Do they think poop is cool or offensive? but plenty of other animals you know they're kind of curious but they also know like I mean see I'm ruining my own examples because dogs are not a good example dogs will eat their own stuff right but I guess what I'm trying to say is that and this leads to kind of a more contentious example but we kind of have to bring this up to to have this conversation so we're you know um

We're all going to agree that poop is smelly and not a good thing, right? A dog might not agree with us because a dog has, you know, some different things going on than a human does. And then there's even some humans that might, you know, think it's cool. And they may even have the chance to convince some other humans to do some stuff with them related to it. But we're all, but the bell curve is that, you know, we're like, we're leaving that stuff in the bathroom. We're flushing down the toilet, you know.

And the reason that we're using an example like this, this is that it's almost the easiest thing to talk about that still, you know, it's like, oh, why are they talking about this? But we have to get comfortable with talking about things that are uncomfortable if we want to have the full conversation. Right. So if we just categorically, like, leave off talking about things that make us uncomfortable, then we're not, we're not able to have a conversation at all, really, right? So I'm going to, I'm going to say that, you know, even if, even if it's actually true that humans teach other humans to, to like consider poop offensive.

I'm going to say that it's a fairly innate thing. Right. Agreed. Now then, so people say, okay, homosexuality. All right. This is something that gives some people a visceral response, right? And there's different reasons that someone might have visceral response, right? It might, they might have visceral response about it because they know someone who is homosexual and how hard it's been in life

them, right? Or they may think, oh, homosexual, and they may think about something specific that someone has associated with homosexuality, like poop. Okay. So, and the reason that I'm just saying these things is that, okay, you can kind of imagine, I mean, I could list them, I could list a couple of different reasons why someone might make a connection between those things. I'm going to lead that to the imagination of folks. But The thing is that people, you know, the problems associated with poop usually, okay, that it's a place of infectious diseases. Mm. Okay.

It's smelly. Like, you know, if we smell like that, other people are going to, you know, they're going to be like, oh, what's going on there? You know, and I know this because there are plenty of homeless people in the world today who do smell like this. And when we walk past them, people have certain reactions, you know. But that doesn't, but the fact that poop is offensive and that we might have this connection between poop and homosexuality in our heads, it doesn't actually reflect upon the fact that there are lots of people who are homosexual that are good people, whether they're good or bad, right? And yeah, to bring this back to our talk, what you were talking about as far as language and our thinking about emotions. So one of the things that I think psychedelics does really open people's eyes to is we start to say, oh, you know what? Maybe what I think I saw isn't always what I think I saw.

And a deeper practice in that is even thinking about, okay, I have an emotion. And then my, so that's limbic system. Then my, there's parts of my brain that are interpreting that in coming up with the word, the wordy story. But yes, like you're saying, there is a connection between the psychedelics and language. What is it doing? Well, it's helping us to understand that language cannot represent what is under the language. Yeah, I think that regardless of what psychedelics, for me, I can only speak to my examples,

but whether it's LSD or mushrooms, you know, we see this language. You know, it's almost to be beheld and you can almost see yourself in a third person and you realize that words no longer describe the situation you're in, whether you're talking about sexual orientation or defecation or there's something that underlies the emotional response to our lives. And you can see that on psychedelics. You can understand these fascinating correlations with actions and habits and understandings. And I think that in some ways, this brings us back to the ideas of epigenetics that you were talking about. You know, I do think. that psychedelics may on some level be a trigger for epigenetics because I know so many people that

have had psychedelic therapy, be it going to a rave, you know, be with a friend or taking their seven, eight grams alone or with therapy. It seems to me that people who take psychics begin to understand this concept of generational trauma. And maybe there is some sort, you know, a while back you described what happens when the gene expresses itself. And as you were going through the elegant way you explained it. It seemed to me that in that explanation of the molecule acting, I could see behavior changing, you know, and I can see that happening that way. So I think it's fractal in nature.

And when you talk about the molecular structure of things, I see behavior changing. And that can't be a coincidence. That's something that you can begin to see unfolding in your life. And if you, as someone as a molecular scientist, that can see it happening in the body, you can see it happening in the brain, then it's something. strange that it begins to happen in your life. And I wish more people would begin to see that happening. I think it takes psychedelics to do it. Or like you said, maybe it doesn't take it, but maybe psychedelics are a catalyst for it. I really think what, and I love the way you describe

the molecular happening because that makes me see it even better. And that's what I think this shift is. I think we're beginning to thoroughly understand, hey, what happens in here, whether it's the critical window in reshaping the way we think, whether it is the critical window that allows us to look back on our grandparents from World War II and understand the traumas they went through, our lived experience for us, which is, that's crazy to think about. But what's even crazier to think about is I can stop it all right now if I choose to. I have to rewire some things. I have to change the way I think about it. And in doing so, I'll change the way I interact in the world. And in doing so I can purge for my family.

That's mind-blowing to me, right? Like, what is possible is mind-blowing, man? So I think one of the things that psychedelics does is it brings awareness to the fact that change is all around us.

Okay, so I... It's the only constant. And I think, you know, I think part of it is the contrast that that experience creates to like part of the cultural values that we have now. And it really took kind of losing it all. And coming, you know, being relatively homeless for a little while there.

And crawling back into society. and what that did for me was, I think, kind of, I can't say for sure, but it reminds me of stories that people have, well, really of like taking these kinds of journeys that, you know, you don't see people for 10 or 20 years, and then they come back and, you know, they're grizzled and they're like, I have a few stories to tell you. I guess what I find interesting is in our culture, it's almost it now with influencer culture. And even before, it's such a thing to, you know, it's a whole thing to have a story of

going away and coming back, right? So we're all kind of, we're all participating in this culture of conversation, but also trying to, like, we're put on the spot to come up with how people will benefit from this, right? And instead of, like, I remember the rave scene for me, in my experience of it was that people, people, were sharing, people were very open, people were not competing. And maybe that was just an illusion, maybe that was just my naivete. But now what I kind of get is that now psychedelics are being brought into competition culture in a new way, kind of the, you know, the, what we might call the formal, formal culture. And I can't help but think,

think of Rome. It all feels like Rome to me. It all feels like just this long kind of, you know, um, long drawn out Rome. You know, Rome kind of spread and, um, planted, planted its seeds everywhere. Um, but, but I want to make a careful, you know, for me, I'm kind of, you know, I'm kind of a, I'm a little feral, but a little, but a little, little, I don't know, you know, society has made an effort to make me more civilized, but the early rave culture and scene kind of like really fed this feral punk kind of energy. So the neuroscientists and the psychologists, they, you know, they understand that they need to be considered trustworthy, coherent.

So they're going to share ideas that are more readily digestible. Where I'm coming from is, you know, I'm looking for models and ways of talking about these things where we can say, okay, this is what we think the evidence is and this is what we think the implications are.

And then there are certain areas that it doesn't really matter to me, like, you know sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't matter how something actually works because what it seems to me that psychedelics do do is they for one thing they give people a sense of possibility when before the administration there may have been a profound sense of lack of possibility okay so i was i mean the reason there is so much focus on how they work is that that is how you get a pharmaceutical patent. Exactly. Okay. So otherwise, we would not be talking about how this works, except that it is how you get a pharmaceutical patent. You have to say, we believe that this is how it

works, and we're patenting that. And so it even opens up several different people, several different groups to say, well, we think it works like this. And we think it works like this. And, you know, our data shows that it works like this third or fourth other way. And guess what? The patent system provides for that. But is that how it really works? I mean, I'm not sure that it would matter except that these people, oh, and guess what? These people were not asking out of curiosity. These aren't the people who said, oh, you know what?

We just love knowledge and we're curious about these things and these particular fungi and the chemicals they make. They're the people who said, oh, we're just at a stage in our careers when it's convenient for us to pivot to this awesome opportunity that these venture capitalists are creating. It's all narrative control. Like, it's an attempt to find way, you know what I mean? Like, that's what it is. It's, okay, this works this way.

It's all bullshit. Here's what's beautiful about it. I see it as like a Trojan horse. Like all we, and for all I know, we could have some people on the inside of the pharmaceutical industry that are like, yeah, let's try and patent psilocybin here. Let's just figure how it works. They spend all this money because they know it's getting out there. And so many of the people that are beginning to become facilitators, you know, this is one of the first times that I can remember in history where the doctors take the medicine. And there's something to be said about that.

It's an archaic revival of sorts. You know, it harkens back to a time when a person of medicine thoroughly understood what the medicine was. And I think that that's what the, right? That's what the Trojan horses is. Go ahead. We have to, okay, so, you know, we can have ideas about history. We can have feelings about history. But then in a conversation like this, like it really matters that what was the history of medicine?

Right. And in, and really, we need to talk about this because this is the story of where the AMA came from. This is the story of why does the AMA protect the role of, you know, of doctor so much in society. We have to look at how was this created? And really that's the story of, it's a really popular book about the structure of scientific revolutions, which is a very commonly cited book,

but I don't have the full citation off the top of my head. But basically in the early phase of the medical profession in the United States, it was filled with quackery, right? All you had to do, all you had to do is be, be right, not even 50% of the time, because most of the time people were going to die. So if you got to save or, you know, ease someone suffering a little bit on their way to dying, good for you, right? And then some people said, you know what, this is out of control.

Some of these people are not proper enough. Some of these people are into quackery in a different way than we are into quackery. And these people are giving our quackery a bad name. Okay, so not history, right? This is just us having a conversation. Right, right. But it might get some people to look at what the actual history of the American Medical Association is. And do I want, you know, do I want more.

transparency in the world. Yes. And part of more transparency is knowing what kind of training is this person that I'm working with? What kind of training did they have? How many people have they killed? You know, how many people have they permanently disfigured? Oh, just my dark sense of humor coming out a little bit. But, but you'd want to know. Yeah. Right. So the fact that the AMA protects who can and who can't prescribe medicine, you know, it's something that they're heavily invested in. Sure. And on the bright side, there do seem to be some indications that some of the key concerns,

the AMA is aware of, and it's very surprising. Even the DEA seems to be coming around that people are helped by medicine. and that, you know, one of the most interesting things to come out related to the DEA recently has been the joint letter from the FDA and the DEA, where the DA, excuse me, with the FDA, came out and said, companies that make these particular medicines, if you're not going to make the quota, if you're not going to use your allotment, then you need to give, we're going to give your allotment to another company. company. Okay. So you might have heard of different medications that people, they often go to fill a prescription, they go to the pharmacy. And the pharmacy's like, sorry, that's not a medication that we handle because it's a controlled substance. Okay. So what the DEA, for the first time ever, they said, okay, companies, yeah, we understand that this is a controlled substance and this caused some headaches for you. But hello, this is a medicine that prevents headaches. for a lot of other people. Right. So that is a bellwether change. That is something where we can say the DEA doesn't look like they're prioritizing their enforcement responsibilities,

but they are balancing their enforcement responsibilities with what their other mandate is supposed to be, which is enabling people to get the medicines that they mean. So I, you know, let's see. I just want to make, yeah, this is my first podcast. It's perfect, you're crushing. I have conversations like this. Do not have enough, so I really appreciate it. Yeah, I know, it's fun, and I think that the world needs it,

and it's so refreshing to get to hear ideas on what's happening in the world from different people in different parts of it. And I'm excited for it because it's on some level I see that psychedelics break down barriers. And it's this barrier dissolution that scares authority, be it at the AMA or the DEA or your principal at school or your own personal self that has built up these walls around you so you can walk around and feel secure. you know, and while it can be a scary thing to face your traumas, while fear itself is a scary thing, I think standing up to it and understanding that I can really live a lot better life if I choose to stand up to it. I think psychedelics do that on some level, which brings me to this, you know, being a lover of language, I queued it on something you said. And I was wondering if you might be able to talk more about it. And it said earlier, you said, crawling back into society.

Like, why did you say it like that? What does that? That seems to be, there's a lot of emotion in that statement. What does that mean when crawling back into society? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is, you know, this is one of the most, you know, challenging parts about my story in my life and therefore also challenging to process. And I've processed it in a lot of different ways.

But now the part that I, the part that I, I like to emphasize is hidden disabilities and the role that ableism had in my own ableism. Okay. So basically what's going on there is beliefs that we're supposed to be a certain way. That's how I'm going to define ableism right now. Okay. I mean, really it's it's a lot more there. you're going to find better definitions of it.

But this idea that we're supposed to be a certain way, and even as we're telling ourselves, okay, I accept myself, I accept where I'm at, I accept that, I accept that I might have negative feelings about where I'm at, but I'm endeavoring to more fully respect where I'm at. So, you know, that's that's one of the more, I guess you could say, on the on the road to maturity ways of thinking about it. You know, that there are different levels of this, but there's no, I really don't think that there's a formula. And I like, you know, people sometimes ask, ask you, okay, what would be the advice? that you give to your younger self right right in part of part of the advice would be you really are

different but you don't have to you don't have to see the difference as a bad thing and when you do see the difference as a bad thing just find a way to make it irrelevant because you're going to have perceptions they're going to come and go and there's not going to be there's not going to be one answer ever except that you're going to you're going to learn how to take things not personally you know like people say like one of the four agreements i love the four agreements one of the four agreements is don't take anything personally but just to be so that can be the wisdom that can be wisdom we can say okay this wisdom has already shown itself enough in my life that I know that this to be a wisdom that I'm not going to take it personally but sometimes being told don't take it personally

that actually that feels like an assault to a to a you know to a traumatized person who is still in the active retramatization right and that was that was that was that was part of what the why the first years were so difficult because I was like I was looking to the places that society tells you when you need help and you've exhausted all the other options look in these places and so I did and I said whoa that's scarier than that's scarier than just being out here on my own right and and so through that that's where I learned don't take it personally right of thinking okay and and that's why I say that it is you know it is it's a contraction and expansion kind of phenomenon where we we become more able so we bring on more challenge sometimes

we say yes to so many challenges that it it overwhelms us it might even apparently break us right and we can say the the light you know I want to say it lightheartedly what doesn't kill you makes us stronger because plenty of people know that no, sometimes things just take you down and not. You know, sometimes circumstances change in a way where you do not have the same ability to provide for yourself or to look after yourself or to find healing yourself. And a lot of people, I mean, part of the story, I mean, there's, you know, I acknowledge there's so many facets. but in the early days of taking psychedelics, that coincided with the same time in my life that I was like,

okay, my family, they're not the people who go to therapists, but I'm open to this. I want to see what this is about. And so I would go to one and I would say, oh my gosh, if that's how therapists are supposed to make me feel, that's a pretty crummy thing to do. in society. And then I was like, okay, well, maybe it was just that person. So wait a few years, try to find somebody else. And then I had a therapist who wasn't a therapist. She just called

herself a therapist. You know, she was the one that I came out to because she was, she was, she was someone who I thought I should be able to feel safe with. And instead, she tried to convince me that I wasn't that I wasn't who I was, you know. And that was weird because she was the person that I, that I trusted. She was the person that I thought I should be able to trust, you know. But it's only through those things that we say, oh, okay, that's what it means to not take things personally. That really everyone does have their own little agendas and they try to influence or they try to convert us with their various agendas, but we really have to identify, for instance, like, when we get excited about something, is it because, you know, is it, do we think that it's

going to bring us some, some gratification, or is it bringing gratification to more than just, you know, I? And again, I'm, you know, I feel like I'm, you know, I feel like I. maybe I'm, it's hard for me to just kind of be like, yay, everybody's joining the party now. Because like I was at the party and then nobody in again, now I realized that there should and shouldn't be anybody coming to any of our rescue. you. But I guess, you know, part of part of the message that I was that I had really distilled down and was going to focus on sharing before I realized that psychedelics were re-exploding is emergency preparedness. And not in the sense of just like having water and some, you know, cans of food.

But like, how are we really able to show up in the moment? And, you know, I'm not, I'm not like trying to sell anything. And so I'm not trying to cultivate, you know, a cult leader persona. If anything, I'm trying to raise people's awareness of how we start getting into groupthink, you know. And that that is where I, you know, when I felt the most connected to the world was when I felt that I was, existing in a psychedelic community. But that psychedelic community has exiled me, you know, has thrown me out. And not because as far as I can tell, I was exiled because I was providing drugs for

these people before, right? And these are these are things that maybe they're not really at issue in our current new paradigm. but there are a lot of people who made sacrifices and basically what they got was isolation. That was their gift. They were stigmatized by the DEA. And for those first seven years, I maintained connections to all of my old friends. But someone who helped me out, someone I didn't even know before I got in trouble, but someone who helped me out when I did get in trouble.

Eventually, I wasn't the person that they wanted me to be. And so they helped me find a place to live, and I lived there for two years, and then they had the power to make it easier, but instead they made it, they made it so that I had to leave where I was living. And that's what led into the seven years. So, you know, in 2015, I abruptly lost my housing. And I started, yeah, basically I wanted to avoid living with my parents because I had lived with my parents a few years before that.

And so I started living in my car for a number of months. And that was kind of the, you know, now I understand why, homelessness is so stigmatized because it really was I told myself stories about how I was like, you know, going to San Francisco to live there and eventually I ended up renting a place

in the East Bay. But I lost all of my friends after that. And it wasn't because they were, they weren't judging me for being homeless. They were, my energy changed. You know, and it's really, it's made it, it's made it challenging

to exist. It's made it challenging to interact and, you know, it's like I kind of do understand Homer a little bit more now. What do you think the relationship, when we talk about stigma, what do you think the relationship between stigma and shame is? That's a great question. That's, I mean, that's actually, so the seven-year timer, kind of, you know, what I realized soon after the natter was, was that shame had really taken over my thinking. Yeah. And 2018 was a real, was a real pivotal year for me, and I'm sure for a lot of other people, too. but shame taking shame head on and that that was that's that's the that was the pivot so you know but you can address your own shame and it seems like it follows you know stigma so it's more than just

addressing the shame i think or at least that's only the beginning i'm really excited that the veterans that there are so many people in the in the you know the community of folks that are talking about helping the veterans heal because those folks as much as the people who've been arrested for for drug related crimes the PTSD that that people experienced in, you know, inactive service, even if it's a relatively safe or, you know, relatively uncomplicated period of homelessness. You know, like eventually I got enough money that I could, that I could make rent.

Eventually I was able to get another job, which I kind of call, you know, jumping out of the flames and into the frying pan. Right. So, yeah, I mean, part of why I started posting on LinkedIn so much was really as a new phase of my own, my own healing because I'd become so afraid, you know, of really communicating and being open that I,

I wasn't even able to really have conversations during interviews and whatnot. So, yeah, my, my, my functioning has improved quite a bit. Apparently it's been a year since I started really hosting on LinkedIn. It feels like two years. Right. Yeah, I bring it up. I was recently reading a book. Doc Askins has written, he's a veteran, and he's written a really cool book.

And in that book, he tells a story where he had done a ketamine treatment. But he relived this experience where he was in the Middle East and a woman had broken, had, you know, they're trained that if someone comes and they're all covered up, regardless if they get past a certain spot, you have to look at them as a threat because there's been all these people that come in and they'll pretend to be carrying a baby and it'll be a bomb.

And so he's up on this tower and he's looking down and he sees this woman come in. And he's like, oh my gosh, here comes this woman and she walked past these guys. Why didn't they do anything? And he realized that he's like the last person in line. And he's looking through his scope and he sees, okay, this is not a man.

And this is not like, this is not someone that is coming through that appears to have all the things that I was told about as a terrorist. It looks like it's a, it's a woman holding a baby right here. And as he looks through his scope, he makes out, yeah, it's, it's, I don't know what it is. He's confused, but his training kicks in. And he's like, this is the protocol. I have to shoot. And he does. And it turns out it was a woman coming in and she wasn't holding a baby.

She was actually carrying an explosive. and like he relives this trauma through a ketamine experience that he talks about in the book. And when I'm reading that story and he's recounting it in such a way that it's so heartbreaking and he just is a really good job of describing it. But what comes to is this shame of like, I'm going to kill this other person because I'm told to

and how do you deal with that? And on some level, it echoes to the story you talk about being cast aside or being homeless or anytime any of us, all of us have stories of shame. that we're not proud of and we carry it with us. It may not be killing someone in war or it may not be going through what you went through where you define crawling back into society. But this level of shame that we have, we all carry with us.

It's like this giant cloud that overhangs us. But I'm so, thanks for talking about it because I think it's, it helps people to understand they're not alone in their shame. And that's enough sometimes to help people stand a little tall or put their shoulders back a little bit and be like, you know what? I'm not going to crawl back into society. I'm going to hold my head up and bring my story and share it with people. Okay, so I really appreciate that.

Yeah, I mean, that's really what I thought when I, I mean, I wasn't looking to share a story. I was looking to just get my life back together when I was first arrested. But I did it, you know, keeping my head high was a priority. That's just kind of like, but you know, I want to say, and I think that this helps me see what to, you know, how to describe how these two periods were different. The first 14 years and the second 14 years. The first 14 with lots of candy flipping in the last 14 with virtually none. So what I see now is that in a lot of ways, the first 14 years and then the first seven of this last 14 was,

not always being aware of my inner strength, you know, not being aware of that inner strength. And that I became, I became a little bit too dependent on the MDMA and LSD to give myself a chance to develop my inner strength. So then in a lot of ways those first seven years were developing the inner strength, but still thinking that there was going to be a magical day that everything was, oh, things are, and actually believe it, believe that it can happen because it really did eventually happen, where I had a day where I was like, this is that feeling that I was

always thinking that could happen of waking up one day, you know, and it wasn't like, oh, yesterday was bad and today. It's more like, oh, yeah, over the last three years on this, on this anniversary, I can feel how over the last three years was the waking up of, you know, of not having really any ongoing anxiety. but that's not psychedelics did not do that okay so that's what I'm trying to like I think one of the and you're helping me so much in just finding what the big messages are that I even have to share right but one of them is it's just a beginning and that really we really do have to start changing what's around us if we're going to be able to do what I think is the ultimate vision which is having a society

that when you do the trust fall, you don't have to know who's behind you ever, but you know that you're going to be caught. I mean, that's the vision of society that I'm looking to build. I mean, I want to cry. Like, maybe the answer to shame is trust, right? But then the opposite of that, you know,

so that's why I got, I started getting into dichotomies. Okay. Because I, for, I always was looking for, for the one answer. Okay. And then I started realizing that, nope, it was never one answer.

It was actually the answer is somewhere between two or three things. So that's, so if you ask me what's the one thing and, you know, is it trust or is it, or, you know, is trust the antidote? maybe it's self-trust because we really do have to put ourselves and be challenged in order to grow where we get back to the place where we're like, okay, we were challenged,

but now we know how to get through the challenge. Unfortunately, for me, I think that I was the kind of, one of the wrong ideas that I deeply held as a child and as a young adult and as a 20-something and as a 30-something person. Okay.

So 42 was like the beginning of the answer. 46 and 47 are also part of the answer for me. Right. So in the last, I lost my little thing that I wanted to share there, but we were talking about self-trust. Well, it's flow psychology. And that's, I'd say, if people wanted to have some of the success of psychedelics without having to take anything

or without having to think that there is something outside of us, because that was always the thing about psychedelics that kind of bothered me. I was like, okay, these are powerful, but now I do feel dependent on these. Like I don't want to move away from my dance community. Right. And now I see that. really there's the simple oh yeah we were talking about things it's usually not one thing or two things all right yeah it's not one thing but rather using a dichotomy or using two things right

and thinking about that space so um to do trust oh this is going to be good one this is going to be good i'm sorry that this is uh but it is worth it so i'm just going to take moment. Yeah. Just pause. Take a time. So what I'm talking around right now is like what if there's one or two things that I did kind of have a little bit off and what I feel is different about the last, the perspective

from the last few years is being more comfortable with with irony, with dichotomy, with with that space in between language. Because I think that that is where, not the reality in words, not the samsara or the illusion part of it, but, you know, what really is, which it's a big question, right?

But if you want to get a taste of what psychedelics might show you or might help you see more, flow psychology, I think is that answer. And here's how I explain flow psychology. Okay. So flow is about,

so flow is the experience that people sometimes experience in sports. Or some people experience it with making art or with music. Actually, sketching or doodling is probably one of the most familiar ways for anybody to find flow. And it's where you find this perfect balance between your challenge and capability. Okay. So we can play with, we can actually play with the quality of our life by being aware and then either playing with the challenge or our capability. So there's some simple things that follow from this.

So if you're stressed, if you're overwhelmed, one way that we can do is just refactor what we think we're supposed to do in that moment. Okay. So if we cut it in half and we can check in again, okay, how does, do we still feel as overwhelmed if we just see that, okay, I'm going to do half now and half later? Okay. If that's not enough, then maybe you need to, you know, cut it in smaller chunks. The other part is if we're not, if we're on the opposite of overwhelmed, right, if we're actually, we might be a little bored. What that means is either our preparations too much or our challenge isn't big enough. And so that's why I've really, I've really homed in on for myself.

and if other people feel so inclined to be supported, helping people identify what is the largest challenge that they feel excited by. Because for myself, what I see, you know, healing myself was a knowable challenge, but it actually wasn't big enough for me. But that's okay that I didn't have that challenge then. Now I do.

Yeah, I was talking with someone yesterday, and we were talking about the obstacles and the challenges that we went through our life and the tragedies and the traumas. And I came up with this idea that, you know, maybe all these demons and these tragedies and these things that we face, they're a way of us helping out a future version of ourselves go through it quicker and less painlessly. You know what I mean by that? That's great. I think so, right? Like, if you look at your life like that, like, wow, this was really. crazy. But the fact that I can come through it, maybe the story I tell today helps a younger version of me in the future identify with it five days early, a year earlier, two years earlier.

And like, you know how much of a gift that is? Like, that's a gift to yourself, like your future self. You know what I mean? Like, it's kind of beautiful, right? It is beautiful. Yeah, I think that's a good analogy for just how life we encounter a lot of closed doors. Like, why are these doors closed? Right? And I mean, for a long, a lot of times I told myself that I wasn't expecting anything from anybody. But then when I would get when I would find a closed door, I would take it personally. Right.

And that's natural. We should. We should actually. I mean, one thing is just to acknowledge, oh, I felt a thing. Yeah. Okay. You know, what does it mean? Do I want to, do I want, and also mindfulness of, oh, do I want to spend all my time thinking about what this means?

Or do I just want to get back to what I want to be doing. Good point. I do that. I spend a lot of the time thinking. I feel like to pull myself out of that because I'll just think about it nonstop. Just be in my own head. Like, why did that happen? Happen this?

You know what it is? That. No, it's this. Just get stuck in there. You know, also with this, this always reminds me of the Jesus footprints. Mm. Yeah. You know, because that was how that was always coming from a Judeo-Christian kind of culture around me.

You know, some ant or something had a little plaque, you know. Sure. You see like either one or two sets of, where there's like one person and another set of footprints or something really cheesy. Right. But I started thinking about that. And now I would kind of consider myself just an agnostic. spiritual materialist

or material spiritualist. And so the, oh darn it. Yeah. Sometimes when you fly too high, you know. You burn by the sun. Your wings melt. Sorry.

No, it's okay. We were just talking about the ideas of like the footprint. So, you know, there's, So I experienced this, you know, for many years where I was like, okay, I know I really shouldn't be expecting anything. So why does it hurt so bad to keep getting these closed doors? And like sometimes it feels like doors slamming.

You know, it's like. Yeah. And, you know, it's like, okay, I feel like I'm getting more sensitive to this stuff. Like this, that's kind of sucks that it's like I'm doing it more. I'm telling myself, this is the thing to do. Pound on this door or maybe not pound, you know, knock nicely. The secret knock. Yeah.

That one. Right. So then you're like, okay, I know I'm not supposed to be taking this personally, but then why does it, why does it hurt so bad? You know? And what shifted? What really shifted? I mean, for one thing, I realized that I just wasn't getting. enough of other things that I needed and that I had really and that's I I appreciate you posting

that medium article because the inspiration for that article of start you know aim low yeah is that my whole life I was just picking the hardest goal that I could and when I couldn't do it in a day I was like well now I have a great reason to hate myself and and then at some point you know you're like oh well i'm loving myself in all these ways why can't i just love myself so that i feel a certain way and it's like well then you're not you know it's and that's where language is is both a help but a hindrance because we can get caught up in the language and it's a necessary tool but we can get over caught up in the language sometimes and then for me and it's like what i needed to do was I needed to go through a year, which was 2018, where I basically cried most days.

And why? No good reason. Okay. I mean, that's the conclusion that I came to about eight months in was that, okay, my body feels like doing this, but then at some point my mind's like, okay, okay mind or okay body. We're going to keep letting you cry as much as you want, but we also see that there may be some other things to do in life. And it's a weird situation. It's also a situation I realized of a pretty intense privilege because I realize that not everybody gets to let their life fall apart

to an extent where they can let themselves do this. But by holding myself back from that, I wasn't getting to the point where I was like, okay, your body, my body. It has a lot of, it wants to emote. It, you know, it's, you know, maybe processing stuff since, you know, one month old, six months old, who knows.

But now this other part of our awareness, is ready to not tell that crying part to stop, but just say, you know, we're open to something else. And part of why I speak so openly about all this stuff is that I don't really know what is going to make a connection for someone else. And I'm still at the point where I'm kind of excavating all of this stuff. So, you know I think a lot of people are

And you know, when When I hear the ideas of unrealistic expectations, I think that it's almost a plague in our society. If you just, you know, I was born in San Diego where, you know, and I didn't realize this until I moved to Hawaii, but there's just this almost pornographic bombardment of advertisements everywhere,

this billboards and television and radio and look at it like this person. You got to have this car. You got to have the, like, there's just, it's overwhelming. It's unfair and it's ridiculous in some ways. And in some ways, it conditions us to have these unrealistic expectations of what our life is supposed to be. How can you ever be happy?

Like, you don't have that. You're not this person. You're not famous. You didn't make a million dollars. You're not a pro. What's wrong with you? Like, if you don't have this gloriful world filled with Specter, then you're nothing. And it's not like a, it's, it's not like a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

It's either it's back to the dichotomies. Either you are or you're nothing. And that is such an overwhelming sensation for people to deal with. And we get to a stage in our life where we go, holy crap, I'm not going to make it. I lied to myself for the last 40 years. I thought I was supposed to be a billionaire by now. How come I am not that? Well, it must be me.

I must be the problem. I'm a horrible person. I should just end it right now. And like that, it's not just you. It's me. It's everybody. And we're waking up to this. We're finally coming to the conclusion.

like, wait a minute. I played a part. Okay, I'll take my part. I'll play a part in that. I'll be sad. I'll cry about it a little bit. But guess what? It's not all my fault.

Look what these people look like, look what's happening to us. And I think that that's the collective understanding of healing moving forward. We are so much better than this. And we are, we are the people that have this privilege. All of us, we should be doing a way better job. There's people that look up to us. All of us.

There's people that count on us. There's people that need. us to be the very best versions of ourselves. And I think that's what's happening, not only in this conversation, but with psychedelics, with the people waking up to them like, wait a minute, we're way better than this. And I see it's fractal. I see it in your story. It echoes my story. And this ideas of unrealist expectations are something that should be shattered. Like, we're pretty impressive. What we're just being here right now. And I hope people can understand that once you realize that maybe you may have some unrealist expectations, if you're just being here,

frees you up to become the best version of yourselves because you no one's going to be that level no one can be that level but you can be the best version of yourself i like that i think letting having structures and processes in society where we can safely collapse you know we can safely break and restart our lives because i kind of always you know a lot of times you start out doing something hard, like say a long hike or a, you know, a strenuous hike. And you know it's going to be hard at some point. Yeah. So you, when, you know, you're in the middle of the hike and you're having the, you're having the challenge, but you know how long it's going to be and you know that it's going to be over at some point. Right. Right. So, you know, I think that I knew that it was going to

be hard 14 years ago, but I didn't know, you know, it's hard when we don't know how long it's going to take. Yeah. And a lot of times, you know, we do hear in society in our life, we hear a lot of encouragement that you're going to make it. And those are coming from people who had challenges. You know, my relationship with my mom is one that is part of my deep healing work. You know, know so i bring i bring her up from time time um with the the healing work that we do with ourselves but that that relate to you know the people that we learned are some of our first relating patterns you know with that object theory stuff um so i i'm talking around right now like how people can be encouraged when healing takes a long time

And, you know, so one of the positive things about psychedelics is that it gives you a sense that progress is starting. So, well, yeah, so that's a positive, that's a positive thing. Like, definitely not saying there's anything but positivity in there. But there can almost be the, and for someone like myself who I really, I like starting the new project, right? I have a harder time finishing the project, you know. So, you know, starting lots of projects, always kind of following the shiny thing. But, you know, if we're on a healing path and we're excited now that,

oh, there's a sense of movement, like where there hadn't been. But that's just the beginning. And I think that for me, I kind of, has stretched out the beginning because, you know, about 14 years, raving, lots of growth, lots of things happening, but not enough where, and again, it's like our society, we get this impression that we're supposed to almost be these fully, fully realized beings. And his children and his kids, you know, even as young adults, we get all these messages, oh, you've got to, you got to have your stuff sharp and polished.

And, you know, basically if you ever want a chance, you know, it has to be right on from the beginning, right? And the reality is that we get to restart our lives many times. Yeah. Just not in the not in the way that looks good for all the Romans. Mm-hmm. Right. But then, you know, that's where we got we get our salt of the earthness, you know. So, let's see, talking around, you know, how it's going to feel, I mean, for me, it just, it felt until I found my family again, the family that I live with now, my two roommates, I realized before that I wasn't really, or, you know, I guess that that was the latest keystone was finding this familial support where people who's,

values aligned with mine and also what we have what we had to offer and what we could receive from each other also matched up and now in this context you know it's been it's been I guess it's almost been four years but you know I went from kind of just like always shaking right and nervous and now i'm much more aligned with this of kind of you know my emotional sensing and my cognitive sensing of things is lined up more now and yeah it's you know it's a very it's a very weird and circuitous route that definitely took me through linkedin world and that interacting with people there and kind of like having this having this like intense curiosity about what was going on and a little bit like,

ah, what's going on? The engaging in that fear is I think knowing that there was support there and that I can turn it off when I need to. That's, you know, I think that that's part of what raving was about for me was the carrot, psychedelics being the carrot to get me into these social situations that I need. otherwise wouldn't have participated in. And sometimes it was a little much. And sometimes we were put through these experiences that turn into lessons or turn

into, you know, the like fabric of our lives. So the fact that I have experienced this sense of social exile, it helps me be more connected to others that, you know, have been, excluded and it also helps me tune into the conversation of okay well how do we create belonging you know how do we create not in some kind of like oh we're trying to engineer this experience for someone but oh how do we create conditions for life how do we can create conditions where people that have been conditioned to compete with each other all their lives can actually cooperate. That's a big question. You know, is that part of the, some people like to think that

the competition is part of the operating system. And maybe it is on a bigger scale, but maybe we can compete more effectively together, instead of competing against one another. Maybe we compete together. You know what I mean like that? Like maybe, you know, they say that there's like this saying that says small-minded people talk about people, you know, people who are really beginning to understand what life's all about. They talk about ideas. And a lot of the times, new ideas are built on old foundations. So maybe we need to redefine our idea of competition.

Maybe our ideas of competition should be all of us working towards a bigger thing. And that kind of feeds into the article that you put out, right? Like, maybe we should have a bigger goal that we can all participate in instead of just a few people. Okay, so this, I think this is an awesome analogy in frame because, gamification is something that we're all thinking about more and even set up for ourselves in some cases right and we can start using these analogies of a game and it really helps us very you know very quickly kind of home in on some of the dynamics here so you know we can talk about history um as you know ideas and people genes we can talk about you know how what's really beautiful about humans is that we can both

we can both intermingle and we can like create boundaries and sometimes we dissolve these as quickly as we erect them you know so we really do need to start talking about what the game is that we are playing on planet earth and whether we want to play a zero-sum game,

which that's kind of more aligned with an extractive paradigm of production versus a regenerative paradigm, where this idea that there are patterns in the universe that can be regenerated. And fortunately, food is one of those things. So we don't have to look very hard to find a real example of a regenerative economy in how regenerative economies work.

So this is actually really great because once we start talking about extract the role and the importance of extractive industries in today's economy, and we think about the role of regenerative industries and economics, and really psychedelics, they're at a very interesting place because they can be made from petrochemicals using the pharmaceutical chemical organic synthesis model, or they can be grown in plants, or they can even be made with biotechnology. So we're talking about being at this place where we seem to have these options. We seem to have a number of options that weren't available in the past,

you know, before the edge of petrochemicals, we only had plants. That doesn't sound super convenient because if you wanted to make a bunch in a way that didn't rely on a plant, you were out of luck. But luckily today we have ways of making chemicals in pretty much any scale that we can, you know, set our minds to. And we have just on the horizon the ability to cut some DNA up, maybe make some improvements to the enzyme that that DNA makes. And we can start looking at moving towards economic production of some of these compounds in a way that it wouldn't make sense to scale this up through agriculture necessarily.

Let me kind of paint this picture. This helps to explain some of the first IP that in theory, the startups I've been working on has secured. So let's say that we wanted to make some MDMA now, and we were able to get some of the starting ingredient called Sapprol from a from a source in Southeast Asia, a plantation that was set up to grow this, okay? Fair enough. So we've made, we've made, you know, 200 kilograms of MDMA for our clinical trial. Okay. But now the word is that we need, we need another 200 kilograms, and then we need another 200 kilograms.

So we call up the farm and we're like, hey, we know we bought you out last year, but, you know, We know that your trees grow and everything. So we need to double our order, though. They're going to say either they're going to say, oh, well, we happen to have this plantation down the street that we also, you know, work with. And so we got you. Or, no, sorry, if you want that, we're going to have to plant a bunch more trees. Right. And that's going to take 10 to 15 years to do more of this, right?

Now, people today, they say, oh, well, no worry. we have this other molecule that we don't have to take from agriculture. Okay. So where the technology that I was originally leading the launch of my company with, where the sweet spot for that is is when you know that you have one molecule that you want to grow a lot of this year, but you're not sure how much you want to make next year, but you know that you want to make more.

And you don't have that time. You're anticipating, right, that in a couple years, right, because it takes a couple years to make these things, but it's not going to be 10 years of planting a plantation of new saffrol producing trees, but we're going to spend a couple years making a microorganism that now when people say,

okay, we need that 200 kilograms, we need that 400 kilograms. We have that strain ready that we can put in a fermenter, kind of like the home brewing people. And we're not imagining having, you know, I'm not imagining that people are going to be doing this at home initially, or that there's going to be microbreweries everywhere where places are making their own MDMA. Not in the first 10 years.

Right. in the second 10 years. The first 10 years, we have bioregional essential medicine production. And, you know, so part of why I talk about essential medicines now is that making bio-based MDMA, having a cell, like, say, a yeast that would make MDMA. That was my 1999. Thesis. Yeah, more idea.

Okay. You know, I was at this. a really cool event outside of Melbourne, Australia, called Earth Dance. And it was really cool because it was in nature, but then they had good lighting too. Where, you know, some of the home zone events were more like under the full moon, no lights, no strobes, no, you know, DJ, just the music. And that's how we do our events now that I do. So, but getting back to the present moment.

So, with the cells, with the cells, with the engineering that we've just patented, what that enables is more than just a single molecule. So, you know, the 1990 vision was, wouldn't it be cool to, you know, feed, feed microorganisms sugar and out outcomes a finished molecule. And when I was looking at, well, for one thing, the psychedelic VCs weren't interested in bio-MDMA. They were not interested in sustainability. They're like, we kind of know what we're looking for,

which is businesses in the pharmaceutical model. and it's not even on our radars that, you know, we don't think that people are going to care about the sustainability of their drugs anytime soon is what that thesis, you know, what the investor's thesis, you know, what I was hearing there. So at this point, there's kind of a fork in the road. I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to have a psychedelic company and now I realize that there's just no way to get away from psychedelics, at least for me. Yeah, I'm with you.

So we're still talk about essential medicines and the kind of interesting overlap that psychedelics and essential medicines actually have some substantial overlap in that ketamine is both a psychedelic and an essential medicine for its anesthetic qualities. It's one of the safest anesthetics there are is pretty much what's what's been clear since 1970 when it was first approved by the FDA. And this part probably people have talked about, you know, before I kind of came back. So, Besides ketamine, we also have molecules like epinephrine, which, you know, I'm not, I don't have my sketchpad out.

But when you start looking at some of these molecules, it's only a couple of bond changes between something like epinephrine and something like psychedelic stimulants. and even MDMA. And one of the one of the theses that I'm, you know, one of the ideas that I'm really trying to share with people is that there's this idea of,

you know, like obviously as life forms, you know, we're individuals. But what we see is that And actually it's systems biologists that have come up with this. But what they found was that metabolisms in the environment don't really make sense unless we consider the metabolisms of the plants that we eat. Right. And ourselves and the fungi as one super organism. Right.

And so one of the kind of twisted things about addiction and drug criminalization is that you can rationalize, especially considering the historical evidence that cannabinoids have been used into prehistory. I mean, basically it's pretty clear that humans have been using cannabinoids before we were writing things down. in before we had language. And if you think that, I mean, if you, if you think about the fact that cannabinoids grow naturally all over the places that humans came from

and that humans have been developing and finding their homes in, it makes sense that we would find these things in our environment that our biology said, oh, you know what? This is a little bit too, much to keep inside the animal organism. So let's leave it in the plant organism. And when the animal organism needs it, the animal that can move, because that's what's unique about animals versus

fungi or plants is that animals can move around. Now, I hope that this might potentially not blow your mind so much that this ends our podcast. but it's kind of interesting when we think about, okay, so animals and fungi are more related in some ways than they are to plants. Right. So when we start looking at some of the molecules that allow animals to move and fungi to grow through their food, we can trace back this lineage to these molecules. that are related both from the fungi side and from the from the animal side so when we you know when I start to look at you know if like if you'll allow us to go into a

very you know kind of fluttery metaphysical question for a second you know where is I where is consciousness and then where is the loci of control because there's kind of like the part of us that sees and then there's the part that acts on what we think we see okay so there are you know there are when we look at lots of different kinds of organisms like I my master's degree is in microbial physiology basically and so what that's looking at is how do how do microbes live? How do single cells live? And what's interesting is we have these species that, okay, so we have species one and species two. And they both have a lot of some of the same central cellular machinery,

metabolic machinery. So then we have this other organism. And so we have these two that are, more similar. We have this third one that just happens to be a little related to one of them. Okay, so we have these very highly related ones, and then we have one that's a little bit related to one of them. Okay. So we see that in the ones that have more similarity, they're obviously a lot more similar. Right? Right. And then in this other way where they have some DNA that's related, they have less similarity, but some similarity still.

So why I'm, you know, what I'm trying to conjure with this, with this analogy or situation is that, you know, we think of ourselves as like, oh, I am I. Like, I am this body. But if we start kind of considering a transpersonal perspective, and we're like, okay, well, I understand that there is, is this thing called consciousness and that consciousness seems to be coming out of this body and feeding into this awareness that I call I.

Okay, that is the seeing, the seeing has this relationship with the thing that can do, which I'll just say the body is the thing that can do, because it's, because it has the as the pinchers. Right. And it also can do the seeing, but then there's this part of us that is not, it is the part that feels the hurt,

but it's not the part that really can be hurt. And maybe that's, maybe that's what I was trying to describe earlier, is that in the last year or two, I started realizing that there is the body self. And then, there is that part of ourselves that really can't be touched by what happens except through how we process and perceive it.

I don't know. This gets into the out on the lens and where nobody really, you know, it's one thing to have philosophy in a book, but it's a different thing for two people. to be talking about, you know, what their ideas are and what they've seen. It's exciting. It's beautiful. You know, how do you talk about how that part of us that is kind of the part that feels the pain but doesn't get hurt? Well, I think you're doing it. On some level, I think it's, it's.

it's difficult because we don't have the language to describe it. It's only emerging in us now. When I see the plants, I see the molecules and plants like as exogenous neurotransmitters. And that helps us understand that, okay, we're not I. I is the planet. Like, we're part of it. You don't come into this. You don't come into this.

You don't come into this. You come out of it. And I always say that the earth grows people like an apple tree grows apples. And when you begin to see that, like all the frames. The same work begins to fall away, these ideas of Darwin is. These ideas that we, the people built their lives on hundreds of years ago. They're all bullshit. Sorry.

Doesn't work. But that's really hard for people that have been alive for 50 or 60 years to let go of. That's everything to them. So much of our world is built on this. Think of it like this. We are a rocket and we are moving into space and the scaffolding is falling away. That's very frightening for a lot of people. We now have, and it was all necessary.

I'm not saying they're bad people. It was necessary. We needed that. And I'm thankful we have it. But it's important to understand where we are. You're right. Like this idea of trans that's moving through the world. Like we are transmutating.

It's transgressions. Just the word trans is in the lexicon right now is a sign of what's happening in the world. There's transformation happening. You could see it all around you if you use the eye that you're given. however you want to define that. You know what I mean? So it is. We're discussing a new, people are going to freak out, but it's a new spirituality.

It's a new religion. And I mean that in the whole of the world, religion, like the wholeness, holistic. So it's scary. People run from it, but it's happened. And right now, and it's really exciting. I'm stoked to be on the forefront of it talking to you. I hope people understand it because it's beautiful. Yeah, I mean, Terrence McKenna, I,

you know, I really appreciate the kinds of messages that he's put out there as far as we're exactly where we need to be. And if it ever doesn't seem that way, that's an interesting moment. You know, if you ever feel like you're not where things should be, pay attention to that as much as when you feel like things are happening the way they should. I guess another way of saying that is that the like the imperfection is part of the perfection. Yeah. Back to dichotomies.

Totally. Totally. So I'm curious, you know, do you feel like, what do you think is like the big challenge for the space today? For psychedelics as a space? Yeah. I think that the biggest challenge is is moving away from scarcity. And I think that the language, a lot of it is, it's a false scarcity. And if you look at the language around psychedelics about healing and trauma,

that's all meant to keep psychedelics in its own little cage over here. Okay, you can talk about it and we can work on patents and stuff, but it's only for the fragile. It's only for this trauma over here, okay? Don't talk about it as, you know, we use trauma, but, you know, you could, you could say optimization. And that opens up the door to everybody. And it takes away the stigma. And that gets me back to the idea of a Trojan horse.

Like, that's what I see. Like, it's too big to be caged up. It was caged up in the last wave. But this wave, like, we all, all of us who have taken mushrooms understand that the next wave is bigger than the last wave. We're working our way towards a peak here. And I often give people the idea, is it a way, I mean, is it a high tide or is it a tsunami? You know, I'm not quite sure, but I know that we haven't begun to peak yet. And this next wave is going to be higher than the last wave.

So I think that the thing we break through and the biggest problem in the space, and I hesitate to say the word problem, but I see the issue that is about to be shattered. The glass ceiling, if you want to say, is this idea of scarcity. I think we're moving towards abundance. And when you talked about it can be a chemical, we can have a, we can have a protein making. It can be synthesized. It can be implants. Hey, look, it's everywhere.

It's already in our brain. It's everywhere. And that means we have abundance. When we get out of the idea of scarcity, then we can really start working on some of the ideas that you and I were talking about, about real healing, about holding our shoulders back up and reintering society. You know, no more crawling back in society. Now it's time to walk in gracefully. And I think that that's where it comes from. It's this scarcity mindset that we've been plagued by.

What about you? What do you think it is? Well, I mean, I would like to just respond to that or add to that that the regenerative really has the potential of, you know, I think. So as we get into where scarcity, you know, where our notions of scarcity come from. Right. A lot of it, I think, comes from the intensity that comes from mining. You know, and I try, you know, I don't. Okay, so there were times that I had kind of sharper judgments for mining.

Now I, the way I look at it, you know, I'm very concerned about how we get through. through the next 25 to 50 years, not for the people who are alive, but for the people who will be alive after this. And there's definitely a lot of, you know, even today where I feel like things have calmed down somewhat, there's still a lot of polarization. And there's a lot of polar, or, you know,

the polarization is, I get that there are forces that are trying to strengthen the polarization sometimes. And I have to say that, you know, with my own eyes, I believe that certain aspects of the industries that benefit from mining, and that's mining and petrochemicals. They, you know, the power that extraction provides, you know, to do mining, to do mining, to do, minimal extraction powered by petroleum this convenient to mine energy so these things have worked together to kind of create this booster pack for society and what's interesting is that there are certain aspects of our society that have over-identified with their

occupation yes their industry with their because there is a culture of of mining and there is a culture of extraction in my family um you know working class people so i'm assuming other working class people from working class backgrounds can also relate to this that there are farmers and then there are the mechanics and the mechanics work at the you know work at the mines and the farmers um work at the farms or something related to farming, you know. So like there's not really an either or here, but what, you know, the message that I would like to send to people is, yes, the economy is a thing. The environment supports our economy, you know, so that, so economics is, if you will, in the picture I'm trying to paint, a part of,

the environment. It's just like the human. It's part of the environment that humans always have their little fingers on. Right. So people's concerns, people's concerns about, oh, well, you know, we have this idea about how the world works. And if you want to keep the world working this way, you need to, you need to listen to us that you've made it this way. So if you're trying to make it harder for us, then it's going to be harder for the world to keep being the way that you want. right so you know the extraction of minerals extraction of energy they're part of this whole community because why well you need all of these machines and you need all of this fuel to keep this thing going and so it's a nice it's a nice little um

companion system yeah yeah but what we kind of need to let people know is okay we still need you, right? Yeah. For a little bit here, but we need to totally think about doing mining in a different way. Okay, we need to think about doing mining so that basically we're thinking about our, oh, I know that the miners never want to think about this, but we need to think about the carbon footprint. We need to think about the impacts.

And the companies, they know the right words. So it's really just about getting the actions to line up with the words. and they may not feel like that's possible. And this brings us back to something we were talking about earlier. And that is, well, you were talking about crawling, you know, like, what's the alternative to crawling back? Well, you'd like to get on, you know, you'd like to come back to the city and, oh, I have my journal of all the things. And please come to my talk. Right.

But that's not what I found. instead they're like oh maybe you should take a shower and maybe you should just spend 10 or 20 years you know just kind of figuring out what life is really about to us in the big city because yeah you think you figured it out but not to us in the big city so why why does that happen well part and we're talking about you know this like young people don't even realize what it does take why because we have a society that is kind of so, there's a green thing crawling on me. The optics is such an important part of our culture.

So it's like, okay, we know that the sausage is made in the back, but we don't show you that. We show you our brand. Sausage, sausage farm, you know, brand. So we And I think more and more people are realizing this But we're still at a very I think dangerous way in our society that more and more people are Realizing that hey we need to normalize

That we need to normalize the making of the sausage more out in the open Even though it's going to offend a couple people right? And we need to normalize that okay. Yes, there's a time to make something that is really cool looking and And there's a time to be like, okay, that is just something that someone is making to make it look really cool. And there's a time where we say, okay, that is extremely impressive, but that does not get food grown. That does not get people sheltered. That does not get people clothed. That does not attend to the needs of human attention. And that's kind of how I see re-examining or, you know, refiltering how we might look at things,

is that if things really, you know, if things really get challenging, what I would hope we would have already laid some foundation for considering is, do we have food situated? you know like lots of other things can fall apart but do we have the food system secure from climate change and you know other kinds of changes um so yeah kind of dancing around you know on one hand addressing people's fears and how do we how do we do that when we have these you know very complicated systems and not necessarily a clear way on you know completely rebamping something. And I think that that's where it's time to bring spirituality back into our everyday lives so that we can see that regardless of our individual faith,

that there is this energy that we are all a part of. And that, you know, we may think that the solution is one way, but part of the, you know, spirit of translation and transformation, is that, oh, sometimes there is another way to break bread. You know, there's a different way to find shelter. There's a different way to do these things that use less energy so that we can save the special forms of energy that we have, because that's what petroleum is. Petroleum is a special form of energy that took millions of years to create.

that we might want to save around for a rainy day or save for when we really need the backup generators. Maybe you can help me understand this. On some way, I don't understand what we're doing. There's no shared value. There's no shared sacrifice. We're extracting just to extract. And when we ask, why are we extracting?

We're like, we need to extract. Like, what are we doing? Like, we're not making anything. We're not doing anything. We're just extracting for the sake of extracting. Like, what are we doing? We are. We're doing a lot.

But what is our awareness around this? Okay. So there's not an aware of a wholeness. And yet there's, so it's kind of the analogy I'm thinking about is someone's in an SUV. They got their oil rig on the back of their SUV, right? And so they're driving along and they have the. they have the little machine that makes the road in front of them. So every once in a while,

they have to put the well down and recharge the tanks so that they can keep paving the road in front of them. Right. So if we kind of take that kind of like weird SUV thing, that's industry today. Okay. So someone's in the driver's seat and they're like, well, we want to keep going forward. So we got to pave because that's what our machine does. Our machine paves in front of us and we know how to get the materials for our roads. And that's by, you know, piercing the planet and sucking up some of the good black stuff.

So what are we doing? We're doing what made sense like 400 years ago. Okay. And here's my quick thesis around. that. So do you know David Graber? I don't. It doesn't maybe you could refresh my memory.

He wrote debt. Okay. And he wrote the it's like the beginning of everything. It's not the exact title. But he was an anthropologist, really smart guy. He died a few years ago. You kind of get the

vibe about him. He was just like, I know I'm going to die early, so I just need to write these But here you go. This is everything that you'll need to know. See you on the other side. So his book about debt talks about the origins of private property. And private property made a lot of sense for a little bit there for some people. Yeah.

But now the new questions are, okay, how do we create an empowerment versus gatekeeping model? because what are some of the risks of gatekeeping? Well, that's where redlining came from, right? Where certain communities are for certain people and certain peoples are for other people. Like that, we know that that doesn't, that's not a good way in the long term. But we haven't really found, well, what's better?

What should we be thinking about? One way that I think we could think about it here in Los Angeles is we should be encouraging anywhere that has been built before, now gets to build up. You know, and that's where we have in certain places like LA, we have certain corridors that allow for more development. And, you know, they're around where the train lines are and whatnot, right? So why should we, why should we be hesitating about doing more development in wild places?

Well, because there's not that much of it left compared to when we got started on this project. and dichotomies. Like, I can't tell you where I would rather live in the city or the country. Like, why should we have to make a choice? You know? In the future, I'd like to imagine that people can sometimes work in cities and then sometimes they go out to the country to, you know, either be part of agricultural tourism.

You know, you work on the farm. where you usually get your food. And the people who work there, they have it sorted out so you don't get in their way too much. You know, but you are a real part of helping grow where your food comes from and seeing what it's like to live where there's way more nature than even in our cities that have, you know, cool green parks and whatnot. So that's part of, that's part of, you know, a potential way that we could focus development. And then, you know, it comes then for me, this little thing in the back of my head is saying,

well, okay, but some people are going to be saying that by providing these opportunities for people to live in the city and the country, that you're ruining people's lifestyles, people who only lived in the country. Well, okay, fine. Only live in the country if you want to. but few people who you know few people who are really integrated into the society into our society um i think would i guess what i'm saying is i think that there's a lot of um there's a lot of disingenuousness in you know the the kinds of things that we say are problems today

but a lot of the problems that get air time today are the ones like like you were pointing out, that are on the agendas of the venture capitalists, you know, are on the agendas of the biggest politicians. And what is the antidote? I mean, the antidote, I think, is just more conversations like this. And for us to think about the people who need a hand, who, you know, there's different ways that we can our boundaries you know I'm not saying that people have to give up all of themselves to make a change or to make you know the kind of changes that we that I think we really need to see but by using psychedelics as catalysts to really build up our

inner strength so what is that our inner strength is how well we perform when the world is falling apart hmm you know and And sometimes, I mean, for me, what I did for many years is I was able to keep, I, I mean, part of my challenge was that I was too good at keeping a poker face for too long, right? I was able to be the person who did not, you know, did not crumble. But I knew even then that it was having an impact on me. Now, a lot of times people will see that someone has started to do this work of, living more authentically and getting the not fun feedback that sometimes comes with living authentically. But then you have an opportunity to start to improve yourself in a way so that you're not acting from the act, but you're acting from your inner strength. and what I had to do was I had to basically,

I had to let all of the curtains fall. I had to let the opera house fall. I had to let all, you know, I had to let the whole city had to fall apart before we said, you know what, it wasn't about the city. It was about you and me. That's all we need is you and me. And maybe we don't need each other every day.

Okay? Like sometimes I need a little bit of, a space from you. But we're going to come back. We're going to find a way to come back. And so it isn't it isn't the curtains. It's not the stage. It's not the opera house. It's not the block that you know, it's not the restaurants around the opera house. It's not the bank. It's not it's not any of these things. But we, but we, we believe this as a society long enough that we, that the society thinks that it is about all these things. Society thinks that it is about our identities.

And so and then some people are saying, well, we don't think it should be about identities. Well, it's not about identities and it's not not about identities. It's about that identity has a place in the big picture for each of us and it's a little bit different for each of us. But you know, it's it's something else that we can't ignore. So almost it's almost. It's almost as though life is, yes, it's helping us, it is helping us see to take things less

personally, but it's also helping us see that, you know, it's, it's helping us see that it's, it is all of these things, but maybe just a couple of them at any particular time. Yeah. I think it speaks to the, I think it speaks to the idea of relationships, a relationship. relationships to each other, to the planet, to the things around us. And like you said, it's, for me, it may be this one thing for a little while. And maybe that's the world speaking to me. George, you need to work on this relationship to money.

George, you need to work on this relationship to objects. George, you need to work on this relationship to inner dialogue. You know, but I really think that if everything falls away, all you have left is your relationships. And I was speaking with a death doing. and not too long ago. And she was saying some incredible things about listening to the last words of the people that are dying. You know, and they're not talking about going to Costco or buying a Tesla.

You know, they're talking about things that matter. And that's their relationships to their loved ones. Their relationships to what they've done. It scares me to think about sometimes because I've been talking about death a lot a little bit. Maybe that's the world talking to me, you know? Relationships. Relating.

in relationship to relationship. Yeah, well put. So one of the things that really helped me, and you're helping me realize that this was, this was, you know, part of the same crucible, was when I said, oh, you know what? My emotions, I have to get some space with my emotions. And how do I do that?

what I realized was that I had to start thinking about my relationship to relationship. So everything, like the fact that you're, oh, relationship to friends, relationship with food, relationship. As we start to think about all of those, like what is similar, you know, like, how does, how does my relationship with food relate to my real, relationship with work and you know we start looking at all the cross connections and then it's then we start to realize i think that that is part of what consciousness is what we are yeah is we are we are the we are the things that can be aware of the relationship the meta relationship meta relationships.

Yeah. This is awesome. We're almost at three hours, my friend. It flies by when you start talking, right? Well, this has been amazing. I don't know where this leads, but I really appreciate you're taking this time with me. Vice versa.

Yeah. I foresee future conversations in the future and our relationship continues to move forward and talk about some issues. Maybe we'll bring some panels on and stuff like that. And before I let you go, though, where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about?

Woo. Okay, so people, the easiest way to find me is probably kayakirsch.substack and in theory, E-N-T-H-R-E-A-L-L-Substack. And if you're interested in a sustainability aware, people centering perspective on knowledge and wisdom, that's Prism 14. What's going on?

So helping people look at supply chains around molecules. So it definitely continues to be the focus, let's say, on the more professional side. And what's coming up? Well, if someone gives me some tickets, we'll see you out there on the playa. And besides that, you know, just really kind of, you know, just putting one. foot in front of the other as we spread awareness about the planetary transition and what we can start doing to make life a little bit easier for the people after us. Yeah, I like it. I'm excited for the future and I'm excited to have conversations like this. It helps, I think it helps, I know it

helps me organize the way in which I see the world and my thoughts and it brings perspective to my relationships. I'm truly grateful for all the conversations. I feel like I get to learn so much every day. So thank you for that. I'm going to talk to you real briefly afterwards, but to all the people out there, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Go down to the comments. Check out Kai's stuff. I hope you all enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. And that's all we got for today. I hope you have a beautiful weekend.