TrueLife - Ninian Dougall - Patterns, Passions, & Psychedelics

Episode Date: June 3, 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/https://nindougall.wixsite.com/psychedelicwellnessAs a BA honours graduate in Psychology with over 5 years of research experience and 2 years in the mental health field, I am excited to transition into the burgeoning field of psychedelics. My passion for mental health and wellbeing has led me to explore the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances and their integration into mainstream healthcare. With a strong background in research and a deep commitment to personal and professional growth, I am eager to connect with likeminded individuals and organizations in this field.At the core of my work lies my passion for promoting mental health and wellbeing. I believe in the power of human connection, and my goal is to help individuals overcome their personal struggles and achieve greater emotional resilience.I am committed to staying up-to-date with the latest developments in my field and am passionate about collaborating with likeminded individuals to further advance this emerging field. If you are interested in learning more about my work or would like to connect with me, please don't hesitate to reach out. I look forward to hearing from you! 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 is having a beautiful morning. I hope that you get to wake up next to someone you love. And I hope that you're surrounded by sunshine and birds singing. and I hope that you have something to look forward to, something to do, and someone to love.

I got a great guest for you day. Got a great show. Nin Dugal, a BA Honors graduate in psychology with over five years of research experience and two years in the mental health field. He's an individual who is passionate about mental health, well-being, and has recently begun to explore the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances and their integration into mainstream health care. He's also the recipient of multiple scholarships, such as the president's scholarship, as well as the Dr. Douglas Earl Alcorn Scholarship. He studied abnormal psychology. He has navigated his way around some interesting corporate structures that we were beginning to talk about.

Min, how are you today, my friend? I'm doing awesome. I'm so glad to be here. Thanks, George. Yeah, the pleasure's all mine. As we were getting started, I mentioned to you, and I want to mention to the audience. I spent a lot of time interviewing a lot of really interesting people, of which I think you're one. but you represent sort of a different demographic for me,

sort of a younger group coming up. And the world through your eyes is probably a lot different than it has been through my eyes or through the eyes of some of the people that I have spoken with. And so I want to kind of begin to touch on that a little bit. And I thought maybe the best way to do that was just to kind of open it up to you. And maybe you could tell us a bit of an origin story.

Like how did you get involved in psychology and mental health and well-being? And what led you to where you are today? Yeah, that's a great. question. It's so funny. As I've been starting a new position and stuff, I've been describing myself to people. And for some reason, I really struggle sometimes to give good definitions of who I think I am, but I like the origin story. So I grew up in the very west coast of Canada, the west, most southern part of Canada on Vancouver Island. Have you

heard of it? I've heard of it. It's beautiful. But I grew up in this small little town, called Sucke. I think there's about 12,000 people there growing up and it's kind of got like a Christian underlie to it and it would be very similar to kind of like Washington or Oregon in terms of the feel and stuff and so for me growing up I think one of the most significant life events that happened to me would be my parents got a divorce when they were when I was eight and of course, like any kid of that age, I think I started blaming myself. You know, at some level, I really thought that I had to do with it. I can remember I had this one memory of my parents were arguing in the kitchen.

And I came in. And I just remember running up and hugging both of them and being like, are you guys getting a divorce? And of course they said no, but they did end up getting a divorce. But why I think that was like a really important life event for me is because, because I think it started, it sparked in me some sort of understanding that there was like a relationship between them that didn't work well. You know, like, and as, I don't, I'm not sure how old I would have been at the time. I think eight or ten years old was in grade four. It was my first understanding, like, on a deeper, deeper way of like what it meant to have relationships with people and what kind of goes into that.

And I think that's that kind of helped me start seeing the world more in that way, in a very relational way and understanding connections between people. And I slowly started falling into this role in my friend groups as the person that people would come to to talk to. And I think it was grade eight. So maybe 12 or 13, 14, something like that. Like, I knew I wanted to be a psychologist. I was so dead set on it because.

And like every kid does at that age, I was like, I'm good at talking to people. Right. And so fast forward into high school, I played hockey and baseball. Like I probably would have been like the jock in the jock kind of group. And to be honest, coming from a small town who played hockey, which typically is quite a toxic sport, I developed a lot of toxic traits, a lot of toxic masculinity. a lot of misogyny, a lot of kind of racist undertones from just the environment that I was in. And it wasn't until I was in grade 12. I took a social justice course.

And I really started to understand, like, wow, like, I have all of these societal structures that have been imprinted on me in such a way that I now see the world in this biased way. and I go to university and and started taking, you know, I took psych, of course, but I was taking a lot of sociology as well in philosophy. And that's what I really started to unpack a lot of these harmful ways of being in the world. And simultaneously, this is when I started, I started using a lot of substance at this age. You know, the typical first year university student drinking a lot, using, I started using MDMA. lecybin, which is also kind of what started kick-starting me into more of the psychedelics realm.

Sure. While all this is happening, I think my parents' divorce had a very strong imprint on me in terms of how I was able to have relationships in the world, particularly with women, or romantic partners, I should say. and what ended up happening is I fell into these patterns of unhealthy toxic relationships where I would hyper fixate on the relationship. It was really unhealthy on and off. So I think we've all kind of been through that to some degree, or most of us, I should say. And what all the reason why I'm saying all of this is because all these different factors, what kept happening is it all came back to me and how I was being in the world, how I was behaving. and I started really understanding how my actions, my ingrained beliefs, my biases were causing me, resulting in me acting, putting myself out there in a certain way, which was then drawing certain things to me. And then we get into second year, just kind of, I decided I needed to stop using substances.

I wanted to really, I really wanted to put my foot down. And that's when I got into research. I started in a social sciences, a social psychology lab doing, it was actually so cool. It was called the IKEA study. Nice. And yeah, and so how it worked is we'd bring in a couple. And then they would be randomly assigned to one of two groups. It was either a very difficult IKEA bunk bed or a very easy IKEA bunk bed.

And we put them in a room with cameras and we just give them the instructions and tell them to build these bunk beds. and it was really interesting to see how different couples took different roles when building the bunk bed and depending on if it was like what genders they were how much I think we ended up terming it kind of like heterogeneate um oh I can't think of the word right now um heteronormativity and so if you had like a very heteronormative couple you know, you see the male would step up a little more and kind of like take the lead. But oftentimes if you had like two women, for example, it was more equally shared or it was, it was a, it was really interesting just to see how different couples and different people took different roles and how they communicated. But that led me into actually joining a neuroscience lab, a neuropsychology lab that studies primarily concussions in like sports related concussions.

And that's when I started getting deep, deep into research. And I did research, like, essentially, like, 365 days a year for three years following them. Which was, it was awesome. That's when I got, like, a few scholarships. I was able to do full-time research on, like, one of our, like, larger research projects. And that's the lab, actually, that ended up transitioning into looking at psilocybin for cognition, which is super cool. Super cool. But I digress for the moment. So third year university COVID hits. And that changed everything. Obviously, I mean, we go online. This caused me to have to move in with my partner at the time. And what that did in particular moving in with my partner was it really sort of highlighting these unhealthy behavioral patterns and unhealthy. cycles of unhealthy relationships.

And this went on until January, actually, of 2022 is when I finally broke up with her. And when we broke up, it sent me into a bit of a crisis, to be honest. Like, I, we had, we thought we were going to get married. We had this whole plan for our lives, which, you know, I told me understand. I'm just some young guy. We were young, but I truly believed it. Yeah, of course. And so I remember I broke up with her one night

by the next day, like she had moved all of her stuff out of the place. It was the first time in my life I'd lived alone. And I didn't really know what to do. But I knew that I was drawn to psychedelics. And so I decided on a whim to just join a psychedelic, a psychedelic, it's called the Vital Training Program. It's like a year-long psychedelic therapy program. And through that, I just had this complete spiritual awakening. I started listening to Rom Doss, and he just changed the way that I understood and,

and decided to be in the world, more, more with love. And that's when I really started unpacking my ego and all the, like, in such a deep, deep level that that is when I started truly challenging myself in my deeply ingrained ways of being and it's been you know about a year and a halfish now and the amount of change positive change and the in that amount of time it has been astronomical and it's interesting because I think when I now when I'm talking to people who I haven't seen since before that time, it's like I'm a completely different person. And that makes me feel really happy.

It makes me feel like I have really gone deep and challenged myself to be a better person in the world. And that, I think, is now starting to translate into the work I do. And now I feel like I've done work on myself enough to the point where I'm able to start looking outwards more and seeing how I can make it use the work that I've done on myself to be able to help other people. Yeah, that's an awesome story, man. I appreciate you sharing that. It's always fascinating to me to hear a story of transformation and the courage it takes.

And it's it never surprises me that these, journeys begin with a sort of tragedy of sorts, whether it's a loss of love, it's a breakup of some parents, you know, but just in that story alone, I can see the patterns of, of a failed relationships and like, how could you have a working relationship if the model that you had was broken? You know, like, and then that kind of brings us into this idea of generational trauma. Like, your parents probably had a model that was faulty on some level and probably even their parents and I'm always excited to hear someone who begins to break the chains because when you do that, it's like you stop the process of generational trauma, at least put a halt to it.

And, you know, especially before you have kids or before you can really become the best version of yourself, you have to do what you did. You have to take a real honest look at yourself and be like, you know what? I got some things I got to work on. And that's really tough to do, man. It's real easy just to be on autopilot and cruise and blame everybody else and get this job that other people have and move yourself into this little box that society is made for you. And then you can live a mediocre life forever. Totally.

And you know what? Like what was particularly hard for me, I think, too, was I'd always see myself as a helper. I'd always see myself as someone who could be there for other people. and part of looking at myself was understanding that like a lot of my patterns were hurtful, that I was hurting people, that I wasn't helping people, that I was hurting myself and the people I loved. And what that was, what that meant is it shattered my belief of who I was and who I thought I was and what I wanted to be. And I had to kind of go into that, you know, I had to reinvent how I saw myself in a and it had to be genuine you know I couldn't I couldn't do it for show like it was like wow no like I am being a shitty person final not like there's no reasons there's no excuses like I had to like you know what I mean really I do and be okay with putting that out there in a way and having people some people believe that because that's the

that was the truth, you know. That was, I think, one of the hardest parts to me was really coming to terms with destroying my very egocentric kind of thought of what I was and who I was in the world. Yeah, it's a real problem. It's this idea that we're not enough. It's this idea that life has unfolded in a way. And we just pretend it's our, on some level, we blame ourselves and in blaming ourselves, we lash out at other people because one thing I've

learned is that the way you treat yourself is the way you treat other people. And if you're happy all day long and you put out this exterior like you want to help and you probably do, but inside you're resentful, like that resentment shows up sometimes and it hurts the people closest to you. Like you hold on to these daggers and it's when they're not looking, you stabbing, just knife them. You know, and then it's so crazy. Yeah, I got you. you feel horrible about it. What the fuck am I doing? Why would I do that?

That's so mean. Or the worst is when you just look at someone and you can see in their eyes that you heard them and you're like, yeah. Oh, man, that was a horrible, horrible thing, George. Why would you do that? I'm not sure about you, but one thing that added to the difficulty that I'm still so, like, working on every day is I'm so quick to want to fix things, right? Like, I see that I hurt someone and I'm like, oh, I want to fix it.

I want to fix it, but like that's not it either. That makes it worse in a lot of ways because, at least in my experience, the people closest to me, they just want to be seen and heard and held. They don't want me to fix anything, you know? And as soon as I try to fix, it makes it worse and that I get mad when it doesn't work. And yeah, it's just a, that's part of the cycle. It is. One thing that I've noticed about that is when you feel that, what you're really saying is I want

to fix myself because they have, they have. have showed you your fault, whether it was something they said, whether it was you are reminded of yourself in an action they did. And that thing of, I want to fix that is your brain saying, hey, I recognize that problem in me. I want to fix me. And you think by fixing them, you'll will, but you won't, you know. Yeah. And it's just kind of a narcissistic, totally. Selfish action. Totally. But it can be used as a really good tool because once you know that, you can be like, oh, I'm weak enough. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I got to work on me. Like, I'm sorry. Like, I'm just going to like breathe. I'm going to like center myself in this moment and just like be present.

At least that's what I try. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's good. Or make a mental note of whatever it was that like triggered your whatever it was about that person. Just file that away. If you can't write it down and then, you know, when you go home by yourself later, be like, okay, what was it? Okay, do I do this? Do I do it a variation of this? Is this a symptom of something? because I recognize it in that person and it hit me pretty hard. So it's something I should work on. You know that reminds that is so well said. It reminds me so in my program at one point, I can't remember like the purpose or like why we were doing it but the the task was okay pick one person who in your life that really frustrates you could be a parent, could be a friend, it could be a sibling, whoever it is and then you pick one person that you really like that you feel really

like a lot of warmth and love towards. And then for each of them, pick five things that you like and don't like about them. And then look at those reasons and see if you do any of them. And in my experience, I found that I did almost all of those. And particularly, particularly with the person who frustrated me, all the things that frustrated me most about them were the things that I do. Right? It was the things that I'm not proud of.

And so seeing it as someone else, especially someone close to me, I get frustrated, but it's exactly like what you said. It's because I'm frustrated at myself for not for being that way or doing that thing. Yeah. And what a great way to change that frustration into gratitude. You know, you're like, oh, hey, thanks for showing me all that stuff, man. You know, and it's so crazy, but it's true. It's like the people that frustrates you the most sometimes present you with the biggest things you need to work on.

And if you can look at it from that angle, you can find gratitude there. And it kind of erases away that frustration. And it just, oh, I see, I see the world speaking to me, you know. And then all of a sort of just seeing it everywhere. And the thing about that exercise, too, that I love is you're also supposed to say five things or three things that you really like about that person. And oftentimes it's things that you also do when you realize, like, oh, wow, like I might have actually learned that from that person. And that's exactly what you said. It's like kind of flipping it from that frustration to gratitude of like, okay, like,

We're not perfect. There's good and bad things about everybody, and that's perfectly okay. Yeah, it's really well said. Those are huge lessons to learn. And do you think that maybe, if we just take, if we stay in that same lane, but we rewind it back to where we got on, do you think that maybe coming from a broken home forces you to see these things at an earlier age? Definitely.

Definitely. And, you know, I should, I should present. by saying like my parents held an amazing really like friendship afterwards like to this day they still talk and hang out sometimes like um i don't want to give a false sense of like right of like it being like they're fighting and yelling all the time it wasn't pretty in the beginning but but i think you're absolutely right i think it's exactly what you said it forced me to start seeing these things and i was also an only child and so i felt like i i had a lot of time i i had a lot of time alone. I had a lot of time by myself. Like my parents are both working professionals and especially

with two houses now going between the houses and school and like walking home from school and stuff. Like I was, I spent a lot of time alone. And I think that added to the, the idea that I started recognizing that more because I didn't have someone to distract me. I didn't, I didn't really even have anyone to share the pain with. Right. Because I didn't have a sibling. I didn't I didn't really have anyone else in my life who understood the situation as well as like I did. Of course at that age like you can't really confide in your parents because like you, A, you feel like is your fault and B, you're also a little bit mad at them for just like perceiving them from destroying the home. So I think that definitely caused me to exactly just really go deep deep into that at probably a younger age than I would have other ways. otherwise. Yeah. You know, you can see the line from having these thoughts at a young age that

children who have a happy home with two parents, they're not confronted with these ideas. And then that would explain why later people would want to come to you and be like, hey, what do you think? Like you had well thought out ideas at least for your age, you know what I mean? Yeah, age appropriate. Yeah, age appropriate that other kids are like, man, how do you know that? And it's like, well, you know, you face some tragedy that they have it. And you've been forced to sit alone in silence and think about, okay, is this my fault? What's happening here? What is love?

Why don't they love each other? Is it something I did? You know, is it my dad? What did my dad do? You know, my mom does this one thing that's kind of weird. I don't know, like you start your mind. You're racing, man. And then, but all of a sudden those same patterns that are inquisitive that are investigative,

Once you sit alone and you've sat with those thoughts as a pattern, because now you're thinking about them all the time, all of a sudden those patterns become something that you use in research. You know, it's interesting to see how your mind worked at a young age and hear about how the patterns developed and then to see where you are today. Like, I love research. Like now this thing that began in your mind is like a giant machine. It started like just trying to look for every little thing that could be out there. all of a sudden that translates into an incredible researcher later in life.

You know, it's pretty interesting to think about. Yeah, you know what? I've never thought about it that way before. I love that. You know, I, to be honest, I don't have a lot of memories in being young. Sure. Sure. I definitely agree with you that it changed the way I think.

I think more more specifically, it changed the way that I, saw the world and thus the way that I came to like understand it if that makes sense. Like it definitely, it definitely changed the way I think and I think it's all related. But in very particular, I just have these memories of just like, like I became acutely aware of like body language, like nonverbal. I became acutely aware of the way people spoke and like what that meant. And I remember getting like, and in sometimes very unhealthy patterns of being like,

okay that person said something a little bit off while their body was this way which means they're probably mad and go into these like repetitive thought cycles and then anxiety and then like depression yeah yeah you become a master of words people like oh that guy said that word but it's not just the word he said it's the tone that he used that guy's pissed yeah you don't look like it on the outside but that guy's going to blow up on the inside exactly or that girl hates that guy And she's still with him. I can see it. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, I know you do. I know you do. We're birds of a feather. And it's that same. Once you learn that, it becomes like a superpower. And when you're a kid, you start wielding it in ways that become really hurtful. But it gets you all kinds of attention.

People are like, how am I, how do you fucking know that? I can see it, man. I know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking. You know, it's like it becomes a superpower. But if you does. But no one teaches you how to use that. That's something you learn on yourself.

And you can look at a lot of people who have navigated their way to the highest ranks of the corporate world or a lot of people that find themselves in the positions of wealth, however you want to define it, whether it's through materialism or whether it's someone like Ram Dass who is, you know, wealthy beyond belief, but has given up his material, had given up his material positions. I think it's a skill, the same skill that you and I are talking about is a learned skill that so many people, have that are influential. And using to learn that skill, using to learn that tool in a way that can help people versus hurt people, I think is essential. And those of us who have learned that skill or are trying to teach that skill to others, there's a giant, giant responsibility to teach that skill in a way that allows

people to really harmonize with other people. Because if that skill is wielded in a way that is wrong, all of a sudden you got a psychopath on your hands, right? You have a corporate CEO that's like, these guys are all numbers, man. I need to make my profit. And you guys don't understand how important. I'm trying to run a business here, man. Like you have that guy that shows up. Or like the, sorry, I'm bad with serial killers, the Manson family.

There you go, man. That's what happens. It's, and, you know, I think adding to that point, I think, like for me, too, is, um, I always perceived myself. Like I always cared about people. And so although yes, sometimes, sometimes it was definitely wielded in hurtful ways.

I'll be it not purposely. But 100% hurtful. For me, because I cared about people, being able to almost like see the world in terms of like that hyperacuity in terms of language and body language, it made me so anxious.

and that really made it made it difficult for me to be in the world in a lot of ways. And I think that's another thing that's not taught either is, I mean, this skill isn't taught, but the ability to wield it or to sit with the feelings that I can bring up is also not taught. You know, and I think that I could imagine I was lucky enough to learn some skills. and going into psychology naturally, I was able to apply those to myself. But I feel that maybe for a lot of people out there who really, really struggle with anxiety, they haven't been taught the skills to be able to navigate that kind of very anxiety-producing world because they care. You know, the people who don't care, they don't, I feel like perhaps they don't get as much of that anxiety

and the pain and the pain of human suffering oftentimes. But the people who really, really care are the people who really care are the, the ones who I feel maybe get more overwhelmed with that, that ability to see the, the social world in such a hyperacute way. Yeah, they're paralyzed, but if I do that, then this guy's going to think that and then that and then that.

Like, in a way, you're, you're living out a set of ideas that are probable, but probably aren't realistic, but they are to you and they come from having a big heart. They come from not wanting to affect. offend. They come from, you know, wanting to do the right thing. Like, that's a very compassionate

person. And if, you know, I think of a society later in life where we see someone who has that anxiety. And instead of labeling it as a stigma, we see this person would be an incredible nurse. This person would be an incredible doctor, you know, and like, you begin to see these things that we look at as disease as a marker for some sort of superpower they have in a weird sort of way. I love that. I love the things you're bringing forward. You're helping me see the world in a new way, and I love that so much. Thank you. I think we think a lot alike, and I find that with so many people that gravitate towards the podcast or that I gravitate towards like, I should really talk to this person. I get what they're saying. I think there's a lot of people out there that have similar backgrounds and feel the same way. And in some ways, if you feel like that, you're called to speak out a little bit.

And maybe you influence somebody. Maybe you inspire someone. Maybe the research you do begins to build things that other people become attracted to. And yeah, it's a really beautiful thing to think about this idea of behavior and psychology and metacognition, like thinking about thinking. That's kind of where psychedelas come in, too. For me, when I was introduced to psychedelics, after having a very similar uproval, and experiencing a lot of the same anxiety or depression and figuring out, like, why am I different than everybody?

Or, you know, what's going on here? How come when I say things, people get offended? You know, I'm just pointing out the obvious. You learn what's not obvious. And people don't like that because you're saying things that are obvious. They should have thought about and they get pissed off. They didn't think about them, you know? So, you know, but for psychedelics for me, I remember the first time I was probably like 17.

And my friend and I went to like this laser pink Floyd show. And like I remember Takens Nica, we split like an eighth of mushrooms or something. And, you know, I remember just having this feeling of like, ah, it makes like everything. I can't tell you exactly what I was thinking. But the feeling, the residue, the shadow of it was that everything makes sense. There is something connecting all this together. And for a split second I have what the alcohol is called this moment of clarity. From that point, I was hooked.

It was like, I can really think with this. I can really make sense of all these things that were just roadblocks in my life. All of a sudden, those cones were moved, the light was green, and I could just fly down that road. What was it like the first time you found yourself on a psychedelic experience? Yeah, thank you for sharing. I actually have a fairly similar story, but it's interesting for me. I started more as a cyclone. than I was using psychedelics for like mental health.

I love I loved the idea of changing the way that I saw the world. But not not it wasn't that deep at the time. But what happened to me, the moment I love telling the story, it's so funny. So one of my friends and I, I'm not sure how many mushrooms we took, to be honest. We were probably 17 at the time and it was late at night. So we just had let's just go for a walk in our neighborhood. It's a pretty foresty neighborhood. There's lots of nature.

We love that kind of stuff. We're walking to this forest and there was a house being built. And we decided, like, let's just go inside of it. Let's just walk around. And it was really dark. It was really dark. There's just the moonlight. And we were trying our best to see because it had just rain.

So, like, the moonlight was, sorry about that. No worries, no worries. The moonlight was shining off the water on the ground and it made it seem transparent. so you couldn't see where you're walking. And my friend was walking in front of me, and he was looking so close at the ground. And suddenly he just stopped. And he just looked up.

And then how he describes the experience was that his whole life, he's been looking, going like this. And when he just took a second to just look up, he all of a sudden could see everything. And it was such a small moment. But I think what represented was the idea that we can get and this goes back to like me and my harmful patterns of being in the world is we get so

stuck so stuck and then for me what psychedelics really helped was just it helps helps me kind of remove or step away step behind all those patterns and see from like a third person perspective or from from an objective outside perspective of like oh wow i see myself acting that way like witnessing being a witness to yourself acting certain ways and that i think as i've really started getting in a psychedelics that's what their meaning is to me is i can step back and and just be really honest with myself without having those pre kind of made ideas or ways of thinking clouding my judgment or my ability to be honest with myself. Yeah, that's such a profound moment where, and it's repeatable.

And that's, I don't want to go off on attention, but like the idea, well, you know, the idea that you can't measure that. Like, that's not something you can measure in a lab. You can't say, well, I have an objective perspective, you know, I have a third person point of view when I'm on a heightened state of awareness that allows me to see my life in the future, in the past. And it also allows me to evaluate decisions that I would have made and the consequences that would have happened later in life. A sign is, be like, well, how you measure that, man? Let's just leave all that out.

Literally, literally. Okay, that's nice, George, but we're going to leave all that out. What I would like to see is, can you put that in a bar graph for me, please? Put in a pie chart. I want to see the proportion of your experience that you had third person perspective from. Can you prove that happen? I don't know you proved that. Didn't happen.

Didn't happen. Yeah, I know. Totally. I love that. And, you know, I think, I can't remember who it was. So a lot of my, my, I've done a lot of reading and I take a lot of my ways of seeing the world in perspective, sorry, in relation to psychedelics from Carl Jung. Beautiful. And, yeah, oh, yeah.

And Stanisov-Groff. And I can't remember, I don't know if it was one of them or someone else, but they talked about how trying to understand the mystical experience from a scientific perspective kind of defeats the whole purpose of it. It kind of like that's that's like almost the power of the mystical experience is the mystical aspect of it, like not really understanding and kind of having to like make your own understanding. But if you really break that down in like a biological reductionist way, is it really mystical anymore? you know and so even if we could even if we could measure mystical experience and like of course people are trying would that would that be any would that really be meaningful and i don't know on some level it may be i mean I mean, it may be, but I don't, I don't think that you can. And I think there's the problem with modern medicine is that they have taken the spirituality

or attempted to take the spirituality out of medicine. And when you do that, you take away the real healing. You know, you take away the component that comes with the medicine. Spirituality is a part of medicine. And I could see, you know, it seems to me the way they, they, they, they did that is to create, and I'm sure the road to hell was paid with good intentions, but, you know, it's a model that allows profit to be made. It's a model that allows measurement to happen, even though the measurement is easily falsified. It still allows for someone to measure

something. And that's, to me, it's a problem with the psyche. It's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's a really symptom of the sickness. And it's a symptom of the sickness that plagues all of us. And it's why we are in this situation. It's this idea that we need to quantify things. You need to measure it. You know, that brings us back to the idea of money and trade. And if you look at the society we live in, it's just this really sharp scalpel of analysis that has forgotten.

It's part of the whole. And on the topic of mysticism, another person that I would add to that. trio of Stanislav Groff and Carl Young is Alfred North Whitehead. And he has a quote that says something along the lines of mysticism leads us to try to create out of the mystical experience, something that will save it or at least save the memory of it. And he ends that quote with mysticism, clarification, action. And that's something that like I always hold that quote dear because, you know, mysticism often

leads us to the ineffitability of words, and then we find ourselves in the integration trying to find clarification. And once you have clarification, then you can move forward with the action there. And I do. I agree. If I can just fall back for a minute on this idea of the third person, I have a question here that I was, that I've been thinking about for some time, and I want to get your opinion. Where is it? I guess the question is, the concept of the inner observer. Would you think that that is the self when we think of the inner observer? Would

you consider that to be the self? That's a great question. Thank you. You know, the first thing comes to my mind is the concept of the soul in the way Ram Dass speaks about it. That, which is kind of, I think, from a Hindu or Buddhist perspective of we're kind of this soul that

reincarnates into like a physical body. And though we take on a personality, though we take on an ego and our physical appearance, the essence of who we are is not from this world. It's not a material sense. And so when I think of what you say, the inner observer, my view on it is that it's, that it's, it's separate from the physical self, but not separate in like a bad way, just that like we're, I'm intricately connected with my personality compared to my soul, but at the same time when this body passes on the essence of who I am from a soul perspective moves on to whatever next cycle I'm in, not necessarily taking on the, the

the biases, the personality structures that come with like this, as Ramdals calls a meat sack. I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, it's a great way to put it. You know, I think similar in that, I think in that heightened state of awareness where you do become the observer, that it's so difficult to put it into words because you can see yourself, you know, you see, and the fact that you can see yourself, I think it's disingenuous to say that that person is the self because you can see yourself.

I would say you are above yourself or you are your eternal being or you are the planet seeing yourself. Maybe you're seeing the image of yourself, but it's difficult. It's so hard to put into words, But it's so fascinating. And it's an experience that there are no words for. There may be a symbol for it.

We may be able to come up with sort of that yin and yang symbol that's always moving with the Pocod and the Paisley. Or maybe something to do with those abstract geometrical images that you see in heightened states of awareness. Perhaps that's the best way to describe it is to show that image. And you can see the relationship to use these incredible relationships everywhere. And it's like, it's this. You know what I mean? Totally.

And I 100% agree. It's funny. I don't like using this wording because it sounds ridiculous, but it's like a download. It's an understanding that suddenly you have. And there's not really even an explanation for how you got to it, I think, a lot of the time. Truly, like, I think we're so good at looking back on it and being like, oh, yeah, this is why. This is why I came to that conclusion. But realistically, you came to it on a whim.

And one one quote that I love is like we're just the the universe experiencing itself through the eyes of a person. And so like for me when I think about being in that that third person and in that that inner witness, when I'm able to witness myself, my my personality structure is separate through that like through that inner observer. I also start to recognize that other people aren't also who. they think they are, as Ram Dass puts it. And then I start to develop this kind of compassion and love for them as being the exact same as me. Like, we are the same. You know, even though we might look different, act different, be different on the surface. Like, it's so funny inside, but that's not really what I mean. We're like the exact same. And that is, that has really helped me develop a compassion and and empathy for people who I've really struggled to feel that for in my life, both on a

personal with like friends and family and also with strangers, especially like in my last line of work, like working with the unhealth population. There's a lot of people who hold at times harmful views and it's as a result of so many factors, but it could be very difficult to overlook certain things to find that deep meaningful connection. And I think psychedelism, they'll explain instrumental role in my ability to connect with people at a level so humanly basic that everything else just kind of washed away. You know, it was like in that moment when you're connecting with someone on that kind of soul level, nothing else matters other than being completely present with that person.

You know what I mean? I do know what you mean. It's beautiful. And I think that's what's happening. You know, maybe COVID was the catalyst that a whit began to awaken people. I think on a lot of levels, it was a true gift. And I know that some people may not feel that way. But if you look at this, you know, think of a merry-go-round.

It's going super fast and just stops. Everybody starts flying off of all. You know what I mean? Like, whoa. Yeah. You know, and for, and I think I came from the corporate world. And it's so toxic sometimes. Like, in my opinion, the majority of the Fortune 500 companies have gotten so large.

They no longer see the people that work for them. people, they just see them as numbers. And when you're forced into this environment where you've got to walk through a metal detector to see if you're stealing anything, and you go in and you're faced with your employee number and there's like a, hey, you know, it's highlighted and it has a minus next to your name. And you're forced to look at that every day. It's just so dehumanizing on some levels. And that, so even though people are going there and they're still maintaining a form of

community and engaging with each other, it's like this, it becomes toxic to a level where all of a sudden you're forced into this environment that you hate and you kind of become a container for that environment on some level. Like some, that toxicity pours into you when you go into work and you bring it home and you pour some some for your kid and you pour some for your wife and pour a little in the cat's bowl, you know, and it just poisons everything around it. And I think COVID helped people begin to see that. And I, for example, and I know many people that have, have just said, you know,

what, I would rather really struggle with money. I would rather, you know, not be penniless, but I would rather walk away from this place, even if I'm making six figures, I'd rather walk out of here than continue to do this. I can't. Like, it's really killing me and I don't like who I am and I'm not around people I care about and it's alienating and there's no amount of money that's worth it. And I think when you get to that point and I think everyone, you know, I got good news and bad news is the good news is not everyone's at that point. The bad news is not everyone's at that point, you know, but you get there. And when you get there, it's super scary and you're faced with fear. And then all of a sudden, the courage wells up and you do something

about. And then you begin to take your steps towards freedom. And it's, I see it happening around the world. I think it's part of this psychedelic renaissance. I think it's this thing called awakening. And it's, if you look at what's happening in France or Pakistan or sometimes in the Middle East or you know, even the wars that are erupting. I think it's a war of consciousness. Like we don't want to be part of this hardcore life extracting sort of lifestyle. What do you think? Is that too much or what do you think about that?

No, I think you're spot on. I really appreciate you sharing that. I can imagine like at the risk of of guessing how it felt, I imagine that being in that corporate world and then choosing to quit, especially to come into something like mental health. Like I don't know. How was that? Like did you find there's a lot of judgment from like your past friends, coworkers, kind of like that world when you kind of like shifted into this kind of work? It's interesting.

It's a lot like when your parents get divorced because mine got divorced too. You don't know how to deal with it. And I've got some really close friends that were, I've gotten a lot. of cool messages along the lines of, hey, thank you for your principled stand or thank you for planning this seed. But a lot of people, they tend to not want to talk to you, not because they don't like you or not because they're upset with you, but because they're afraid. Like they don't, they can't imagine.

Or maybe they can't imagine. And it bothers them. Like, oh, my God. Like, you know, you have kids. You have bills. You have a mortgage. Like, what are you going to do? You know, and you're, you have this cloud of why me?

What am I going to do hanging over you? And you think to yourself and you're completely bombarded with this in the corporate world. You'll never go anywhere and make this kind of money. It's like an abusive relationship of someone's like, yeah, you'll never do better than me. That's kind of what the corporate world is telling you employees. You'll never do better than us. You're lucky to have a job. That's all bullshit.

And I would, I want everyone to know that. Like if you feel you're in a situation where that kind of messaging is in your mind, I'm not saying that the person who runs your corporation or the manager or or people in a position is sort of saying that to you. But if you feel that message in your heart, like it's being conveyed to you on some level and it's coming from that place. So it's all bullshit. It's conditioning. It's this, it's this, you know, in primary school or public schools, we kind of treat children like Pavlovian dogs. We train them with bells and whistles and an authority figure standing in front of them.

And, you know, you've got to break that conditioning. And it's hard. But it's not, it's just this idea of fear and confronting fear, right? I think that when you think about fear, fear is not the absence of, you know, courage is not the absence of fear. Anybody can do that. Courage is doing something in spite of the fear. Yeah.

And once you begin doing it, you know, you realize that fear is a phrase. of you and you can blow through it or it still might be challenging, but you can stop your heart rate when you're in that condition if you're aware of it. And you can become the person that you want to be. You can get across the message that you want to the authority figures. If you're willing to sit with yourself and figure out what is it I'm afraid of? Can I keep doing this? Is it fair to the people that matter? Is it fair to my daughter? Is it fair to my friends? Is it fair to my parents? It's fair to my wife? And if that, if you answer no to any of that. And if you answer no to any of that. you really need to start thinking about making a change in your life.

And it'll be the best change you've ever made. And this idea of, in my opinion, all of a sudden, this confidence begins to grow inside of you. And this belief that you can become the person you've always wanted to, that you're worthy of actually living the dream. Man, you're worthy of that. If you start walking down that road, it'll happen, man. Yeah, I love that so much. I just want to sit with that for a second. because that that really resonated with me.

I love what you said about, like, the courage is not the absence of fear. It is doing something despite the fear. Yes. And at least in my experience, I found that when I sit with that fear and I go through it, like I think public speaking is a great point. Yeah. For example of that is like, you do it and then you're so scared. like that's okay. Like it's okay to be scared. I'm going to do it anyways and then you do it and it goes

great. And all of a sudden you're like, whoa, like it's it's it's you're not actually scared of public speaking. You're like scared of the fear. You're scared of feeling the fear in the first place because if you can do something well despite fear, you're right there's nothing to be feared anymore. And it comes down to just being scared of the fear. And that's something that has been so hard for me in my life with my anxiety is like being anxious to do so many things and as I've gotten more confidence in myself and started facing that fear, I've started really recognizing like there's nothing to be feared. Even though I still fear all the time. I always have fear. But at the same time, I simultaneously am scared, shitless and not afraid. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And I think

a lot of people do. One of the tools I use right there is like, okay, if I don't, If I don't do, if I don't fight this fight, then my kid's going to have to. You know, if I get up and I go do this thing I hate every day, what am I teaching my kid, man? What am I, what kind of a man did my wife, Mary, if I'm not going to stand up to people? Like, she deserves better than that. And I'm not going to let my fear get in the way of that, because that will be something that drives me to drink in and I'll be a worse person. You know what? That reminds me, I can remember as being so young.

probably in middle school, which is grade six to eight here. And I remember just thinking, like, okay, what is, what is my parents life? They wake up at 9 a.m. and they go to jobs that they don't like that much. And then they come home, and then they do whatever they need to do, and then they get ready to do the same thing tomorrow. And not that, not that I'm judging anyone for wanting to do with their life, but for me, I started thinking, why would I want to get up and do something every day that I don't love doing.

Yeah. And I think it's exactly what you said in terms of like, of, of the fear and the like, of kind of like letting the people down in your life of like, I'm not being. And it comes back to like not being my authentic self. You know, and something Brahm Daw says is like, we, by doing the work on ourselves,

we become a vessel for other people to find their own enlightenment. So beautiful. Right? But how can I be a vessel for someone else to find healing if I am not being my authentic self? Like it has to be truly authentic. And in order to be authentic, you have to do what you love. You have to not be afraid or you have to do things despite being afraid. And I think it's through those actions that we start to inspire other people and create that space where other people can start to look at themselves.

And, you know, I think related that as well. bringing it back to when we're talking about when you switch from like the corporate world to mental health and stuff and you have those friends who are maybe a little more resistant to it. I've had this conversation with my roommate before actually and how when people can recognize things in themselves that they don't like and they see that you're actively doing something to work on that. That's a scary thing because it means that they spend time with you. They're naturally going to have to start looking at that in themselves.

And I think, at least in my experience, I feel that when I've started doing this work and being more authentic and people don't like that or don't like me, I try to, the way I see it is it's like, okay, so they are noticing something in themselves that they're not ready to work on and seeing me doing it is perhaps prematurely forcing them into doing it, you know? And I think on a practical level, perhaps that's one of the reasons why when people start to go through these transformations into mental health or just becoming their authentic self, their friend groups change. And the people in their life changed drastically because all of a sudden, one part of it is people are like, whoa, I don't want to do any of that weird. So I don't want to talk about my feelings. And then there's other people who are like, whoa, I like what you're doing. I want to be like that. You know, and then you start the way that you spend your time with people changes, at least in my experience. Yeah.

I prefer to think of premature forces a seed of inspiration, you know, like I, because I know it. Like I have been on both sides of exactly what you're saying about. And even though I ignored the people that were doing the things I liked or even insulted them, some part of me wanted to be it. And some part of that light was transferred to me. regardless of what I say. And it's becoming honest with that that allows you to understand

what you're doing to other people when you come through the other side. Like, I get it. Like, that person's ignoring me, but I reached them. On some level, I reached them. And I'm hopeful that that little spark, you know, you just blow that little spark into them.

Yeah. On some level, you know, all of a sudden, and they may have a random thought on an idle Tuesday at 4 p.m. and be like, damn it, I don't like this. You know, and that thing grows. You know what I mean? And I, yeah, please. Sorry, sorry.

I've had some really amazing people where I work, reach out to me. Some of my best friends in the world. My friend Matt and Eby and Griggs and, you know, even some of the leadership there have just, hey, thank you, George. I thank you. You know, and it's opened up so much for me. And to hear that, to hear that word, hey, you know what? It's inspirational, George.

And for some of those people to see the pain that I had to go through to get there, it means the world to me to hear people you love go, I got some thinking to do, George. And you know what? I love you, man. Thank you for that. Thank you. You've really made me see things that's possible.

And like, that's worth more than any amount of money. That's worth more than two commas or three commas or four commas. know that you you've done something for someone, you know, by leading by example. Like, and I, I think that's the true wealth in life. And if you can do that, if you could stack a few of those on top of each other, the world just starts changing the pattern for you, you know? And like, you can see, when you start changing other people's patterns, man, I get goosebumps.

Like, that's why I do it, man. Like, look what I had, did this one thing, man. And people, it's not like you're telling people to do stuff. It's like people are going, hey, I could do that. And you're like, yeah, you totally can. Or maybe you could try these four things. Here's what I did. And you were just beginning to share.

And all of a sudden, this sharing economy erupts around you. And it provides like a cornucopia of beautiful fruit for everyone to sink their teeth into, right? I love that so much. That's so inspiring. And I have a question for you. So in those moments where someone is resistant to you because of, of them seeing something in you that they want but aren't ready for at that moment, perhaps. Oftentimes I've found in my experience that's met with some sort of negativity.

And how do you keep yourself inspired and positive and sure of yourself through those moments? It's really hard. It's hard, especially when you care about people and they say things to you that they know we're going to hurt you. But what I have found is that even if it's you or, eye, the language we use is a reflection of who we are. So when people say things to you, what they're really saying is what they feel about themselves. And so in some ways, like, it still makes it hard because instead of that person saying negative things to you,

you're watching someone you love say negative things about themselves. And that to me is like, that's heart-wrenching. It's like, oh my God, this person's in pain, man. And like, and then at that point in time, as soon as you, you realize that, like this hurtful statement that comes your way is an admission of pain? Like, I don't know what to say to that, man. Like, you know, it's just like, I just try to, I just want to hug them, you know, or at that point in time, I usually, and it's hard because some of the things they say can be so offensive. And it's meant to be. It's meant to hurt you.

And, you know, but I try to, I try to just maybe sit with silence at that point in time or be like, Oh, man, I'm sorry you feel that way. You know, I really am. And I think you're an awesome person. And I guess maybe we just disagree here. You know, but if you can keep it there and you can see it that way, I think that the corrosion of that language will fall off like rust on you. It still sits on you for a while.

But if you can just begin to see that language as someone who's hurting, And I guess maybe the silver lining there is that you're inspiring them on some level. The fact that you force them to bring up that pain, the fact that they felt comfortable to bring up that pain towards you in a way as a compliment. You know what I mean? Like they said it to you. They've probably been holding that stuff in for a long time, man. You know what I mean? And you got it out of them.

You got it out of them, man. So you don't pay yourself on the back there. And correct me if I'm wrong. But anytime you've ever said something to someone in a negative way, didn't you feel bad about it? about it later like, damn, man, it's kind of a dick there. Yeah, yeah.

Every time. Yeah, I know. I know. And so will they. And so will they. And when they're ready, they'll apologize and stuff like that. So just know that that's just a different version of you.

Like you said, it's a mirror. It's a younger version of you. It may be an older version of you. I don't know, but it's just a version of you. And if you can recognize that in the other person, it kind of takes the sting out of it,

I guess. That's how I would look at it. I love that so much. It actually reminds me this example. So one time at my last position, I was, we did room inspections just to help people stay on top of rooms and then get to really, really bad levels. And I remember I came to someone's room, just asked him if they want to do a room inspection. And he just blew up at me immediately, yelling me like, you fucking asshole, I fucking hate you. Get the fuck out of here.

Just like everything. And it's someone I had a good relationship with too. And I was just like, okay, now it's not a good time. no worries how about tomorrow and he's like like yeah whatever just kind of like yelled and then i remember um i he had me walking around the building later and i just happened to walk past him and i just did my thing like i didn't really um i didn't bring it up again i didn't ignore him but at the same time i didn't i didn't overly put any attention on him and the next day he actually came up to me and was like hey man i'm i'm really sorry i was just having a really bad time like

like you're an amazing person like you didn't deserve that and I think I had that realization of exactly what you said of being like whoa like this person was just projecting onto me and I didn't respond to it I didn't take it personally I just said this person needs space and that's fine and I waited and then that's exactly what happened he came and he was like man I'm sorry and he felt bad about it and like that really strengthened the relationship between us right when when I feel like at least in that context, when someone can like express like unfiltered anger and you can just kind of like not absorb it, but but contain it. Yeah.

And then they recognize that and then acknowledge it. To me, that is like that is connecting on such a deep human level where everything else fades away of just like, man, you're there for me. And that, those kinds of moments and relationships made me so much. more effective at my job because when it came down to it, when things, shit was hitting the wall, having that relationship was the difference between being able to contain someone, calm them down, or help them in ways that other people couldn't because they hadn't taken the time to build that relationship in a way where that person like genuinely trusted you and trusted your opinion

and knew that you actually care about them because you would show that already. Yeah, it speaks volumes of someone. attitude towards you. But more than that, it speaks volumes of their thought process. You know, the way people use language with other people is a direct reflection of their inner dialogue. So if someone's exploding like that, they talk to themselves like that all the time. And, you know, imagine if you just fictually think of someone yelling at you like that all

the time, like you would want to leave that relationship. You wouldn't want any part of it. So imagine a person that talks to themselves like that all the time. Like, that's like, it's in a weird way. It's like this self-hatred. And like, that's why they're sick is they have this pattern of language where they have this song on repeat that's constantly angry. And it erodes everything inside of them. And so if everything inside of you is eroded, how can you not erode the relationships outside of you?

And it speaks. And on another level, too, in a weird way, it's sort of an example of Schadenfreude in that, you know, when someone, someone's like that, there's a weird sort of feeling that you get going, you can almost take a weird solace in this idea that no one can ever be harder on someone than themselves. And so the fact that that person came and apologized to you, meant through that person probably went through a prolonged period of like having to think about how much of an asshole he was to you. And like, The fuck do I'd probably do that all the time. God damn, I did it again.

And I should apologize to that guy. But then you found the courage to come and do it. Like that's a whole other thing. A lot of people will have that internal dialogue and they'll be like, I should, I should apologize. But instead of apologizing, they'll come up and give you a Snickers bar or they'll pat you on the back or, you know, they'll try and buy you something, which is their form of apologizing without apologizing. And it doesn't go all the way. But yeah, I love the idea that, first off, I'm glad that happened to you, not because it made you

feel bad, but because you've had that experience, and now you can begin to understand the inner workings of other people's minds. And I think that's essential if you're going to be in mental health care is that you have to understand why. You got to, you know, and that probably comes back to you being a kid and asking why your parent, why were they divorced? Why me? You know, that question of why me is something that stays with you. And it works well when you're trying to help other people erupt out of this pattern that they're already in. But yeah, it's a fascinating concept, man. I'm still talking about it. It's fun to me. I know because I've been there and I'm sure you've been there too. Totally. Yeah. No, it's this is that is something that I specifically in terms of

of thinking about like this, the context of like people exploding on you and how you take that in. Like that is such a core part of working in like the social services industry because it's it happens every day. And it leads to burnout so quickly because because you, take it personally and I took it so personally in the beginning and at times you know as I was reaching being burnt out and compassion fatigue there was I would start taking it personally again even though I done all this work to not take it personally and I think Rom Doss particularly and what he what he talked about which I already mentioned about about we help people by becoming a vessel for their own healing because to me what that means

we're not doing anything. I'm not trying to heal anyone. All I'm doing is being my authentic self and that creates a space. Right. But when I had the mindset of like I want to help somebody, that's where issues came into play. That's where compassion fatigue comes from. That's where burnout comes from because it doesn't work that way. People heal when they're ready. And if you, if for me, when I based my value and my effectiveness on the results of other people, especially in that context, I was bound for failure because true, true wins are really rare. They're unfortunately really rare in that field. And so I feel like that's one of the reasons why compassion fatigue is so prevalent in that field.

Or people become numb. That is so common too because there's so much pain and suffering and you can't do anything about it. And so you just shut yourself down. And I mean, that's a whole other topic. But that's also unfortunately really prevalent in the healers that I have seen in the social services field. Yeah. And I think that's a process that happens throughout humanity is that we shut ourselves off to the pain at a necessity. Like, you know, okay, I can't feel this and continue to go on.

So if I want to go on, then I have to stop. making a big deal out of this big deal. Yeah, I love it. You know, and I've had multiple discussions with people that, that, you know, have much more authority than me. And we sit down and we talk about things. And I try to explain to them, like, look, in my opinion, what you do sometimes, you do all the time.

And if you treat all these people here in this way, you can treat your family that way. You're real, like I remember having a conversation with this, guy who was really good with his language, but he used it as a tool to sort of be really dishonest. And, you know, I noticed that. I'm like, oh, yeah, I used to do that too. But look, yeah, congratulations on tricking all these people to think something. Congratulations.

That's super awesome. You know what? You're so good at it. You don't even realize you do it. You do it to your wife. You do it to your kid. It's probably why you're having problems at home, man. is because you implement the exact same system here that you do at home.

And you can't help it. Like if you do something for 10,000 hours, you become an expert at it. And if your job is being a professional, you know, bullshitter or a liar, or if your job is to seek production at any cost, well, then you begin seeing this world. You train yourself to see the world in a certain way. And that's how you see the world. But by being numb, you also take. away all the pleasure that can come from that sensation of seeing things.

And it's an epidemic that we're in. And I think that it's coming to a different way. I think psychedelics is something that helps people see that. You know, you had mentioned earlier in the podcast that some, a relationship between psychedelics and cognition. And what's going on there? Great question. So the research in our lab is looking at, and when I say maybe I'll let me define

problems really quickly. Please. So more in the context of how our lab studies it is what's called executive functionings. Are you... Okay. Any flesh out for everybody. Yeah, awesome. Okay.

So the idea of executive functioning, broadly speaking, is our ability to make decisions to plan, to switch between tasks to otherwise known as like metacognition. And, you know, we can really get into the semantics, but think of it as higher level thinking, the really complex cognition that we have. And the idea behind it, it kind of aligns with the idea of how psychedelics improve plasticity, right? Neuroplasticity, which give us this little ability to change the way we are in the world. And, but what does that mean? We talk about us so much for mental health, right? It changes the way that I relate to other people. It changes the way that I, the behaviors I take, but we don't talk about, like, can psychedelics improve your

decision making? Can it actually make you quicker at responding to things? So we're talking about the structure of the brain itself and how that relates into effective goal directed behavior. And what we're starting to see, actually, is that obviously acutely, when you take a psychedelic, no, no, your working memory, your ability to think, essentially hold things in your mind, it plummets, which makes sense. Your decision makes, it's not any better, to be honest, in the context of how it's measured, I should say. But longer term, we see actually some improvements in cognition.

It was just a scoping review, which is essentially just going through the literature. It's not even a systematic review or meta-analysis. It's just, it's qualitatively essentially looking at some of the data and seeing if there was results one way or another. And we do start to see actually some benefits. fits to cognition from psilocybin specifically in the long term, which is amazing. And maybe some of the practical applications of that is to have a traumatic brain injury. Maybe you're riding a bike, you fall off at your head and your memory goes away a little bit.

You can't think as clearly your ability to hold things in your mind isn't as good. You just aren't making as good decisions. Well, maybe psilocybin or other psychedelics can actually be used. to help regenerate your ability to function, help your most basic cognitive functions work at a higher level again. That's the idea behind it specifically. And I think that in particular, when it comes to traumatic brain injury, it's concussions.

It's such a ubiquitous thing. Like, as more and more research comes out about concussions, they're so easy to get. And especially in sports, like concussions are everywhere all the time, realistically. and some of the research is showing is as little as one concussion can cause permanent damage to your brain structures and thus your ability to effectively produce goal-directive behavior. And so that is the hope for psychedelics in one way in neuropsychology and neurology is to be able to use them for their physiological effects in the brain in order to boost our most basic cognitive functioning.

Yeah, it's brilliant. You know, I recently, what, when you talk about the scoping and the study that you're doing and the research on that study, is that based on like neural feedback or is there neuroimaging there? Or what does that, what does that study look like? I should preface by saying it's not my research project. It's two other people in the labs. Bailey, I don't know their last names. It's Bailey and Justin in my lab at the cortex lab. They're amazing researchers.

They're actually, they just started this new research. is like the largest study in the world trying to get like attitudes and and psychedelic behaviors. But it's likely what it is that they're measuring if I understand your question correctly. So correct me if I'm wrong. But it's doing basic cognitive tasks. So actually, sorry, can you repeat your question again? I kind of lost it. Yeah. I was just wondering when looking at the study, were they basing their information off of like neural feedback or neural imaging? But it sounds to me like they were basing it off actual, you know, cognitive abilities and tasks. Yeah, that's my understanding of it.

Yeah. And more and that's how our lab is. Yeah. Better. Neuro cognitive psych, really. Like we do a lot of cognitive testing, just doing like computer tasks. And so I, I imagine that's the kind of studies that they're looking at. I actually don't know for sure.

I think they're publishing it or it has been published. But yeah, that would be really cool, though, looking at brain imaging and neurofeedback and stuff. Sometimes I think that the results, the way we measure results should be in the joyous tears of the family members. Because those are the best people that know, you know what I mean? Like when you see family members crying, like, my husband, my daughter's better. You know, like, okay, it works. Like, look, the person that loves them the most is telling you they're better. Like, okay, we don't need the imaging.

We got it. I think that's a great idea. You know, in my new job in hospice, one of the best indicators we use to determine the effectiveness of our services is whether or not people tell us, them and their families tell us if our services were effective. Were you happier? Yeah. At the end of the day, with anything in life, is, you know, if we're not, you're happy. Isn't the subjective experience of the experience the most important thing about any experience? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so true. It's and it's this idea of, sometimes I think the idea of specialization.

You know, like the left hand has no idea what the right hand's doing is, has gotten away from us in some ways. But yeah, I saw an interesting parallel study where Nick Murdo. who's got a company called Wake has recently done partner with ESPN and they took these people I think Ryan I'm not sure his name is Ryan but his name is Cote he was like an enforcer for hockey up in Canada and a bunch of people that played in the NFL and they took them down to this retreat in Jamaica where they had multiple sessions of psilocybin and you know they did then hook them up to some newer technology like this kernel brain imaging machine and they did some neuroliferation feedback and they were able to show which science I'm sure loves is this new centers,

these new connections, these sort of new brain waves that are beginning to show up in these areas that before didn't have a whole lot of action. And along with that, they also can hear the people no longer beginning to slur their word so that there's there's also like real tangible effects happening in conjunction with the science that makes both sides happy. So I would imagine that Bailey and what was the other person's name? Justin. And Justin.

Bailey and Justin, you're welcome to come on this show. I'll try to put all your research in the show notes down there. Thank you for doing what you guys are doing. You sound like amazing people. I'd love to talk to you. And I would imagine that their research is somewhere along that lines. And I think it's this kind of research like Bailey and Justin are doing that is going to drive mental health care in the future. It's really profound.

I'm really excited for it. Yeah, me too. You know, we in the lab, as more and more like psilocybin and psychedelic research is being picked up by the members and stuff, we've been as a lab starting to educate ourselves on a unified idea of how we want psychedelics to, or how we see psychedelics being implemented into our work and more broadly society. And we have such a beautiful mix of opinions and viewpoints based on our backgrounds. A lot of the lab are clinical neuropsychologists or clinical neuropsychologists in training where I'm more. more going to like the a little bit less away from the the clinical neural cycle a little more into just like the counseling side of things and we have other people who are from other research based specialties and we all bring our own viewpoints and worldviews into it and it just helps us create this really holistic amazing and I think it's a great balance between the mystical unexplained things and then the science of things and I think we're doing the lab is doing a great job of of balancing those to it and and bring

bringing the science to it, but also leaving room for there to be a little bit of unexplained stuff. Yeah, it sounds to me like you're redefining medicine or redefining healing in a way. And when I think about, you know, if we just stay with the idea of redefining what things look like, whether it's words or experiences, and we think about the relationship between words and actions, you know, healing sounds a lot like optimization to me. but there's a little bit of a difference there, you know, on some level, like, healing has like a negative stereotype to it. Like, oh, you were injured, so you know you have to be healed.

But what if you're just being optimized, you know, like isn't optimization just, optimization has a lot of levels to it? Maybe you're optimizing your cognitive ability or maybe you're optimizing the, the emotional, your EQ, you know what I mean? And I think that that goes a long way of taking the stigma at a disease. and I think that's a huge part of it because people kind of become that stigma when they're labeled with something. But if they're not healing,

if they're just optimizing, if you have an optimization center versus a treatment center, now all of a sudden, you're attracting people in there for different things. And when people come in, they don't judge other people for like,

oh, well, that guy, you know, he's one of those guys. I love that idea. You know, I've thought about this before, actually, in terms of like, because I think there's a huge, God, I don't want to, I was going to say market, but I think demand for for people who are okay, but are wanting to just optimize themselves, you know, but I do think there are people

out there who, who are looking for healing as well. Sure. Like, I think, I think that it is also important to acknowledge that there are some, there, there are a lot of people who really are hurt. And like, at least I come from my perspective, like, it's okay to be hurt. Like, I'm hurt. Like, I've been. been so hurt and I wasn't I was maybe ashamed in the beginning but I'm not ashamed to say that anymore

and like at times what I've been looking for is healing not optimization yeah but I think I definitely think optimization is as equally important and needed because at the moment sometimes I see the psychedelic medical side of things being taken towards like treatment resistant depression you know PTSD and there's no space for people who want to use it to just break toxic masculinity. But like that's that's valuable too. Why are we not why am I not allowed to use psychedelics to to help with my toxic masculinity and toxic ways of being in the world? But other people are allowed to use it for things that the medical system has considered to be worthy or hurtful enough. And I'm not trying to compare PTSD to toxic masculinity at all, but I think it's a gross example of how

psychedelics are being siloed to only being able to be used for certain people. And I think it's important to acknowledge exactly like what you're saying, the spectrum of reasons that psychedelics can be used for. It's a very astute point. And I can tell that you spend a lot of time because I'm beginning to see new terms like traumadelics being put out there. You know, because there's so much emphasis on trauma and healing. And I agree with you. People need to be healed and they should be healed. And I'm so glad that there's coaches and professionals and there's a lot of people out there.

But I do see this new branch emerging. In fact, I talked to a friend of mine, Jason Sheffield, who used to have, he's got a few companies. One of them is experience integration, but his new company is called the Rooted Rebellion. And he teaches a class on masculinity using psychedelics. And it's so funny that we're talking about it because he gets into this. He comes from a really hardcore Christian background when he was much younger. And he found in that background.

that he was presented with this masculinity that wasn't something that he was comfortable with. And so now he takes people that have had different sort of things happen to them or that maybe need some help in their way. And he steers clear of, you know, people that need trauma or people that need real healing. He obviously pushes those to people that have that modality or have that background or a psychologist or a doctor. He pushes the people that need that in that direction. But there's a lot of people that come to him that need some direction and that maybe they've been a man their whole life,

but they haven't really felt as if they're their authentic self. And he's got this whole course that he's developed. And just talking to the guy, I'm like, man, I should be spending more time with this guy. You know what I mean? Manly than me, you know? Yeah, yeah, I love that. And what I love about that point is it starts to break down these ideas like, what is a man? Yeah, totally.

Is it a behavior? Is it a feeling? Is it both? Is it neither? I know in my life, that's something that is really, as I started to break down my toxic masculinity, I started within myself being like, but this is what I've associated with being a man my whole life. So like what does it mean to be a man? And like, what does it mean to even have a gender? What does it mean to be a woman? What is it? And when we, when I think about the concept of the soul, like we talked about earlier, the soul is genderless. It's just an essence of consciousness. And so. So if I'm identified with my soul, I don't feel identified with a gender. And how does that translate into the way that I communicate and talk with people in a day-to-day basis who are identified with their body and thus their gender? And sometimes I feel like there's not a disconnect, but I feel a over-emphasis on gender. when I'm identified with my soul because it's like a concept that I don't feel. But then when I become more identified with like my egoic self, I'm like, oh, well, now I can feel myself identifying with like physical features, my meat sack.

Yeah. Do you mean? I do. Yeah, I think that's a big problem. I think that, you know, we are, we're subject to the judgment of others, whether we like it or not. Yeah. And in order to achieve the structure of this society has been set up in a way where, and maybe all societies, like judgment matters.

You may not agree with it, but there's some things that you run into that are, you can change your perception about them. You can't change how you feel about them. But you can't really change how other people feel about them. And those affect us in ways that are sometimes unfair and they're wrong. but there's really nothing you can do. I mean, you can select your friends and be around like-minded people. But yeah, it is tricky.

And I think part of that integration process is coming to the conclusion that like, I'm okay with those people who judge about me. They may think I'm a total freak and they may not like me, but I'm cool with that. In some ways, I can probably see why they think that, you know. And I think that that's the mark of a well-rounded person is understanding that they're going to judge you. You may not like their judgment, but maybe you can empathize where they're coming from

and then you can begin thinking about why they think that and then it becomes an exercise and cognition and wow. And sometimes, sometimes like the greatest ideas you have come from analyzing the judgments of others. And sometimes that helps you solve problems and you can see it as a gift that way. It's pretty amazing to think about. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. And for me, I think too, like as I become more comfortable being my like authentic self I quote I find that the judgments bother me less because I'm I feel happy I feel proud I feel at the same time interestingly feel like it just feels right yeah I'm doing what feels right to me and and I become more for lack of a better word certain with the stuff I'm doing I I I less often stop and think, am I doing the right thing? It's, it for me, it becomes more often this intuitive feeling of I am doing the right thing. And like,

I will take whatever, and it comes back to courage. Like, I'll take whatever, whatever's coming my way by doing what it feels right to me. You know, and you just take it, you just take it in stride.

Yeah. I heard a great quote that was like, you know, nothing hits harder than life. Life will hit you and it'll hold you to the ground if you let it. But in life, it's not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and get up and keep moving forward. You got to take the hits.

You've got to take the hits. You've got to be not afraid to face them. Or if you are afraid to face them, face them anyway. And the more hits you take, the tougher you get. And the more you're able to walk through that storm. You know, I heard another great quote where they were talking about the difference between buffalo and cattle. And the difference is that when Buffalo see a storm coming, they run through it. Or cattle, you know, like when the storms come in, you run through it.

Yeah. Cattle would like, they'll either sit and hunker down or they'll run away from it. And you're, you know, if you're constantly running from that storm, you know, you're going to die of exhaustion. You're going to die of something because you're not running through it. Like, that's a sign to run through it, you know, and I, it's interesting to think about, you know, if I, if I shift gears and I think about this new position, you've taken congratulations, by the way. I appreciate it. You know, I recently read an article in Spanner Magazine

where they're using five MEODMT to treat neurodegenerative diseases. Have you heard about that? I haven't actually. It's fascinating. I'll send you the article. It was really, and it's anecdotal. Like I haven't really researched it.

I've spoken to the guy a little bit, but I don't have the documentation in front of me. I'll just say it's not. But the story is beautifully written, and it talks about a gentleman who had a really great relationship with his father. They would go to the beach. They would travel. They would play guitar together.

And as his father grew older, all of a sudden, the signs of dementia began to set in. And it got to a point where he went to see the doctor, and the doctor says, you know, look, your father probably has six more months before he really needs to go to a home. He's going to forget who you are. it's going to be very, very difficult. So I would recommend that you spend these next six months with as much love and capacity as you possibly have. And they tried all these different treatments.

They tried all the drugs. They tried the layering the SSRIs and all these things and nothing worked. And so he had spoken to a bunch of professionals about, hey, I've seen some evidence that says certain psychedelics can help with cognition. Would you guys be willing to work with me on a lot? study here. And so they did sort of a, you know, a informal sort of, you know, preparation. And they used five MEODMT in an inhaler over the course of six months. And the way the story goes is that they started using it twice a day and they didn't see a whole lot of, you know, a whole lot of

benefits. But after about a month, you know, they started noticing small things. And then the crux of the story is on like month three and a half the son came home and he heard like it's important to note that by this stage the father was you know he would be around the house kind of shuffling around the house maybe on the couch or in his bedroom and he was no longer doing any activities so after the course of five emio dmt about month three the son comes home and he hears this faint sound of a guitar in the back of the house and he goes back there and his dad's playing guitar and he's like Dad, what are you doing? And he's like, you know, it's weird.

It's like, I've been in this fog and I haven't been playing guitar at all, man. I just felt like playing. So I just came in here. And the story goes on to talk about how all of a sudden he got his license back. He started traveling. And they're really doing a lot of research because the only factor that changed was the introduction of five MEODMT. And I think if you look at what Beckley's doing right now with a five MEODMT inhaler, they're saying some things what they're using it for.

But I think, in my opinion, I don't know this. I'm just thrown as other speculation. It seems to me that they are looking at that in a way that could be the next wave for neurodegenerative diseases. There's also a company called April 21st with with Ja'em Fiber. Excuse me if I pronounce that wrong at him. But he has been looking into using next generation psychedelics for neurodegeneratribus disease. And I'm curious, like I think that that could be something that happens in your field or at least, if the next generation psychedelics, for neurodegenerative diseases. And I'm curious, like, I think that that could be something that happens in your field, or at least, the people you're caring for really quick. What's your opinion on that? What do you think about that? That's such a good question. I love that story. Thank you for sharing it.

So in the context of hospice, so the idea of hospice is that you're no longer seeking treatment. It's you're essentially like ready to die and you want to make your life as pleasurable as possible until you pass. Yes, we do get some, some dementia patients. And I should say I'm not an expert on the company yet. I'm still new or hospice in general. But this is my understanding.

I think the effectiveness of 5-AMO DMT for dementia, for example, would be a little bit more upstream. Right. So before hospice, but absolutely yes. Like, especially as like, you know, I'm not a medical professional, but perhaps maybe an more early treatment for it. Or perhaps preventative, like to be. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the things about neurotogenic diseases is you don't notice it until there's a lot of damage.

And so what's the best way to stop something from happening is to prevent it from happening. And so I could really see that coming into play with at-risk people or, you know, I try to be hesitant about being like psychedelics cures all. Because I don't believe that. But in the places where it could help a lot, I mean, dementia is probably. one of the worst things you can get on a family on the system because watching someone you love essentially whittle away into a non-functioning human being is horrible and that's not to downplay how horrible other things are but it's particularly hard to watch I think and so the way I see it at least is like like it's already one of the worst things that can happen so like anything bad that can happen

from taking psychedelic, can't be any worse than that. You know, and when it comes to a palliative approach, which is just the idea of of, to my understanding, a palliative approach is just the acceptance of a life-limiting disease and containing it rather than aggressively fighting back against it. That's not to say you can't treat

during palliative, but that's the idea behind it, is helping people live their life to the fullest. And so just under that umbrella of helping people live life to the fullest, psychedelics perfectly make sense to fit in there. Because when it comes to palliative and hospice approaches, like for example, in hospice and oftentimes palliative, like they give a lot of opioids. But that's because addiction issue is not a worry because people are already dying and are wanting comfort care. And so if one of the biggest barriers against psychedelic use right now is the lack of research and understanding of the potential downsides of it, well, if the general approach in palliative and hospice is already, it doesn't really matter about the negative side effects because we care about comfort, then why are we not starting to use psychedelics more in that field? I mean, that's more rhetorical, obviously, but the general idea behind it is like maybe that's something exactly what you're talking about.

talking about we should be exploring a little bit more. Yeah, I think there's a lot of research that talks about people that are in that particular situation using psychedelics and finding comfort, you know, instead of fear, overcoming a little bit of fear and helping them, you know, with understanding about letting go. And I'm sure that that's definitely a very personal decision that anybody would want to do. But if anybody wanted to do it, I think that they should be welcomed. to it. I read some really interesting stories where, you know, people didn't want to have their family come around because of the way they were because they didn't want people to see them in that

way. And after taking psychedelics, they did like a 180 and they became conscious of what's happening to them. And they found a way to make peace with it. And in some ways even embrace it. And we're like, you know what? I get it. I want to see my family now. You know, and I want to, there's some things I want to say, you know? And like, it really helped them see that this thing that was happening to them, you know, maybe it's not the entire tragedy that they think it is. Maybe it's something else. And maybe in this particular state, they have an opportunity instead of they're losing everything.

Maybe this is an opportunity that they can really use to finish things off. You know, I heard a story about, um, about, I was talking to Susan Guna, who's a, she's got a really great podcast. Maybe it's Susan Gouner, I think is her name. And she's, she's incredible. I'll send you the links to her podcast. She has so much cool stuff. And she was telling me about her mentor. And her mentor was someone that was, the way she introduced herself was, oh, I'm an event planner. And when she said, well, what kind of events do you do? She goes, well, into life. Kind of threw her back a little but like, wow, that's an interesting concept to think about yourself and as an event planner.

And one of the stories she told her is that a lot of the times the people she's with don't have a lot of family. And so she'll spend like the last day with them, you know, sometimes the last hour and like the last 10 minutes. She says, you know, way too many people in the last 10 minutes that she's been with, like she'll be holding their hand and she'll just see what she described as the look of unrealized dreams as they take their last breath. And, you know, she was also someone who is a big proponent of using psychedelics towards the end of life. And she had been with people that have and have. And in her story, she had said that the people that did use them, a lot, a lot less of them had the unrealized dreams of a lifetime in their last moments of life.

And I think if you could provide that for somebody, that might be the greatest gift that you could give to them is to make peace with this unrealistic expectation of unrealized dreams. You know, it's pretty powerful to think about. Yeah, I love that. And, you know, that personally, that's where I see psychedelics being so effective in their life care. Yeah. And that's actually something that, like, I'm hoping to propose to, like, my bosses that we can try and implement in, like, randomized, control trials or something in our hospice. You know, it's complicated in a lot of ways.

Sure. We're a long ways out from getting there. But my hope would be that psychedelic assisted psychotherapy or even just like more of a spiritual-based psychedelic experience with maybe like a doula or some sort of spiritual practitioner, that could be just like a normal part of hospice care. So in the same way that you can get opioids for pain, you can get psychedelics to help with your end-of-life anxiety for any reason you want. And I think when it comes to end of life and people start to come to terms with that,

they're more willing to try things to see the world in different ways. And I think that's a perfect way to start introducing psychedelics into the mainstream. Because if you think about end of life and all the people that are related to that end of life, seeing how psychedelics can drastically improve someone's life, in that time, I think that is so important, the last little bit of life. And when people see the impact it can make in the most critical time, maybe we'll start to see a culture shift of like, maybe there's something here. And like, wouldn't it be nice to have that feeling before I'm just about to die?

You know, so that I can live my life authentically earlier? You know, I think the hope would be that we don't need to take psychedelics. to come to terms with their own death, right? My hope, at least at the end of life, like my hope is that we can get out of this death-phobic society, maybe with the help of psychedelics, face our mortality from a younger age so that when it comes to that time,

we don't have that moment of unfulfilled dreams, of regrets. It's like, no, like I knew I was going to die one day, so I live my life authentically so that when I got to this moment, I could have a sense of peace without the need of a substance to guide me there. It's a really beautiful said. Thank you for sharing that. It makes me think back to the earlier part of our conversation where both of us have used psychedelics

and we did find the courage to try and at least pursue the dreams that we have. So in some ways, what you're speaking about is being put into action right now. And people can do that. They can save themselves that last few moments. And, you know, another aspect I think about, if there are people that elect to use psychedelics to cope with an end-of-life strategy or as an end-of-life strategy, imagine a young girl or a young grandson or a granddaughter seeing the life return to their grandparents for a few moments and how much that that grandchild will change the world as the last breath of, of hope or the last breath of life is transferred from them to their grandkids. Like when kids see miracles, all of a sudden they can perform miracles.

And I think that that's the process that's happening. It's this process of waking up, whether it's your grandfather that's dying in a hospice care or whether it's your father who's dying at a job or your mother who's dying in a relationship. Like the truth is maybe we're dying all the time. And we have this opportunity to live. And not enough of us are taking it. But I hope that we do all of us begin to take that plunge. It's so worth it.

Yeah, that gave me goosebumps. I love it. Yeah, I love talking to you, man. Thank you for this. It's been really fun. Yeah, thank you, too. I love this more than I ever could have imagined. Well, we should have more conversations.

As we're kind of coming up towards the end here, though. And like, what do you have coming up and where can people find you? And what are you excited about? Yeah. So we're still in such an early stages of our process. We're actually working on a podcast ourselves. Yeah. You'd be epic at it.

You'd be so good at it. Thank you. And we'd love to have you on. Anytime. Because we want to have a similar vibe that you got going on here. In the beginning, it's going to be a little more focused on psychedelics and, like, the legality issues and what they are. And we're going to be very focused in, like, British Columbia.

in terms of like the context but then we want to start branching out and having like spiritual conversations and getting into it but we actually just recently um came to a name and we're the radiant roots healing collective love it thank you so the website uh that i gave you we have we don't have a domain name yet we haven't built it for the new website so that's all up and coming but for now i can be reached by the website link that i saw you put in the description it's just a basic website of who I am. There's some information about psychedelic therapy and stuff on there that I think is amazing for people who want to get a sense of what it's like. But that's pretty much it for now. There's lots of stuff in the making, but it's going to be a few months before

anything really tangible is ready to be released. I mean, I'm so excited. You have such an incredible outlook on life and such a warm energy that comes from you. And I can only imagine the people you're surrounded by share that and can't wait to hopefully i'll get to be on the podcast i can't wait to meet the team on the podcast and if i can in any way shape or form help in any way please don't hesitate to ask man i would love to be part of what you guys are building then thank you so much i appreciate that so much i'll definitely be reaching out of course well hang on for one second but ladies and gentlemen i want to say thank you to everybody for listening to this has been an amazing conversation go down to the show notes check out when nins got going on um reach out to me

me at the same place as always. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you having a beautiful day. And that's all we got. Have a great weekend. Aloha.