TrueLife - Randall Hansen Ph.D. - Nature, Love, Wellness & Plant Medicine

Episode Date: November 19, 2022

randallshansen.com rshansen Psychedelic marketer. Advocate for all things healing: nature, food, wellness, love, entheogenic plant medicine. INFJ. Writing a book: Our Journeys of Healing Through Psychedelic Plant Medicines (and Other Psychedelics)

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, furious 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 Kodak Serafini Check out the entire song at the end of the cast Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the true life podcast

We are here with the one and only Randall Hanson. He's a psychedelic marketer An advocate for all things healing, nature, food, wellness, love, and theogenic plant medicine. He's also writing a book, and he's just an all-around great person. Randall, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, George.

I'm happy to be here and happy to be helping spread the message. Nice. It's a beautiful day, and I've been looking quite a bit at the beauty in life. And as we get started, I kind of wanted to throw out a question to kind of get things going here. Sure. when you think I was reading this book about beauty and it says that the problem one of the problems we have today it seems like is that we're trying to consume like it's we're trying to consume beauty but beauty is not something that can be consumed it's more like something that can be contemplated what do you think about that well that's a beautiful question I agree I'm a photographer too amateur photographer and I see that dichotomy when I look at something with my eyes and just admire it and then I try to capture it with the camera the camera image is never the same as that beauty you see firsthand and I think that's part of it I I live in a house with a lot of

windows and I'm on my laptop way too often so I get up and I look out and I take what I what I call a mindfulness break. I just look out the window and every direction I have, I sit up on a little hilltop above a lake and forest land. And no matter which way I look, it takes me a moment and I just take a breath and breathe in that beauty. So I think there's something to that. It's not, it's just experiencing it.

It's not trying to capture it or I'm not trying to hide it in my house. some just trying to appreciate it and be in that moment. I think that's, to me, what's what beauty does. It stops you. Yeah, probably there are some that are trying to consume it and keep it from the rest of us. But no, nature won't have that. Yeah, I agree.

There's something so beautiful and contemplative about nature. You talk a lot about nature. I was reading some of your posts. Like, where did this fondness of nature come from? It was like young Randall running out in the forest and like playing stuff. or like what what is your fondness for nature come from I think it comes from I'm the youngest of four brothers and I think the youngest sometimes can be a little invisible

and so in some ways that's great for freedom and I spent a lot of time in nature we have a lot of trees in where I was growing up and I've climbed to the top of the tree and I not only see the beauty of the distance and the horizon, but I also found I could be listening in them conversations from people below me that didn't know I was up in the tree. But I just found a piece in nature. I couldn't, you know, I couldn't define that as a child. I just found it soothing. I didn't know why. I built a tree fort. I loved being outside. I loved when people couldn't find me because I was hiding in the tree. And in, High school, I actually thought I was going to be a forest ranger.

I really thought I was going to go take forestry in college and work for the Forest Service. And as I look back in my life, I realize I have accomplished that in a way because I'm sitting on 30 acres of forest's land. And my wife and I, Jenny, both managed this forest. We are restoring the health that was logged about 30 years ago. When forests are logged, they just kind of take the best trees and leave all the bad stuff. And so we're cleaning that up now 30 years later and it's just a labor of love. But I think it comes from that childhood, just that innate sense that nature is peaceful and restorative and calm can bring new insights. That's a beautiful story.

I'll go all the way back to the beginning of that story when you said that you learned that you could climb trees and listen. to listen to people. What an amazing way to, what an amazing thing to learn from nature is how to listen. Yeah. Yeah. Listen and just be, just be involved, just aware of your surroundings. You know, too often as I'm sitting in my laptop, I'm so ingrained in whatever project I'm working on that, you know, just like the other day, there's this beautiful tree right outside my window here. and we had just this crazy half-hour invasion of these birds called Crossbills, beautiful colored orange and green, and they just were flying up and down from this tree. And it's like forcing me.

Nature's like, get off your laptop. Look at this. They're right in your per-structural, right in your view here. And it was beautiful. It was just, so yeah, nature is definitely a great teacher. I saw this really great. it's not a statue. It was more of a work of art.

And it's very difficult to explain it as beautiful as it is, but I'll do my best to give you a visual of it. Imagine like a large platform this way. And in the middle, in the middle of this platform is like a, like a one-way mirror almost. And it's about five feet high. And on one side is the statue of a man pushing on the wall

with two hands in like a runner's pose. and it's made of computer parts. And it's of wires coming out and like little monitors. And on the other side is the exact same man, but he's made of branches. And the images of this nature pushing against technology. It was such a beautiful sculpture that it's just stuck with me for so long. And I see it once I saw it's, I think that's one of the beautiful things about art. It's like once you begin to see the image that art is showing you, now you can see that image and other thing.

It's almost like it's been imbued in you. And now you can see that artist's artwork living in everything around you. It's such a beautiful gift. And I see it in what you would just said about when you're staring at the computer and you're focused on this project. Maybe you have to get it done or maybe you have a deadline. But then there's something so beautiful over here that's just desperately trying to grasp your attention. It seems like they're fighting for each other. And I'm wondering if you see that in your life or you see that around you or have you seen that growing since you were a kid.

And now that fight is still relevant today? I definitely think so. I want me to give you a little jump off to a little slide tracker for a second, but you know, we're all involved in social media and sometimes, I think that's part of our problem today too. And I was on a journey and one of the outside my deck, so out in nature again, beautiful setting. We can talk more about that later. but the one message that came to me during that journey was none of that matters that's not life what you see in social media and i was spending i don't know probably an hour a day on facebook you know just going through posts you know sometimes

posting my own stuff sharing stuff and it's like wait that's an hour away i could be taking a hike i could be working in the forest I could be doing something much more meaningful than liking or loving or laughing at a post and it's just so so yeah I think I would I would love to see people kind of push back a little bit from technology technology is a great tool for us no question what we're doing right now we wouldn't be able to do it unless I flew to Hawaii so it's a great it's a great thing but we have to take breaks from it we have to you know the other thing that that a strong vibe that came to me was nature always wins and i think about this image pictures of in chernoble where the nuclear meltdown and now decades later we see this forest and birds coming back to this

place where humans can't even survive still because the radioactivity is still so high. And so nature, I mean, that's the thing. Nature will always win. You know, no matter how much we fight it, that sculptor is a perfect example. You know, technology is pushing up against it. And it's like nature's like, no, no, no. I'll still be around when that, yeah, when that, when that laptop is now sitting, sadly, probably in a landfill or so wherever else, nature is still going to be there.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about it. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this idea of nature and nature winning. And I think that's a great way to put it. I'm going to pose this question to you. I've been thinking a lot about spiritual reality. And I'm not even sure really how to define that. But I think about virtual reality. I think virtual reality as being this almost religious spot for technology.

And on the other side of that is spiritual reality, which might be the height of like an LSD trip or a psychedelic trip or a plant medicine, but it's this other reality that is always there, but you can't stay there, but you can go and visit. The same way you could be in virtual reality, you could be in spiritual reality. And I almost think that virtual reality is like the shadow of spiritual reality. What can you help me flesh out that idea a little bit? Like, what do you think about that? Wow, that's really an interesting concept.

I love it, though. Well, first of what I say, let me just say that that spiritual reality can also come in other modalities, breathing techniques and deep meditation, things like that. But I would say that in almost every person I've talked to that have done some different modality of consciousness, mostly through psychedelics, with my experience and talking to people, there is a spiritual component. And it's fascinating to see, depending on the people, I've had some people. people that have said, I was an atheist, no belief in God, no faith, no nothing.

And in their experience, they found so much love. And they talked, they heard, again, it's so funny how we describe cycle. You know, we don't hear that, well, some people maybe they do. I don't. But we hear telepathically these words from God, from the spirit, from the divine. from whatever and everyone calls it something differently it's amazing to me but there is that sense of when we're in this place that we're all connected and I think that virtual reality is the opposite because in virtual reality we can

make people in our virtual space you know we can build our virtual house and our virtual virtual forest and all that but we're alone in that unless we bring in people and do a group virtual, but in a psychedelic or an altered consciousness experience, we not only are we connecting with some greater spirit, oftentimes people are connected with a dead relative. And they have, you know, this woman I spoke with for the book was talking about how she had this half hour conversation with her grandmother who had passed. you know, a decade or two before, but had raised her as a child. And so she had this beautiful moment.

And again, so it's just connectedness of energy, of a greater power, whatever we want to call that. I had a minister, a fiscal minister who did a journey, and he actually spoke in tongues during his journey. And he thought, going in, he thought he was as close to God and spirituality as he could be. So there's that difference. Someone who's an atheist says, I don't believe in God, and then has this experience. Someone who's a minister, a priest, and says, you know, I'm, you know, I have this beautiful relationship with God and goes on this journey and says, oh, my God, no, I had this, I had a connection this big and now it's, you know, it's gigantic. So, yeah, I think, I never really thought about the virtual versus the spiritual. but that's a I love that George that's a great keep going on that it's a great great question

yeah thank you very much I just it it brings up the idea for me and I I kind of got I was reading a little bit about I want to get into some of your some of the post you talked about about the heroic hearts project and yeah you know life and educating and empowering people and how you got there and as I was reading this stuff the other couple days ago it just got me thinking so much healing is done in the presence the felt presence of the other or so much healing is done when we have this connection to the planet or this this altered state of consciousness and you know you could call it religious or you could call it spiritual it doesn't bother me what anybody calls it or what their connection is but there is this there is something there and it seems like that's where the healing is and for so long at least for me growing up there was this spiritual void. Like, I've always felt connected, but this, the draw to psychedelics to me was the beginning of healing for me. It was the beginning of being pulled back into the world of wholeness. And when I think of wholeness, I think of holy. And it's so interesting to me how I've been talking to so many

people, I've been so fortunate to hear their stories about maybe they've had PTSD or anyone can go online on LinkedIn or they could go on the internet or they can look at the research coming out with psychedelics and people that are being healed. And I know that you have a passion for how, helping and inspiring and healing people. And I'm curious if you think that, like, what is it about being next to the spiritual source that heals us? I think for many, it's not only that that hope or sense of a greater power and that we're not alone and that we don't have to rely just on our own marriage for everything, because

it's exhausting, you know, if we have to do everything ourselves, it's exhausting. And I think that healing is, we don't even realize, I think, at times how much we push down. My background and my partner Jenny's background will book Scandinavian Heritage. And I don't know what it is about Scandinavian. It's a man, they push stuff down. It's not talked about. It's pushed down, shoved under the rug, and we don't move that rug ever. And so one of the things, again, I love about Dr. Matei and what he talked about, Dr. Du Bois Mette is a book out called The Myth of Normal.

And he talks about that we've all suffered trauma, whether we know it or not, because some is capital T trauma, abuse, war, things like that. That's obvious. We know, you know, we were traumatized. But then there's these small T. where the small cheese things like where love was just withheld for some reason or something happened that was sort of an accidental thing but you're you were expecting something different so his example is in the Nazis were or taking over he was a baby when the Nazis were in power and his mom was afraid that the Nazis were about to kill their family so she gave the little baby gobor up to a stranger in a the street and he didn't see his mom for about three weeks and then he were finally reconnected and life went on blah blah blah and then he had this psychedelic he had the sacred ceremony with natives in Canada and he relived that moment of that trauma when he was his baby and he was able to see how that one moment in time impacted decades of his his life and how he treated other people and how he didn't trust because as an infant he lost

that trust because his mother, his dominant caregiver, gave him up to save him because he didn't know she was trying to save him. So I think this healing, and that's something with veterans too. It's fascinating to me, they go on these retreats thinking they're going to heal the PTSD or the moral trauma they've experienced in war. And what comes up that first night is an abuse that happened or a trauma that happened in their childhood that they didn't even know about. So the first night, you know, they're all expecting like, oh, thank God, I'll be done in my war memories.

And the first night's like, oh, no, no, no. We have to heal other parts of you before we can get to healing that part of you. And so I think these altered consciousness and psychedelics to me are the, I don't know, I don't want to see the easiest way, but maybe the most straightforward way rather than having to learn a breathing technique or meditation for me is an ongoing learning practice and I haven't mastered it yet. So psychedelics is the fastest way for me to get into that altered consciousness to deal with whatever I have to deal with. And typically it's those traumas that we didn't even realize we had, or we had a vague feeling, or maybe there was a mental block. Like, boy, I don't remember anything that happened to me when I was eight or nine years old. Uh-huh. Well, that's because your brain just blocked that from you so you don't have to, you know, have these triggers.

Like Matt was talking about, Matt Deeman was talking about on a previous episode of yours, you know, we, there's something there, but we just don't know what until the psychedelics kind of show us. Yeah, I agree. It's it's so fascinating that there is something that you can take. If you prepare and do everything the right way, there's something that you can take that will help you see the world in a way that will relieve anxiety, that will relieve depression and will help that will show you the path. And it reminds me of like Dorothy's Ruby Red Slippers. Like you have the power all along. Yep. You know, it, it blows me.

my mind. In some ways, I think that, that, you know, maybe, maybe that's what's happening right now. Like, it seems so chaotic right now. There's so many things going on. There's so much information pulling you this way and pulling you that way. And we're flooded with all this negativity. But maybe this is what change looks like. Maybe this is what a new consciousness being born looks like. Maybe this is this healing that must go on so that we can move forward in it. I know when I read some of the stuff you post, oh, go ahead. No, I just say, man, please, I hope so. Make that, make that reality. Yeah. We live in so much fear and hate and division. And, you know, I just feel like, you know, I start my book with, you know, we are just in crisis right now. And someone's realized that some of us don't, which I don't know, I don't know which side I'd rather be on. I mean, maybe the, maybe the blatantly not knowing is better. than knowing and seeing it and but psychedelics or this altered consciousness just

have a way of clearing all that and seeing that all that fear and all that stuff is just so much wasted negative energy that's dragging us down not just individually but even as an entire world as a culture so yeah I agree we we're you know we're on a precipice and I'm hoping that this you know, to use maybe Hawaiian, this wave is about, this beautiful wave is about to crash and just explode and push that fear and that hate in a way in this great wave.

So I'm hopeful. Yeah, I like that. I like the sound of that. Yeah. So we've touched on it a little bit, but you got a book coming out. I don't want to give any spoilers or anything, but can you tell us about the book and what it's about?

Yeah, well, let me start. Let's just dive down in that rabbit hole a little bit. Yeah, let's do it. So in my research, I've only really been taking a deep dive in the psychedelic for the past three years. But in the early phases, I heard people talk about, oh, yeah, I did ayahuasca and I got this digital download in my entire website and how to do my app and the target market and all this came to me. And I was like, no, no, that just sounded a little too crazy. And then in some of my early psychedelic experiences, I didn't have those. I had great experiences and monumental shifts and perspective, but I didn't have that until I did an LSD journey a couple months ago.

And toward the end of it, I literally, it's so hard to describe it, I literally got this digital download of the outline for this book. I had no plans to write a book. Book writing is sort of archaic in this day and age in a sense. We get all our information just by going to a search engine and typing what we want to find. But it was just this compelling message that, and it wasn't like you're going to write the book, it's you're going to move this book forward. And so, yes, I do have a couple of preliminary chapters that I wrote, but the bulk of the book are stories and that's what this message was is and if we look back at our

culture from the beginning of time really the way we have shared information in our cultures through storytelling and so I thought wow that's brilliant it's a great idea so let's just have so I ended up with about 23 stories from people that have done either macrodose journeys or microdosing and microdosing is kind of the really current hot topic in psychedelics but and we can talk about that too but and so that so this digital download came to me and then I've been working the last couple months doing it and the stories you know I wasn't sure about the the process in the beginning but the stories are just phenomenal whether it's a soldier healing from that trauma and multiple traumas, not just war, but his own trauma growing up, or whether it's just

this Episcopal minister finding a deeper connection to God, these stories are all extremely powerful, getting off of antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications that they felt were even helping them anyway, and then seemingly healed, no longer needing any more psychological. No longer needing any anti-anxiety or antidepressants and with a new outlook on life. It's so I'm looking forward. I'm just all the story. I just got the last story yesterday. So I'm in the editing phase now and it'll hopefully be released in early 2023.

It's amazing the art of writing a book. It seems that it used to be this thing that. it's interesting to go from reading books to writing books. And when you said it's an archaic form, like I think it's, that's a good way to describe it, but I would add a little twist to it and that it's a, it's an archaic way or,

let me see, it's an archaic revival of thinking. Because it's a way for you to, it's almost like your body, your brain is giving your body permission to fully acknowledge the information. When you write it down, something happens, right? Like when you get it from here, when you translate the vision into reality,

it's such an amazing thing to do because the spoken word is so beautiful. And the written word is amazing in its own way. But when you have them both together, it's almost like they reinforce each other on like a feedback loop. Because once you've written it down, now you can consume it and then you can put it back. You can change. You can put a blue in there. You can put a little bit of a yellow. You can put some music to it.

And there's just something beautiful that happens when you do. I can't wait for your book to come out because I can tell how passionate you are about helping people. I can tell how passionate you are about seeing beauty in the world. And to me, there's something beautiful about someone who can translate that vision into reality. And so I love the idea. And let's talk about storytelling too. That might be the oldest form of translating, you know, visions into reality. Yeah.

And so when you have someone that has had an experience or a life there of experiences and now is in a position to become a storyteller. That's got to be exciting. How do you feel about becoming a storyteller? Well, again, it's funny. In this book, I don't share any of my story, although I'm sort of the orchestrator or whatever of the other stories.

But I think it's beautiful because I think, you read these people's accounts. And the other kind of neat thing, let me just back to our second, that what I didn't even think about, it's not my brilliant comment it's somebody else's but I don't know about halfway through this process I was talking to someone we were talking about her story and and we were doing some feedback after the story and she said wow thank you

and then of course I don't know thank you and she said no no because I want to thank you because this helped me further integrate my experience by telling the story and I thought wow that is genius and that was that's not my genius at all again so that's what I mean by this greater you know this greater power giving us sometimes information that we we didn't have and so I thought about that because one of the things we talk about with psychedelics is the importance of integrating and it's not some you know you just don't take a psyched delic I'm like oh wow I'm changed and I can go on with life and it's it's not that way at all and because you've yes you've changed from

psychedelics for sure. To go back in the world is still the same as someone said, shit show. And you have to figure out how this new vision of yourself and of nature and of the world and of the divine or the universe or whatever you call it, how does that fit into this world where, oh, no, people are still shouting at each other in the parking lot at Walmart or flicking, you know, giving you the finger on the street or whatever might be and so integration comes this big tool so storytelling is a way of integrating of so these people are reliving their journeys and then sometimes having new realizations from just talking about the storytelling not only is this this

beautiful cultural thing from from day one of all civilizations it you know how how do you share our truth, our moral compass, are the way we do things, the lessons I've learned that I want to pass down to future generations, it's through storytelling. Yes, I could give them a list. Oh, here are the ten things you need to do. No one remembers ten a list.

I mean, it's a fun thing to do. It's a great thing for articles or podcasts. Here are the ten things to do. But to really remember, you need to have storytelling because these little bits of emotional aspect in these stories are the things that we keep in our in our hearts and our brains and then that's the thing that triggers that memory of that story oh yeah i remember when the lesson in that story you know blah blah blah blah okay now i got it and so yeah i think storytelling and that's why i ended up doing that's why at first i was like you know i don't

want to do this book because there are there are a lot of books in psychedelics already but most of the books have it's interesting they all have slightly different approaches you know I know I think you had Rick Straussman on a while back at some point and he has several books out and of course he comes at it from the medical standpoint he's a scientist he's a researcher Matt Zeman you had on with his books like Deluxe for everyone I think he's a perfect companion for this book because he talks about yeah you know he he did a little bit he he has a science part of it but he also has his stories in it i think that's what that's a nice combination where you bring in the science but then people don't you know sometimes the science

gets so lost you know placebo effect what does that mean and how does that affect the results but ah but here's Matt's story and here's what he learned in this process and so my book you know i said well The last time anyone did stories was something like in 2010. There's a book of, I think it was just LSD stories. And so I said, okay, well, this is good. So this is now an updated sort of version. It's on all the major psychedelics. So we cover psilocybin and Ibegain and ayahuasca, ketamine, MDMA, and LSD.

And then I also tried to look at different traumas, capital T, lower T to get this mix. And then I try to do as many genders and ethnicities as possible because storytelling is different, even by gender, even by different cultures. And so I think it's a nice mix of that people can relate to with these stories. Yeah. Yeah. In my mind, Randall, I could see, in my mind, I can see like an amphitheater and one person going up and telling the story from your books. Like that would be a great, like you could go there. And it's almost like a ritual. And sometimes I think that maybe that's what a new Elyucinian mysteries could be like is something like a storyteller, something like your book that were people come up that had a trauma and they come up in front of a large group of people. And no, on one hand, I'm like, okay, that's just alcohol and anonymous George. People, not everyone wants to see. that. But on the other hand, it's like it can be a rhapsody, a tragedy, a mystery. It can be all those things wrap into one. And that's what a good story is, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know,

there are something story, you know, I have to say warning about psychedelics, at least from my experiences, is you become more in tune with your emotions and the emotions are much more closer to the surface. And, you know, I'll read, I'll try, you know, I'll try, you know, I'll try to read one of these stories and I can't get through it. I'll start choking up and because the change is so palpable, so strong. And you just feel such elation that these people have found themselves or found something they were missing or, you know, whether it's healing or that spiritual component. or just found their place in the universe. You know, so many people are just lost,

don't know personally, professionally, who they are, what they should be doing. And so I think these stories have that power to say, oh, wow, I relate to that piece. Maybe I don't relate to all the trauma or all the things, but I relate to that. Wow, if that person can find something and whatever that is, healing or spiritual out,

then maybe I can do it too. And so I think, yeah, there is that power. And I love that idea of that, you know, it makes you think of, you know, Shakespeare in the round, but instead of Shakespeare storytelling, and well, Shakespeare and a play is storytelling in that sense. So, but yeah, I love that. I love that idea.

Integration circles are a little bit like that, but that's what people who are all sharing their stories of psychedelics or consciousness, it would be better to do that type of storytelling. doing, yeah, do it in a mall or something crazy like that and say, you know, hey, gather around, we're going to hear the story of healing. That's the one thing that, you know, my big challenge with this book and even with this whole journey I'm on is how do I get that information out to the general public?

There was a great research study published about a month ago that showed the the potential benefit of psilocybin for alcohol disorder, alcohol use disorder. Very small study, but the results showed great possibility, way better than the placebo effect for psilocybin and helping people end that dependency on alcohol. And Forbes, and on LinkedIn, published the story. And so I went in there and I did my nice little comment like wow, this is so wonderful and beautiful. And looking back at how alcoholics even started, you know, this is, you know, psychedelics are a way to break that. And then I went back and I started looking at the comments from people outside the psychedelic realm. And it was, oh, great, we're trading one drug for another.

good job people or oh the druggie culture is back and it's so sad to me because and you know we're fighting 50 plus years of disinformation about these medicines from you know the good old president Nixon deciding that the anti-war movement and the hippie culture was was a little too powerful for him The black culture was a little too powerful for him. So let's let's kill cannabis, let's kill psychedelics, and spread this misinformation about, you know, do psychedelics and you'll never come back. And, you know, your brain on drugs with a frying pan and all the crazy stuff. And I hurt sometimes because I think of all these deaths we've had over the last 50 years and suicides, or especially, but that could have been. been healed through psychedelics, but because of politics, we said, oh, no, these are, you know, most of these are all Schedule I, it's a pro ketamine. And Schedule I drug say there's no medicinal benefit whatsoever. And we had studies back in the 60s proving they were medicinal

benefits. You know, they were people doing the, stopping people breaking that alcohol and addiction dependency in the 60s and all that research just got buried and now we're seeing that finally again with MAPS one of the leading organizations doing the research in psychedelics with MDMA especially but also with psilocybin and we're seeing these great inroads with PTSD with depression with anxiety with addiction with OCD and it's like wow we lot you know 50 years we could have been saving so many lives but anyway hope is now we are on this great wave and we're not going to have another political pushback and in fact we're just seeing some things you know i just saw yesterday in congress we're finally moving forward with setting up committees and looking at possible legislation for

moving psychedelic therapy especially for veterans to to make it FDA approved which we would be astonishing, wonderful, amazing, and about time. Yeah. Man, that's... Sometimes I think that when you look back at the history of the research that was done or the people that have done psychedelics or the way in which it was closed off to everyone, I kind of look, I liken it to like a large mushroom trip. And like anybody who's done mushrooms or psilocybin or any of the analogs, they realize,

it kind of comes in waves and like you know for a minute you get this euphoric feeling and you start understanding things and then you're like okay am I done is that wow that was crazy I guess I'm you know and then you got this moment a moment where you come back and then all of a sudden another wave comes and each time it's like the rising tide like it comes up it goes back and then it comes up a little further and then it goes up a little further and I think that that's where we are with psychedelics I think the 60s may have been the first wave and it washed up over us and it left this residue and we're like whoa we got all wet that was awesome what was that was Oh, it's gone.

But here it comes again. And now a bigger way, like the same, the same analogy that you used of another wave coming through. And I see, it seems to me that not only is it the medicine, the plant medicine that helps you as an individual, learn and get better. But it's almost like once you've taken it, you've become the mycelium. And now you're growing with it. And you as an individual become the medicine or the catalyst to go help other people. And when I see you writing the book, when I see you collecting the stories, when I see you telling me stories about George, I read this and it's hard to get through it because it's so beautiful. Like that is the medicine.

It's like almost like the medicine gives you the realization that you are the catalyst to go and help other people. And I'm not saying it can't affect other people in any ways. There could be another Jones Town or there could be another CIA study where they're testing it on people that they don't know they're doing. But for the most part, it's going out and it's changing people one by one so that they can go and become catalyst to help other people. And it's such a beautiful movement. And I know it's not a panacea and I don't want to pretend like it is. But it is doing something and changing the world for the better. And I can see it happening.

And I can see it with people's stories. I 100% agree, George. There is what we call the shadow side of ourselves. and psychedelics sometimes can enhance that. So we have to be a little aware of that. But if we go in, again, you mentioned this earlier about preparation, and we haven't already talked about that. But yeah, if you go in prepared and if you have kind of a big ego,

then the shadow side is going to probably come up. And I had this story from this beautiful guy in his 20s, this young guy who you would think would be so macho, ego-focused. you're 20, where your testosterone is raging, you know? And he, it's just a beautiful soul. And he said, I, I saw, I had that he did a mesquine through San Pedro or Wachuma. And he said, he just had this, you know, some people would call it challenging or bad, but he didn't.

beautiful, this journey where he saw his shadow self and shadow just meaning the ego or the negative side. And he saw how it made him mistreat his girlfriend, the friends around him. And the medicine basically said, you know, is this who you want to be? And he was, wow, I didn't realize I was kind of a jerk. and it transformed him in a way that he saw that and he is truly this beautiful person that just wants to help people as you as you just said now flip that to a healer i met who took the medicine and the medicine told him you're the greatest healer there ever is and he said oh yes i am the greatest healer there ever is and he said oh yes i am the greatest healer there ever is and he out of that experience, the shadow self totally, he gave this, it was supposed to be a Q&A,

and he gave this like one hour lecture about how he knows everything about ayahuasca, and ayahuasca flows through him like his blood. And, oh my gosh, I was like, wow, you know, he needs a different psychedelic to knock him down a few notches or a lot of notches. But for the most part, I would say 90% of the time, or I have no idea of the statistics, but I would say the vast majority of time, the psychedelics just helps you see the connectedness. The best example of that, I can give them a personal experience, and I've actually never shared the story, but see, it's already, anyway, that's why I don't share stories, get too emotional, but it was during an ayahuasca journey.

and it's done in a ceremonial space and I walked out of the ceremonial space to get some fresh air, go to the bathroom. And I looked up to the sky and it was completely almost white from all the souls that were just shining so brightly in this. again, this moment where it almost fell to my knees because it was just such pure joy of this, these souls just watching out for all of us, that we are, again, not alone. And even when people, you know, there's always this, I don't know about other religions, but often in Christianity,

we talk about heaven and no one already knows what heaven is, but in that sense, in my mind, in the psychedelic moment, DMT. It was just this, you know, and I've been in Montana and I've been in places Wyoming where dark skies, but this was nothing like that. And it was just so profound. And it was the sense, it was also this, and I don't know how you could have a big ego then because that was pretty, you know, that was like, you know, if you think you're kind of big in the world, look up and see that, no, there are a billion of other people. you're just one little speck in this great universe.

And I think that's, you know, a big universal message that a lot of people get, whether it's being shot up in a rocket ship, as some people talk about, talking to aliens. But it's the sense that, yeah, we, you know, we are not alone. So that's a good feeling, but we're also not alone. So we can't be selfish about it either. We have to help people. And I think the vast majority of people,

psychedelics, you're all like, yeah, how can I help you? What do you need? What information can I give you? How can I sit and listen to you today? How can I hear you? And that's the beauty of this movement, this experience. Rand, that's beautiful. I wish everybody, I've had this experience, a similar experience in that I know what it's like to fall to my knees, feeling so thankful. And be surrounded by beautiful. Like that's like that is worth more than to have that feeling even for a moment. You know, maybe maybe you're lucky enough to have it for an hour or 30 minutes or maybe it's a fleeting

glance. But to have a moment where you just like are overwhelmed with beauty where you're like, oh my God, I'm so loved. That regardless of your problem, if you can just have that for a moment, if you can receive that love, like it washes over you.

It cleanses you. It brings you back to this idea. Please. What do you got? Yeah, no, I was going to say. And again, in the vast majority of psychedelic stories, love is the most beautiful four-letter word, everyone expressed. And almost everyone comes out of that with the sense of love, with a sense of I am loved, with a sense of, oh, now I understand why my country. parents couldn't quite give me the love I wanted because I see they weren't loved in their

childhood. And so it's just, I mean, it's just love, it's this beauty, but it's also this, this deeper understanding that, you know, wow, all this crap I've been holding about, yeah, I was a youngest child and I was ignored or I, you know, hey, you know, my oldest brother got the new bike and I got the hand me down. Well, that's all this, you know, BS of life. That's nothing compared to the beauty, the love, loving a friend doesn't have to be a romantic love, just love of people, love of your fellow person of this beautiful earth. You know, it brings me to another point, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this.

It seems like in the psychedelic experience, we get to a point where language fails, whether it's, you know, a few, regardless of what psychedelic you're taking, it seems to me that this point can be, whether it's a disassociative or it's a hallucinogen, whatever your, whatever your medicine is, it seems to me, at least for me, I've found myself at a point where I can't talk or I can't describe, I can't thoroughly describe what it is. I can say it's beautiful, it's love, but it's fast. I can use words to explain it, but I can't really,

describe it. What do you think this lack of languages? Is it, can it be the point at which we're able to find new concepts and that's why we don't have words for it? Or what do you think this, this inability to explain what's happening is? What do you think this lack of language is? When language fails, what is that? That is such a fantastic question because that's one of the, you know, if we talk about these hallmarks of a psychedelic experience, experience. One is the inability to really describe it, which is sort of funny because it was almost like LSD was giving me this joke, like, okay, you're going to collect stories, but no one can really express the experience this way. You know, I love chatting with some of these people, and they were like, well, God spoke to me. You say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn't hear God. I didn't even see God.

but God spoke to me. And I'm like, wow, yeah, we almost need a new language for this because these experiences are undescribes. I mean, we can describe what he just said. Oh, I saw God or God spoke to me. But we can't really because he didn't literally speak to us. We heard it, again, telepathically or whatever it might be. And it's just so fascinating to me.

and a little aside only on psilocybin for me in the actual journey i can't speak like i during this one journey my wife and i were on a journey on the outside deck and it was a beautiful journey and this we had a playlist we haven't talked about music i'd love to come on music here a minute and we have time but we had this beautiful playlist on that all psychedelics I love. On Psychedelics' one song was this deep, deep,

down in a canyon, and it was dark, and I was alone and struggling, and I was internally screaming, like, get me out of this thing. This is, you know, what's going on? And after the journey, I was talking to Jenny and I were integrating,

and I said, that one song it seemed like it lasts like two hours and she said babe I'm sitting right next you why didn't you just tell me fast forward go to the next song and I said I couldn't I couldn't speak I was shouting it to myself but I could not verbalize and I don't know whether that was a medicine saying no you need to be in this spot and deal with it or whether it was just something that psilocybin does to me on lSD i can speak i can talk i can walk around but with silaibin the journey goes so deep for me that i am just gone but yeah i i i thought what makes these stories in the book interesting is that people do their best to try to explain what happened to them and that's why

we end up with words like beauty and love and nature and connectedness and and whole and healing because we can't really describe what we experience because it's just, it truly is indescribable in my mind. Yeah, it really makes me think of language. And as I've gone on my psychedelic journey, I've begun to think that the only way to get close to trying to explain the experience is some form of poetry where, you know, we've all read poems that have spoken to our souls and your face gets flush and your skin gets goosebumps.

And it calls out to you. It's this idea of the spoken word with alliteration and all these devices. It's almost as if the written word, I think it was, gosh, as soon as I want to quote the person, I forget who it was, but it was once said that the written word is the carcass of the spoken word. So when you're sitting in the felt presence of the other and you can, we've all sat next to our lover and looked in their eyes and spoken words that we feel deep or we've been lucky enough to recite a poem. And in that moment is when you can thoroughly understand what the person is trying to convey.

We had a person that I want to put this comment up because I think it's really beautiful and I want to get your opinion on it. Here we go. Could it be that the lack of ability to describe the experience is rooted in the underlying philosophy, ideology of the individual. What do you think? That's pretty deep. I don't know. I mean, that's a question I really have to dissect there. I think I love back to what you said before this question. Some people as part of the psychedelic experience afterward do write poetry or prose as their method of integrating. Some paint, some do sculpture.

And so there's, I think, I think the key is there's, there are multiple ways to express that experience. And I think maybe some people do it nonverbally or non-written or whatever way because they can't express it that way. They, there are no words. So they try to do it through a painting or if they, a poem where they don't have to, it doesn't have to be logical like a book or something like that. can just be like you said, beautiful words that are kind of spewed out there, that they're just coming from this experience. But I don't know. I don't know the science behind that exactly why that is. I do know that everybody has a way of at least expressing some aspects of that. And I think maybe some of that's also more emotional than thinking so they can talk more about their feelings

then about you know the stories where they're talking about you know reconnecting with their mother or some people relive their birth was this crazy to me and I can't even fathom that but or or healing it's all emotional but when you get to the thinking part of how your brain changes and these new connections it's much harder because those connections maybe are new, this neuroplasticity that we're just kind of discovering. And I love this image of the brain, the one image of the brain,

not on some altered consciousness. And you see, you know, like eight or ten little pathways connecting. And then on psychedelics or in some altered consciousness, you see like 50 pathways all connecting. And to me, that's maybe that's why we can't express. it as well because we don't actually have that ability yet. Maybe the further we integrate and further those connections keep happening, then maybe later the better the ability we're able to express what that experience was. That's beautiful, man. I want to touch on that.

I don't really believe in coincidences. I think that a coincidence is what you get when you apply a bad theory. And it's so interesting to me. me how often and how much this idea of neuroplasticity is just coming into my life. And, you know, I spoke with a young lady named Abigail Calder and she's studying the effects of LSD and neuroplasticity. And, you know, and it's so interesting to me. And it's almost as if my idea, my vision, everything I know about the world is changing. Like, and I see it happening in real time. As I'm talking to you, my idea of the world is changing. My reality is changing.

And that's neuroplasticity happening in real time. Like, you know, it's so fascinating and it makes me so excited. And I hope people listening to this are getting to feel a little bit of what we're feeling and understanding that the experience you have every day is a psychedelic experience. If you're willing to really see, if you're willing to really be open to what's happening to you, how can you not get goosebumps? How can you not be excited? How can you not be in a moment of love where you like just look around you look at the people look at everything that's happening like there's such an amazing time to be alive and I hope people are getting to understand that and see that and I I just it makes me it makes me so thankful to to get into that and I yeah I was that that's it I was done I didn't have anything else to say because it's so awesome I love it you know I I I

And that's why I love this podcast that you're doing. I love the other podcasts and all the books, not just mine, but all of them that are out there that people are seeing. There's, you know, from whatever happened, capital trauma, T trauma, little trauma, something. We sort of had put these blinders on. And psychedelics has the ability, not always, but has the ability to remove. move those blinders and expose this new reality as you're saying and that can become your reality through psychedelics and you know yes I you know the one funny thing I've always as you've picked up very early on I've always loved nature so when I'm doing a psychedelic journey and I'm looking at my

trees and my forest it just looks as beautiful as it does right now as I'm looking at the window because And I first was really disconcerted by that. I'm like, wait, the trees should be waving to me and smiling at me and winking at me and saying, good job. You're taking care of us. Because sometimes, you know, some people can't say that. And there's like, you know, oh, the trees talk to me. And for me, they just kind of, you know, the branches blue and the breeze. And it was very pretty.

And then I rose, I think, because that nature, that appreciation of nature is already within me. So it wasn't a new experience for me because I've always had this wonder, you know, climbing that mountain and then seeing that view and just saying, oh, wow. And so I think that's why, you know, I didn't have that with nature. Now I've had other crazy things. Like I have wood floor in my house with big knots in them. And in a psychedelic experience, the knots are like drums to the music and they're beating. The floor is moving. so I can't look at the floor because all of a sudden I start getting dizzy.

But I think, yeah, I think that, you know, if we can get this message across, you know, the amazing thing is for some people, one psychedelic experience, and that's it, and their change for life. And that's beautiful. And I think that's kind of a neat message we should have. Yes, there are psychonauts and people that need deeper. healing that do multiple journeys have multiple traumas they're also now doing some crazy I one of my stories the the so he was a Marine he had so much trauma both individually and in the in fighting that he and then he got addicted when he came back, you know, somewhat typical self-medicating. He did a combination of Ibegain, which to me is the

strongest, gnarliest psychedelic burrows, and I have no real interest in ever trying that one, although I've heard also beauty. So all these psychedelics have beauty, but some are more challenging than others. But he did Ibogaine and then with a five MEO DMT chaser. Oh my gosh, the power of that medicine. I can't imagine. I can't imagine, but that's the other, that's like maybe the third wave that sort of happened, smaller way that's happening now is like, well, what if we, okay, we know generally that psilocybin does this, but what if we combine psilocybin with MDMA?

Now what does that do? And so all of a sudden now I have a couple stories where people have done most. multiple one did MDMA with ketamine and had this absolutely most beautiful crazy experience that transformed his life forever. And so that's the other kind of cool things. Now we're on, you know, so I know I'm way off your point now, but not at all. All these things, the end result is you have beauty and if we can translate that. into our daily lives and we could have somewhat of a altered or maybe true consciousness is maybe a better word every day if we don't let ourselves fall back into that rut and i know it's very difficult

on i'm that way working this book you know pre book i was like yeah i'm gonna just take 10 minutes and have a little moment of meditation and now it's like oh the designer needs my input on the cover design and oh i need to do this and say no no no wait come back come back take a breath do your you're still need to do that integrating and and so it the real world does pull us back sometimes from that and we have to fight that because that's just you know our careers or the way we make money is just one tiny tiny part of our lives and yet for so many you know i taught business students from well i'm still teaching business students as a college professor but I always ask my students what's your

definition of success and business students nine times out of ten say money I want to make my first million by the time I'm 24 I want to find found my first company and sell it for five billion by the time I'm 30 and I look at them I say you know and so then we have this discussion well isn't that more of an outcome than a success because if you're you know if you're if you're if you don't achieve that goal then you're going to label yourself as unsuccessful you know if you only sold it if you want to sell for three billion but you only sold it for two billion are you a failure because you didn't reach that goal so it's sometimes also redefining you know we are as a culture have been so defined

of in the west at least you know grow up get your education whether it's high school, get a job or go on to trade school or four-year school, maybe get a master's, get a job, start a family, all these things that are these indicators that were taught from early on. But success should be, am I happy? Do I have joy in my life? You know, am I seeing the beauty that's around me? Do I see the beauty in myself?

and were sometimes so compartmentalized into thinking of success is money or you know a beautiful spouse or beautiful children or a you know a house here and a house in the you know in the mountains or cabbing you know all these things that are these financial which were financial which are materialistic things which are silly because you know we can't keep them we die and they're that house is now going to go out to somebody else but the beauty and the love and all that we you know if we believe in some kind of eternal souls or eternal life or even reincarnation whatever it might be that love and that beauty and that that spirit within us continues that next phase, whatever that is, but all that monetary stuff, all the material stuff, that just stays behind with a shell of a body. And so I think psychedelics helps us reframe what success looks like and what life looks like. Yeah. So it brings up an interesting

point. You know, and I'm curious to get your idea on this. As someone who has done a lot of research in marketing, as someone who understands the business. cycle. First off, I think that that's a great question you ask your students is what is success. But isn't so much of marketing trying to, you know, open up the behavior of someone and slip something in there and then shut it back down? Like as, as someone who's good at marketing, like you have to understand language. You have to understand behavior. And that's probably why these books reach you or these stories that people are telling you reach you so much because you have a thorough background and meaning and understanding and marketing and stuff like that. So, How do we, how do we as a community of people that want to make the world better? How do we re-infiltrate marketing and get the message out to people in a positive way? Yeah. I mean, that's a good question. And I, you know, I sometimes laugh at this choice because in some ways, marketing is the anti-to or business itself is sort of, you know,

it's not so you can't have a business in psychedelics because that's, That's one of the challenge we're facing right now is, you know, we have these multiple methods of delivery of psychedelics and then we have big pharma or small farmer looking peering over and saying, oh, well, if we synthesize these, then we have a market also. And so, and they're a purist within psychedelics and say, you know, the Kevin O'Leary's and all those money hungry people stay out of this because you're going to kill the purity of it and I walk on that line so much because I'm a believer and I'm a believer in Matt Vemans title that the psychedelics should be available for everyone not necessarily for

everyone but we should have that access and yes psilocybin magic mushrooms pretty much grow all over the globe. So in that sense, they are accessible. But for someone like me, who is grew up, I don't know how or why, but afraid of foraging the mushroom, be the wrong mushroom, you die, I'm not going to go in my forest and try to find, you know, with a book and try to find the right magic mushroom to do. So I, you know, and of course most of these trials are using synthetic versions of the mushrooms so they can get the exact dosage, you know, perfectly. So I walk that line because I agree. I want psychedelics.

I want that healing for everybody. I want people to not have to take an antidepressant that makes them feel like they're not their true selves for the rest of their lives, even though they were even designed to be that way. Antidepressants were designed to last, to be at most two years, which that's how they were studied. And, you know, people are often for a lot for their entire life now. You know, I want to see that inner city or third world person who is, you know, struggling with how to even find water or electricity or shelter, but find healing as well, you know, the one sort of legal psychedelic ketamine, you know, those, those prices are sometimes. the thousand dollars a treatment or more and who can afford that and and so you know bringing in these big you know or bringing for-profit companies that can reduce the price but we all know from the pharmaceutical industry they're not necessarily open to having lower prices they're open to making

money and shareholder value and ah so you know so being with my skill set as you mentioned it's so frustrating to me because I know business can do right we look at a company like dr. Bronner's in California that not only is doing great things with their soap products but they actually have opened ketamine into their health care plan. So their employees who might be minimum wage people on the line can get the subsidized for them. So maybe that's a better model. You know, I'd rather than all these pharmaceutical companies jumping in and raking the

cold, raking the prices and that sort of thing, you know, maybe it's more and more companies like Dr. Bronner's or companies in other spaces like Patagonia and others that just have a value for the world and a value for the employees, you know, making a psychedelics as just another healthcare benefit would be amazing. I'd rather see that model than the model of, you know, for, you know, four major companies controlling all the, you know, most of the psychedelic medicines and pushing the ceremony. And, and I, and, and, I, what. One more little backspace. I do most of my psychedelics on my own,

but I know and understand the value of the ceremonies behind these psychedelics, which the indigenous have done for centuries. Because there again, that's community. And so they're doing these psychedelics in the community because that's the healing model for them. And so again, I don't know. know what the healing model is for us. I wish I knew and I wish I could have more influence

to be, you know, to be that Kevin O'Leary, but not Kevin O'Leary, but be the one to say, you know, let's direct this model this way and see if we can do it in an ethical manner, in a manner that, yes, sure, shareholders make money. That's why they invest in the company, but that everyone has access to this medicine if they want that access. And again, I think so many people would benefit, especially after these last couple of years with the pandemic just adding to the stress. You know, there was a study just out a couple, two weeks ago about the mental health of our school-age children, and it's the worst it's ever been. Again, this is, this, social isolation, the social media, the main interaction, fear-based masks.

You know, I look at the headlines every day and after psychedelics, I have to stop looking at the headlines as much. I want to be informed, but I don't want that fear-based, which I think the news media is really feeding on, all news media, not just, you know, different labels, fake or unfake or whatever we're talking about. But I think, you know, we fear, to me, fear is sort of the opposite of love. And both are extremely powerful. I mean, look at what fear has done. I still have a brother who's isolating at home right now. He's gotten vaccinated. He still wears his mask.

He stopped. He recently retired. He has, he did very well for himself. He could be traveling. He talks about travel. all the time and he's too afraid to even travel now. And so he's sitting complaining at home. I make him text me every day just to make sure he's okay

because I worry about all these people that are sitting just like my brother at home, that the fear, and he watches way too much news. And yes, we have to be aware of what's going on our surroundings, but love is so much more of a healthier outlook than fear. Yeah, you need to be aware of what's going on. You can't just say, oh, yeah, I'm going to, you know, walk up to that person that's sneezing and hacking and say, oh, yes, give it to me.

But you couldn't go up and give that person a hug rather than being like, oh, my God. Or say, why aren't you? You know, I was approached outside one time, you know, at the height of, of the pandemic and I'm on a trail in the woods and there's a guy comes up to me on the opposite way wearing a mask and he's like what where's your mask I'm like well first of all there's almost no one around yeah and we're in nature right and it's most definitely distancing but I get it because that was a fear you know that that that he was living in fear and

And that's not the place to be. That brings us to many bad decisions, whether it's self-inflicting or inflicting on our people we interact with. And I'm not saying, oh, we all need to be all woo-woo and do like that co-commercial from what, the 70s or whatever it was, kumbaya or, you know, all hand in hand. But psychedelics does bring you that awareness that you. are not alone and your decisions do have impact and that love is a much better place to be. It's brighter, more beautiful, more peaceful. I literally cannot tell you the last time I did not wake up with joy in my heart. Now, it's not to say I don't have moments during the day where I'm like,

ah, why that guy sent me that email or frustrations. But the sense of I know where I fit in the world and I'm okay with that. I can be a tiny little communicator for the beauty of psychedelics or for marketing or business. I can teach my students. I can help educate others on living a better life. But in the end, I'm just one little speck, but I'm a speck. but I'm a spect for change or respect for positivity rather than a spec for fear or anger or things like that. Yeah, that's, I think that that is one of the most important things people can do.

And while psychedelics is a path for that, there may be some other outlets. So the question to you is this. How, first off, at what point did you get to the spot where you're okay being who you are? Were there some things that got you there? Or was it a psychedelic experience? Was it a relationship? And like, what was it that got you to that spot? So take it from right there and I'll be right back.

Okay. Okay. I think the beginning for me of this journey was I spent about seven years disconnected from teaching. I sort of got burnt out on teaching and I spent time in nature almost every day for those years. And I reconnected with God with a higher power with the universe. I was working in this forest and I had deer that were lying 10 feet away from me, just watching me. And I just felt like they almost were my friends. So that was the beginning of that journey where I started to try to remove the toxicity that we have often growing up in suburbia or in cities where we're isolated from nature.

One nice thing about cities like New York, maybe other cities is there's a central park where you can get out in nature if you choose to. but from that that beginning I then met my partner and wife first just as friends and I knew she was going to be a friend for me for life and then eventually we started dating and now we're married and she

similar values as I do love of nature younger child so we have a lot of commonality and so that brought more joy but still stuck in the world, so to speak. And I think it was really, it was truly the psychedelics that put me over the top with that. It was this, first it was a sense of, okay, you need to clear out some of this crap that's in your life, the social media, other things.

And then it was, again, you know, as we got about it earlier, it's just so hard to describe, but I had this one psilocybin journey. where my intention was to get closer to God. And that had been my intention in the previous journey, and it was a very different journey in probably long to discuss. But the second one, it first was just this pure sense of peace. And it was also the sense that I wasn't breathing, and I was okay with that. At first I did sort of had to put my hand in my chest to make sure I really was breathing.

but it was a sense that I was completely free and then I had this light just emanate from inside my head out and I actually had to open my eyes rather than keep them closed because I felt like I was almost getting blinded by the light when I opened my eyes to light diminish some I was still there but my so I was joking with with my wife after that journey I said I needed sunglasses inside my brain because the light was so bright and i think that was the final journey that pushed me over that that edge of of joy but it took some period of healing before that so for me it was maybe almost like a decade long process now if i had done the psychedelics at the beginning of that journey when i was in the forest it might have happened a lot sooner i wasn't back then i wasn't

really even thinking psychedelics was you know I was just thinking I I need to get away from people I need to be in nature and and and clear my for myself for my soul I was dealing with some guilt feelings and and shame that I had from previous trauma that I had and I was able to work a lot of that out through just being in nature and then psychedelics was the final 20 percent maybe that really pushed me over the top and cleared all that out. Yeah, you know, I see a, I see a eryodyny thread that runs through this maze, and it is this idea. I like how you use capital T and little T for trauma.

But I really think that this thread that binds us together is, whether you find it through psychedelics or you find it through meditation or maybe some of the medicine or something. I think the thread is that under, understanding that the traumas in your life, while maybe horrible, were necessary. And I think psychedelics allows you to come to the conclusion of why it was necessary. Maybe it was a lesson that was learned. Maybe it was a change that had to be made that was going to be made, whether you liked it or not.

You know, it's not a question of, it's no longer a question of it wasn't fair or it wasn't right. It's more of a question of, oh, now I understand. There was a meaning there that had to happen. And it was going to happen in one way or another, whether the bandy was ripped off slow or if was ripped off fast or there's still a hole or the hole has been filled. Like there's a lesson there. And it's life's lesson. And if you can understand that the purpose of the tragedy, if you can understand the purpose of your tragedy, then I think you can come across as a Randall Harrison and have this love for life, this zest for life, this blinding light. Like, you know, and I, the most amazing people that spread so much love have usually gone through the most horrific tragedies.

And they've come out and they're beautiful because of it. You know, some people get consumed by it. And so I'm almost afraid to ask this question, Randall, but how did you become such a beautiful person? Well, it's a work in progress. Some people probably, some people probably would call me beautiful. yeah wow I you know I

you know I attributed to to God I attributed it to psychedelics greater consciousness I attributed the people around me you know I early in life I had some some good mentors

and then And during business life, so to speak, not really, more and more business measures, but not affecting me personally, really. And then in the last period, I would say, really, you know, just people in the psychedelic space. Because, again, once you're, as you see, George, you know, once you've done this altered consciousness, again, not just psychedelics, once you cross that barrier, it's just a different perspective. It's just I can't go back to being that person I was 10 years ago. I can't go back to, like even for me now teaching has become difficult because I grading students that aren't performing well. I always want to encourage them, I'm going to do better, but now it's harder for me to give them the grade they deserve. because I want to be like, yes, but you're a great person,

so you really deserve a better grade, but I can't do it. It's kind of funny how it's like that was actually affected my teaching. But I think the beauty just comes from your eyes being opened. And I think it's hard to understand that except going back to that neuroplasticity where your eyes now become a greater window of your soul of those connections. One of my other brothers is an eye doctor, and I was talking to him once, and he was doing an exam.

He said, you know, the eyes are pretty amazing, and I'm like, nah, whatever. And he said, you know, when we do that scope, and we go into your, deep into your pupil, go beyond the eye and we can see and he actually one of his examinations saw a tumor beyond the eye that it was giving this person this really kind of negative personality and and might have been it might have been fatal eventually if it hadn't been caught i don't know that but anyways you know referred him to a to an oncologist and and he got the tumor taken

care of and she was a different person when he came back much more and of course I could have just been the experience they were thankful to my brother for you know safe not saving him but curing him of this problem but you know he was saying you know the eyes are really from a scientific standpoint or medical standpoint so imperative and so just thinking that now with a psychedelic experience and just talking about where this light behind my eyes I think it's back to your question of the beauty. I think it's your eyes do get opened up, not in the, not in the,

oh, you know, literally, but in the, in the crazy scientific medical way that these new connections are being made and you're actually seeing things differently. So that irritating neighbor or co-workers now, oh, you know, it's just funny, wacky, strange, whatever, and just kind of move on rather than being all day,

sitting there like how am I get back at this person for irritating me so much you just kind of move on beyond it it's not like I said it's not the things don't irritate you anymore because they do at times but it's just your outlook and your general way of feeling and thinking just changes and I think the people and that's okay that's one of the problems with integration also back to that because that's one of my big things I harp on his integration is like wait is one one story where this guy first psychedelic experience I think was psilocybin and the medicine told him get off the alcohol get off the cocaine straighten your life out you're loved this is what

you need to do and he came back from that journey he's like oh my god I need to you know, yes, I need to change my life. But all the people in his life were the people that were there the day before that journey. So his, you know, his drug dealer was like, hey, do you need a new, you know, do you need a new batch? And he felt actually more isolated than before his psychedelic experience, because before the psychedelic experience, at least he was, he knew he was an attic and he knew what he was and he didn't like it. but he knew all people, but now afterwards he was changed, and he had the people around him were all like, hey, let's party tonight. And he's like, no, no, no, I don't, you know, I don't, you know,

I'm like, what do you mean you don't do that anymore? Of course you do. You know, you're a so-and-so. You do that all the time. And so it took him, I think, four different experiences to finally get off all the, the addictions and part of that was also expanding his community so he finally realized hey I need to find new people and he did and now and so I think that's where the beauty comes from you have to you know I'm not saying you know you discard all your friends obviously not yeah but you redefine

you redefine relationships for sure and you say you know hey that toxic brother oh he's still my brother I still love him I still want the best for him but hey I don't need to interact with him every day or I don't need to take his toxicity and internalize it. I can say I hear you, I empathize, but that's not me. And I love you, brother. Goodbye. And then just find beauty. It, in any other industry, you know, I'm like I said, I'm about three years into really diving deeply in psychedelics. Any other industry, you'd be like, oh, you're a newbie. You have no say in this, you know, you need 30 years experience and, you know, a PhD in neuroplasticity to even talk about the stuff. And in this community, it's like, wow, Rand, that's beautiful.

You're writing a book and you're sharing these stories. This is fantastic. This is going to make the world better. And it's like, wow. This is, it's so, so you need to find that community. You need to find those people. And that's how that beauty expands. And that's how that joy expands in your life, you're still going to have moments of flashbacks or moments of, you know, anger or whatever, you drop a glass of milk or it spills and you're all upset. But, you know, it's just, you realize that so many of the stuff that holds us back and back to what you said, even the traumas have lessons. You know, we were, we were taking the wrong lessons from them. A lot of the times, you know, oh, I'm guilty because I let that, I let him or her

do that to me or I'm shameful because I should have known better that to let that person do that to me or whatever rather than saying wow that person was a predator and I didn't do anything wrong and I'm stronger like you said I'm stronger now because of that because I survived that and I can still find beauty and this one guy who actually went, I couldn't do this, but he did, and I can give him credit. He went and he was abused as a child and he went to his abuser after psychedelics. Because the psychedelic, the medicine told him, go find him. And he did.

And he had this beautiful, if you can call it that, but beautiful conversation with this guy who, big surprise, was abused as a child and was just passing that abuse along as this intergenerational. trauma often occurs and he was able to forgive him and move on and see you know yeah we're all damaged and sometimes people act out that damage in a horrible way um but he can be forgiven and he can and this guy could also then forgive himself for that shame and guilt that he felt so okay not to get too woo-woo and you know too oh you know psyched dogs can get that way and I guess that's for me the business background helped ground me a little more and psychedelics themselves ground me but

I I couldn't do that I know I would want to punch out the guy I would want to drag him through the mud. I'd want everyone the world to know. And but now, you know, after psychedelics, you know, you just see it differently. You're like, no, he was traumatized. You know, he, he was just acting out on his own trauma, you know, again, totally wrong way, an appropriate way. And that's, you know, that gives a, you lead to a whole lot of discussion about how we, deal with punishment, which I don't want to get into.

But anyway, that's the beauty of psychedelics, where you can actually go to your abuser and say, hey, I forgive you. Wow. I mean, that, that blows my mind. So that's, anyway, that is the beauty of psychedelics for sure. Yeah, it's, I'm willing to bet that that person probably had all those feelings that you were talking about, about wanting to hurt that person, drag them through the mud to make them feel pain.

But at some point in time, I forgot exactly how the metaphor goes, but it's like hate is like swallowing a poison pill and hoping the effect is on the other person, right? Yep, yep. So like in some ways, forgiving himself by forgiving that person.

Exactly. Forgive, yeah, the greatest line that I ever heard and might even come from my partner was forgiveness is not for the other person, it's for yourself. Because we hold that anger at that person, but they never experience it because we don't typically tell them. We don't call them up and say, you blah, blah, blah, blah, we hold that in. And that stress is hurting us. So you're right.

That same line, same thing you said. When we forgive, it's not about the other person as much as it is about letting it go for us and letting stop us hurting ourselves, beating ourselves up for that experience. So yeah, forgiveness is a thing we do more for ourselves and for the other people. Yeah, it's so fascinating to think about the way in which we live with these emotions that are so huge that they are overwhelming and they're so powerful. And we're never taught at our early age. Like, okay, this emotion is a significant.

for this. You know, so many of us, and you know what? I hope, and I see this happening in a way, I think psychedelics has the ability to change the idea of education. You hinted at this earlier, but it seems to me that what is known to the universe is not something that's taught. It's something that's revealed. And I found myself in the midst of psychedelic ecstasy or psychedelic trips learning

things, not because it was someone was showing it to me, because it was revealed to me, the same way like the scales drop from your eyes and you're able to see, oh, I understand why this person's in pain. Like, it's not that I'm learning that. It's like, I get it. It's been shown to me. And now I can, you know, and all these things that you said connect where you do see more. Literally your pupils are like this big sometimes.

Yeah. More light is getting in there. You're seeing more, whether it's through, you know, feeling or touch or seeing. But now I find myself after having a lot of psychedelic experiences, I can see myself in other people. I can recognize that thing in other people. What I've learned is that if that thing you see in other, the other is only because you recognize it in yourself. And that's good and bad. Like if you see great things in people, it's because you recognize it.

If you see bad things in people, it's because you recognize. Like that, that's in you. How many times I've thought to myself, oh, I know why this, you know why they're doing this? This person's doing this because you're trying to get over on me. They're going to, you know what they're going to do? They're going to say this and they're going to do that. And then I thought to myself, like, that's what I would do. Oh, my God, I'm a horrible person.

But yeah, I think psychedelics, that's what for me has been revealed to me. Is these things I think I see in the other, only things I recognize in myself. Have you had a similar experience? I love that, yes, reveal. I should use that word more often. that's perfect you'll learn it it's shown you i mean that is that's that is classic and it's shown to you and again a way you can't necessarily describe but um yeah i i i've done that i've had that experience also where i've watched been watching a show or whatever and it's like oh yeah

that person's going to do that and oh yeah they do it and then you're like oh whoops uh maybe i've revealed too much about myself there right right but yeah i i i I think, you know, I would love to see psychedelics do a paradigm shift in more than just psychedelics, but in learning and governing maybe in so many different ways. How, you know, how we treat people, how we govern people, how we relate to people, can all be shifted with this revelation. and so my joke that I do with some people in psychedelics

is, you know, I want to sneak psychedelics into the water for Congress or something like that. And so all of a sudden we can see them all hugging each other around and, you know, all their separate sides. But the problem with that is, of course, well, first of all, you can never do that. But the shadow side, because I think that's, I would love. love to see more research in that one area because if we could find a way like this guy,

Jason that I was talking about, the young guy, that saw his shadow itself and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be this person that's condescending to my girlfriend or whatever versus the healer who decided that, you know, he was the greatest healer ever. So I would love to do a study on that shadow side, Because I think Psychedelics would be helpful if every member of Congress took it, but took it in a way that didn't expand their ego, but revealed to them there's a better way to govern or a better way to live or a better way to love. So, yeah, maybe I'm hopeful. I do think psychedelics is definitely going to do a paradigm shift with climate change.

I think so much of psychedelics is tied to nature and tied to the beauty within nature and then the realization of, oh, whoa, so many species are becoming extinct every year. And we're losing so much forest every year due to growing pommel oil or just urbanization. You know, all these stupid things we're doing for whatever reason, for our vision of what society. or life should be like. And so I think hopefully at least with climate or with the earth, we'll see psychedelics and that are definitely in a parallel step, I think, in terms of paradigm shift. But the rest, I'm hopeful, but I don't know. Yeah.

I am too. And I think that maybe deep down you do know. And I think that you're doing it right now. I think you're making a little bit better. I, um, as I, as I, I'm having an absolute blast, man. And I could talk to you probably for another hour. we're just kind of getting warmed up. But I got to,

I gotta, I gotta go to work in a little bit. And I, I just, before we go anywhere, I didn't even get to everything I wanted to talk to you about, you know,

I wanted to talk about the heroic hearts project. I want to talk about empowering sites.com. But before we leave, why don't, maybe you can share with us, like what,

what do you have coming up? You got the book coming up, maybe, what is this empowering sites that I see that you and, in your wife have put together. What is that all about? Uh,

I guess I didn't even realize this until more recently, which is kind of funny, but I was doing this exercise for something where it said, you know, boil down your life to one word. And it dawned me, and this is something, again, growing up, I never thought I would ever be, but the word that came strongly to me was educator. And so, and I look back in my life, I'm like, yeah, all my life I've been trying to educate people in both my official realm of business marketing, but also in the realm of, you know, wellness and health and all these things are connected. You can't have a happy, joyful life if you are in pain. and you can't have a happy, joyful life if something else is dragging you down. And so, you know, about 10 years ago, or more than that now,

about 15 years ago, I got involved in the wellness area because I had this experience where I went to for physical to my primary care of doctor, just a regular routine physical. And the first question he asked me, about how are you doing? Good to see you or whatever.

He said, what prescriptions can I get you today? Wow. And I said, and I was on no prescriptions at that time. So it wasn't like I was someone already on medication. And I said, wow, the world has changed. Where my doctors, instead of saying, you know, how are you feeling or are you, you know, why you're here today was what prescription can I get you and that led me down this rabbit hole wellness and that's what the empowering sites came about where we wanted to empower people

to live better lives educates the older word empowers kind of the buzzier cute word for but basically the same thing and so that spawned this thing you know digging into to the science of why is nature so powerful? Well, trees and plants give off fighting sides, which is this chemical. And they also have these killers, killer, they're called, I just lost the name of them, but they're called something killer cells. And we can, as we're walking in the forest, we're absorbing these things. So it's not just the calming element of nature. There's actually a scientific physical thing happening at the same time as mentally, and in your heart, and in your heart because you're happy because you're in nature and you're seeing birds or whatever you're

seeing flowers. And then so that was one component of. And so the nature was one component of it. And then I looked around and I saw, you know, people are eating all this processed food. And I started looking at labels for the first time of my life. And sugar was a label in almost every product I bought. you know, salad dressing. What? Why is sugar in sour dressing in ketchup, in tomato sauce, and all the stuff? And I started saying, and then I, you know, I saw the study where

the average American consumes, you know, more than 100 pounds of sugar a year. And then I saw the obesity crisis. And so that led down to the kind of a wellness aspect of empowering sites of, you know, here's how we should be eating. Here's the things we should be avoiding. And then the third component or a third leg of that is exercise. And, you know, sometimes we get too caught up, oh, you know, every January gym memberships, you know, go crazy because everyone's like, oh, my resolution to do it. And then by the end of January, memberships are already declining because people have given up on their resolution. And so it's like, well, don't make it a resolution. Make it a life change. You know, and exercise doesn't have to be

a gym, it can be taking a walk in your neighborhood, taking the stairs rather than the elevator in your business. You know, going, if you work in New York, like I did for a couple of years, go in Central Park during your lunch break and take, you know, walk in nature. You know, walking is actually probably the best exercise people can do, but they get so caught up like, oh, no, I need to be in a gym and I need to have weights. And weights are important, too, but, you know, all these machines, no, you don't need that. So those were all the things that's kind of so, So I was getting into this whole wellness space with that. And then psychedelics, which is sort of, I guess, I mean, unplanned,

but sort of this fourth leg that joined that wellness thing because that's the component that adds a mental wellness. So you have the physical wellness and the spiritual wellness from the psychedelics. But, yeah, I mean, Jordan, I love it too. You are a great host. I love your smile. I love how you react. it helps me as a guest if you're a

I was talking I was on a Zoom with this guy and the whole time I was talking he was like this and I was getting freaked out I was like you know I was like trying to edit myself as I'm talking because every time I looked at him

he's like I was like and I was talking about you know good happy stuff yeah anyway so I love that you know down the road I don't know if you ever have repeat guests

that once the book is out, I would love to talk about that. Definitely would love to talk about Heroic Hearts. Yeah. Profit that's just saving veterans lives. I have reoccurring guests all the time. I hope you'll be one of them. I hope you'll be one of them.

I think we just scratched the surface. And more than that, like, I see this evolution of what I'm doing. The same way that, you know, you get a download or the same way you begin to interact in something new and you learn about it. It's kind of like a dance. And then you can add in new moves.

For me, the next move is having more and more people contribute. I found that when we get, like, it's really fun to have like a one-on-one conversation, and I'm never going to stop doing that. But I have also found that there's a little bit more chemistry, and, you know, we can add a little color here and a little sound over there if we have four or five of us. Yeah, I saw that one that you did. Yeah, I'm going to start having more and more of those. And I hope that you'll be someone I can call on to come on and talk with people.

It's really fun. And so, yeah. Yeah, I feel like we're building a community and amplifying sound. Yeah, yeah. One last thing I want to say what I do you got. Cool about this evolution. is so the only so I'm totally off Facebook I do Instagram only because I still post nature photos that's all I do on Instagram and all the two I follow

just do nature photos so it's very common when I do that so LinkedIn is kind of my main tool and I have been blown away in the last year you know LinkedIn to me prior to 2022 was this sort of you know the nice striped tie we just say business stuff on here and you know try to increase our sales or whatever we're doing whatever the personal goals are but in this last year I have been blown away by how many people are sharing those psychedelic stories on LinkedIn it's like so phenomenal that is like to me that's the greatest evolution so far yet that you know I I can just imagine this CEO, you know, blogging his or her LinkedIn, and all of a sudden there's, oh, there's Joe from whatever facility telling his story of tripping out on, you know, magic mushrooms. Wow, to have that freedom and to have that need.

I mean, that's the other thing with these stories. I think people have this need to. Psychedelics are so opening that you kind of want to go to the top of the mountain and screaming out to the people, take psychedelics and heal. And so I see that with LinkedIn and this tiny little platform that was so, so formal.

And so just, you know, talk about your new article or your new this or that. And now people are saying, hey, man, psychedelics changing me. And here's why, here's how. And not saying you should do it, but just sharing my story. And so if you're interested, here's what you might experience.

It's beautiful. Anyway, leave it with that. I agree. It's fascinating because Lincoln has so many people that are leaders in communities. And here's all these voices that are out there. And I don't want to say frantically or desperately, but they are, what's a better word? What word should I use, Rand? What's better than they're not desperate.

They're not frantic, but they are invigorating. They are. They are going into the world and changing things purposefully and meaningfully. And here's these people and you can see the way they've been affected by psychedelics. And you can literally see what they're doing. Like I've spoken to so many people, you included who are making a conscious decision to change the world in a way that is beneficial. It's not just about money. It's not just about status.

It's just not about this one thing. It's about creating and changing in, you know, making the world a better place on top of the fact of success. Like they want to change it in a positive way and be successful as an outcome, like you said. It's so fascinating to me. So where can people find you? Do you got any other gigs coming up? Where can people find you? And what are you excited about?

Well, the one funny thing, I think I have to write an article about the book process. because it's changed a lot since the last time I wrote a book and so I've found wow you know a big learning curve on this process but I am excited about it the cover is almost done and the cover is beautiful I cannot wait to share it probably early December it'll be done nice it's not psychedelic in nature like one of Rick Strausson's books which I love but the cover is so psychedelic it screams you know like either either take me or stay away from me, or this is going to be a little more subtle. But I'm so excited about that. And people can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way. They can go.

My website is randall S. Hanson.com. Find me there. I'd love to connect. I'd love to, you know, as you said, I don't know how big a force I am, because I don't think I'm that big a force, but I am a force for good. and i think it was before psychedelic but psychedelics has given me so many more tools to amplify that message and the book being one of them and that so i am excited about the book you know back to your earlier comment yeah you know books are like my uh my designer is like well you know you know you

really need to focus on the kindle edition and i'm like i said you know i have like 10 books downloaded on my kingdom and i and i don't read them i you know give me here you're there's a book right here. Yeah. It gives me a hard book that I can, I don't know why. I mean, I'll just make on plain travel, having a Kindle or, you know, an e-book is a million times easier than lugging around a hardback. But, you know, I still love that sense.

The book, my book, is only going to be in paperback and e-book because a hardback, again, I think hardback especially. I don't know how people afford them. I look at hardback, you know, 40 bucks. bucks a pop and it's like, I wouldn't pay 40 bucks for my book. I'm sorry. You know, 20 bucks, yeah, I'd pay that. But 40 bucks, no, I wouldn't. So, and then, of course, the e-book you can price even much lower and much more economically. But so, so those are things. So LinkedIn, my website, I will have a website for the book. It's not quite ready yet.

But again, once the book covers done, the launching December, we'll have a website for the book, too. I can't wait to read it. I, um, I'm really looking forward to Now I'm excited to see the cover. So, yeah. I'll email you a copy of it. Yeah, I would love it. I would love it. And as soon as you're ready,

I would be honored to be one of the first people to get to have you come on and explain it. So it'll be fun. Rand, I'm really thankful for your time, and I'm really thankful for everything you shared. I'm looking forward to future conversations. I hope you have a phenomenal day. And we'll talk again soon, my friend.

Yeah, Jordan. I hope so. Thank you very much. You're the first one that asked me to do the podcast so you get the you get the primary credit right there nice very nice so i'm gonna i'm gonna hang us up on here but stay on for one more minute because i still want to talk to you for a second okay ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for joining the true life podcast go check out ran he's on lincoln he's got his website out there he's a he is a force and he's a big force for positive change

in the world and i hope you can see that by talking to the day i know i did that's what we got for today alone