TrueLife - The Anti-Hero’s Journey - Doc Askins

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Doc is no one. He is Banksy's erudite elder brother, a Deadpool wannabe, and the Shadow of the world's most interesting man.When artificial intelligence has a fever dream, it dreams of being Doc. He is a son, brother, husband, father, veteran, psycho, therapist, and friend. He is the grinning embodiment of the Duchenne marker, all of his lies are true, and he writes his books with tears in his eyes for you and only you.Ben Askins has an eclectic background with degrees in Outdoor Education, Intercultural Studies, Physician Assistant Studies, and Divinity. He has nearly two decades of experience practicing and teaching wilderness, tactical, and expeditionary medicine in the military. In civilian life, he is a Psychiatric Physician Assistant with an evidence-focused and integrative approach to mental health that includes extensive experience providing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, medicine management, and spiritual direction. He is certified with the Multidisciplinary Association on Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Ben is a member of the Wilderness Medical Society, a National Outdoor Leadership school alum, a veteran of the Global War on Terrorism, and has completed postgraduate training in Neuropsychiatry and Genomics.https://www.antiherosjourney.com/http://linkedin.com/in/doc-askins-8b80bb27a One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

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

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're ready for this. I know that I am. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. Hope the wind.

Is that your back? I got a great show for you. Got a great show for you today. The one and only. Doc Askins, aka Deadpool, aka Ben, aka son,

brother, husband, father, veteran, psychotherapist and friend. All of his lives are true. Everybody should know that by now. And he writes his books with tears in his eyes for you

and for you only, ladies and gentlemen. The one and only been Doc Askins, author, father, speaker, Speaker of truth and incredible individual. Ben,

thank you for being here today, my friend. How are you? My pleasure, man. I'm glad to be back. The mask isn't muffling my voice, is it? A tiny bit, but who cares, man? As long as you're not sweating under there too much, you know what I mean? No, I'm good to hook. Nice, man. I love it, brother. Thanks for being here today.

What is going on in the world, man? You got the book out, you got the audio book out. You've been doing some speaking gigs. What's going on, man? Yeah. I opened my own private psychiatry practice in Kentucky. I bought a farm as like a surprise gift for my wife for our anniversary. What else?

Yeah. I'm working on a bunch of like research projects with a couple companies. I can't really talk about it beyond that. But some pretty cool stuff. Yeah, cool stuff. All of it. Yeah. You know, like do you watch the Super Bowl over the weekend?

Deadpool 3 is coming out in July. So now, like, I have a reason to live for another couple months. Yeah, I'm just excited to be alive, man. Excited to talk to you. You're a good dude. I'm a good dude. We'll have a good conversation. Of course, man.

So when the, when the potential clients come into the psychiatric office, are you wearing that mask? It hasn't happened yet. But, you know, at some point, it'll make sense. You know, like it'll become a thing if I keep doing it long enough, right? And then they'll expect it. It'll be like, why am I talking to the regular guy when I could be talking to Deadpool? You just got to ease people into it over time, right?

Of course. Yeah, it's like anything. Pretty soon people will want to only want to come to talk to the Deadpool guy. Yeah, it's like any other sci-op. Eventually, you just adjust to whatever. They keep stuffing down your throat over and over again. This is delicious. I'll take more advertising, please.

Man. I love it's it's so true like advertising is you know what blows my mind is that perhaps some of the most intelligent minds and art design are currently in the world of propaganda maybe it's always been that way yeah I think it's probably an escapable right like it's all about winning friends and influencing people like dale Carnegie's dead games people play right what else are you going to do while you're stuck in this meat suit Well, you know what? Maybe we should talk about the idea of influence for a little bit.

Like, you have to be one of the most well-read people I've spoken to on the podcast. Thank you. I love, yeah, it's true. And I think that people who read The Anti-Hero's Journey, there's so much in there. People that are watching this right now, you should check out Ben's book, The Anti-Hero's Journey. It's just chock-full of so much cool stuff. It'll make you laugh. You'll sit down the book like five times and be like, what is this guy talking about?

You look it up and you start laughing. It's amazing. but the idea of influence, man. Let's riff on that for a little bit. Yeah, yeah. What do you want to know about being influential, right? Yeah. I think my friend David Connell over at psychedelics.com,

they're like naming me some kind of like influencer or something in the psychedelic sphere. I don't even know what that means, man. I'm on like the cover of a magazine in India. I don't even know how that happened. Like where do we live? What time is it whenever like a guy like me? just like sticks his neck out there and shows up on a magnet. I don't like how do you become an influencer?

What is an influencer in the first place, right? Like people just listen to you because you have a camera. Everybody has a camera now. Everybody has a personal brand now. Like it's just so much white noise at this point. I'm just one more example of like what white noise can turn into, I guess. I don't even know how to make sense of it. Like why would you be influenced in the first.

place by anyone. What, like, what was the first influence in your life, George? Probably your parents, I would say, like, on some level, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And did your parents, like, tell you the truth about everything from the start? Or did they tell you about, like, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and a whole bunch of other bullshit?

Yeah. So, like, why do you believe anybody? Why do you accept influence from anybody? after having the sorts of experiences that we all have as children of just being lied to over and over and over and over and over again. Sometimes they're fun lies. Sometimes they're harmful lies. But like, why don't you just think for yourself or not at all? Yeah.

If you don't think for yourself, there's lots of people paid lots of money to do the thinking for you. Yeah. You can outsource it to whoever you want, right? You can outsource me at whatever my hourly rate is. you can outsource it to that supercomputer in your pocket for whatever amount you paid for that. Like there's always somebody who's ready to like set you up for an automated subscription for whatever it is that you think will distract you from your existential dread. Yeah. Yeah. It seems to me and I'm hopeful that this happens to everybody is that they find themselves on the doorstep of despair because they realize everything they've been told is a lie. Yeah. It's like a nihilism, right? It's all meaningless. It's the Big Lebowski in the parking lot where they come walking out and the nihilists are threatened them and Donnie says to Walter, these guys are going to hurt us, Walter? No, Donnie, these men are cowards.

It's so true. Right? The Big Lobosky keys to life. Yeah. Man, the dude. You know, I've got this like, you're one of like the three and a half people that have read my book so far. So like, you know, figuring out where that fits into the overall scheme of like, what do we believe about who we are in the first place? Like, what are we doing here? It's a whole bunch of like stories about stories about stories that go all the way back. But like, how do you make sense of it? What, like, where are you at now? I just listened to your podcast with our mutual friend Clint Kiles over at the Christian Psychedelic

podcast. I was really grateful for that conversation. If anybody hasn't listened to that, go on over there and take a listen to some of, you know, George's story there, man. I really appreciated you opening up about a whole bunch of your stuff that's going on there. But like, what are you doing on a Christian psychedelic podcast, man? What's the deal there? You know, I really like Clint Kiles.

And I think Clint Kiles and I have... some shared goals and some shared sacrifices, as do all my brothers and sisters out there. And I think that going on and speaking about the things that happened in your life, you know, while irrelevant and, you know, I don't, I don't really want to go out and like, hey, look at me. I'm a big baby sometimes, you know, or I fought this battle and I lost. Like it's not about that, but it's about being proud of living a life where, you know, you fail sometimes. You go out there and you start peeling back the onion. And the more I understand, the more I do that, the more relationships I make,

the more I realize that it's my life experience. It is the, let me think for the right word for a moment. It is the lived experience that makes a life worth living. And there's no real good and there's no real bad. There's only the lived experience and that which you draw from it. And that hopefully allows you to have the courage to take the next step forward and be the best version of yourself. And that doesn't mean society's best version of yourself. That doesn't mean, you know, the external validation that you're the people seek, that I seek, that everybody seeks.

Like, that is what is hindering you. This idea of external validation is the thing that's causing you to be stuck. And so that's why I'm on other people's podcast. That's why I'm on Clint's podcast. That's why I'm opening up out there is that. look, I got it to a point in my life where, you know, I can't do it anymore. Like the lies that I've told myself, the lies that I've been surrounded by have not only hurt me, but they started hurting my family.

And I can't have that anymore, man. So it's like, I'm just this open book now and I'm coming out and I'm doing what I love. And I think it's contagious, man. So thanks for asking and thanks for the kind words. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I thought it was pretty cool that you came on his podcast there. I mean, I've been a Christian virtually my whole life, but I'm still, you know, I'm like 43.

and still trying to figure out some of that stuff, right? Like, I got a good grade in Hebrew. I got a good grade in Greek in seminary or whatever, and I'm still trying to figure out, what do I believe as a grown-up? How do I raise my kids? What stories do I tell them? We told them a whole bunch of stories that we inherited that I just,

I don't know how true they are, right? And that's the struggle is this idea of, like, truth in the first place, right? That was a question. you know, not to quote the wrong, the bad guy or whatever, but that was Pontius Pilots question, right? Like, what is truth whenever they was trying to decide whether they should crucify Jesus or not? I'm not sure, man.

Like, it's stranger and harder and weirder than it ever used to be to try to figure out what actually is true. Like, it's almost like you've got to cancel everything and go all the way down to nothing to absolute zero and try to like, reconnoissements. instruct from there what exactly you do and don't want to believe about anything, man. But that's, that's hard to pull off while you got a nine to five and you got kids to feed and you got responsibilities and all these other illusions that, uh, just demand your attention

all of the time, right? Like, how do we approach truth in this like post truth era where all the people in charge are lying to us and we know it, but we got to vote for somebody. So, you know, November's coming. What are we going to do in November? Like, uh, just going to show up and flip a coin like every other year or vote for a third party that's not going to make it or, yeah, I don't know what to do, man. I got to like teach my kids and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just struggling against the mystery, uh, behind all the other mysteries like everybody else, right? It's, it's so true. You know, yeah, please. You know, hang on, hang on a second. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to do a man behind the mask. A second hair, like it's just getting hot, man. If you have another mask into there. This mask is actually really funny. Whoa.

That is pretty epic, man. It puts the lotion in the basket. It's like, you know, I'm going to tell the truth. It's like I got to take off all these masks about who I am in the first place. There's that identity question behind all these other questions or whatever, right? It's so wrapped. Yeah, let me, this is like my thing now, right? It's like I'm the zero with a thousand faces.

Let me hang on a second here. Scooby do this other one off here. And now, oh, yeah, oh. And we just lost all of the people who are watching live. They're like, oh, God, put that mask back on. God damn, I didn't realize that was what that guy looked like underneath. They're expecting Ryan Reynolds and they got stuck with this. It looked like an avocado had sex with an even uglier avocado.

and not like, you know, it was like angry. They had to work some stuff out in therapy or whatever, right? Like now we're stuck with this, yeah? Yeah, let me, let me, I've got this, like, idea about telling you a story. And I don't know if you're cool with that, but that's kind of my byline now is this psychedelic science war storyteller. So like what I want to tell you maybe is the, is, like, I have this idea of what an origin story might be for the entire universe. And I'm just going to throw it out there and see, you know,

what comes back or whatever, right? Because like you said, I've read a significant amount of ink at this point about these sorts of philosophy questions and physics questions and all of that sort of stuff, right? I think everybody agrees before there was something, there was nothing. I don't think that that's controversial. It's just nonsense. You can't really talk about nothing. We talk about the Big Bang or we talk about a creation story or creation myth or, you know, the two options seem to be either the material universe has existed infinitely, which creates mathematical problems that we aren't able to solve.

So we suggest, yeah, maybe not an infinite material universe. So it had to have a beginning. That's where we go with. But what happened before the beginning? And, you know, like your teacher will get mad at you if you ask that question because that's not. There can't be a before the beginning. There's just the beginning of the beginning, right? That doesn't make a lot of sense either.

So here's what I think at this point, provisionally, about the beginning of the universe, is that before there was let there be light, before there was creation in whatever creation myth you have, there was nothing. And that nothing decided to deceive itself into being something. whatever that looks like nothing said i am and when nothing said i am it became something and maybe that was the first god or the god behind all other gods or the creation and what i'm saying nothing what i'm

talking about is this mystery that's incomprehensible and beyond our ability to get at right but if nothing is going to become something it's going to have to be deceiving itself to some degree it kind of tells itself a lie at the very outset. And then if you accept the lie, and this is kind of, you know, me playing around like chapter zero from my book, right? The liar. If the first thing in the world is the creation of all things required this lie, I think that makes sense of a bunch of like what we know about what's available in mythology and history. Because the oldest, you know, Sumerian cuneiform codices and all of the oldest like most ancient Joseph Campbell, with a thousand faces, suggest that there was, the most ancient god was a trickster god.

You go as far back as you possibly can and there's a trickster, right? And we think of the trickster in like, you know, Carl Jungian tradition as this like, you know, Loki figure who is always trying to get away with something, always trying to, you know, trick humankind into making a mistake or it's, it's Enki from, you know, ancient Sumeria that lied to the Adamu human character and tricked him into refusing eternal life whenever he got to heaven to talk to the high God by telling him, yeah, don't eat any of the stuff or don't drink any of the stuff because that's what's going to kill you, but it's actually what was going to make him live forever, right?

But I think actually the first one was deceiving himself, like talking nothing into being something in the first place is this what I call the poetic effect of sin. rather than the noetic effect of sin. There's a sin on the way, effect on the way that we think. So going all the way back as far as possible, everything got created by self-deception in the first place, and we've just been deceiving ourselves to one degree or another ever since. And the idea is that there's a first axiom.

You have to accept something at the outset. Like our parents tell us, hey, you need to believe in this particular religious tradition if you're going to make sense out of the world. or if you're going to be a good person, you need to act in the following ways. You don't tell lies. You don't do all of these sorts of things, right? And if you accept whatever the first lie is that somebody tells you,

you get to play by those rules forever, right? Like there are two theories of truth in philosophy, in Western philosophy. There's the correspondence theory and the coherence theory. And the correspondence theory just says something's true. if it matches everything that's going on outside you, that cup has half a cup of water in it. And there's a line drawn on it that says that's half a cup and either you got closer you didn't.

And either you get an A, a B, a C, a D, or an F on the test based on how close your eyes measure up with what is reality outside of it, right? A coherence theory of truth is do your thoughts match up with the logical rules that are associated with whether you can retain truth from one proposition to another, right? The classical laws of logic, modus ponens. One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and all of those sorts of things. Are we following the rules about the way that you think on the inside, right?

But all of that, again, assumes that you're willing to play the game in the first place, that you're willing to accept the first axiom. And kind of where I'm at at this point is I just want to remind people as much as possible that the first axiom is a lie, that you can play by the rules or you can go looking for a different axiom. And I just want to remind people about that over and over and over again. It's like, okay, do you like the game that you're playing? Do you feel like you understand it and you know what the rules are and you're winning and you're making friends and you're influencing people and you're enjoying it? Great.

Continue to play by that game, but understand that it's a game if you're not. if you're suffering, if you're struggling, if you hate your life, if you don't want to live, if you don't want to go on anymore, it's okay to go all the way back and take a look at whether you want to believe that first lie or not. And it's okay to look for a different one to believe, but you're not going to escape the fact that you're going to have to buy one of them in the first place if you want to play the game at all. Does that make sense? Or have I started to ramble more than usual? No, it's beautiful. it's a lot of work to do that because you have to peel back all the lies that you've told yourself

or been told through the game to get to the first one. And sometimes that first one is tricky to find. It's buried under there. You know, is it the ceramic model of the universe or is it your dad saying that he loved you? You know what I mean? You know, like it's tricky to find it, man. It's heavy to lift that one up.

Yeah. What are you going to build on? You know, it's all what? What's solid? What can you trust? What can you rely on? You know, is it inside you? Is it outside you? Is it a relationship with yourself or a relationship with someone else? Whatever it is, you get to kind of decide and discover at the same time. Is there a comment from my friend Christian Gray here? I see some comments popping up. Yes. Let's check it out. Shout out, Christian. Inky is a trickster god in most of the other stories, he is shown in the same way. In the marriage of Ereshigal and Nurgal, for example,

he arranges events so that Nurgal, God of war, will be held in the underworld for six months of the year, thus preventing warfare and strife during that time. Yeah, yeah, that's a good insight. I like Enkie. He's a good dude, I think, if I was going to pick, if I was going to pick a lie to believe, I might go back to the Enki myth, the Enkie myth. And I think that's the same. people is like the ancient astronaut theory of where we're like a slave planet the Zechariah Sitchin like Russians

came and what are they called? The Anunnaki. The Anunnaki Yankee was one of the Anunnaki with the big brains and it's been alive for a long time. You want to hear a story about those guys? Yeah, man. What you got? Let's hear it. So let me tell you the backstory to writing

lies, lies and more lies, Christians says. Exactly. Lies, damn lies. statistics. Yep. Yep. And, you know, ancient Sumerian myths, right? I am very, you're much more of a psychonaut than I am. You're much more psychedelically experienced in personal practice, right? I, I read all the papers and I have like a license to practice some of this stuff, but I've been very careful about personal practice because of being a husband, being a dad, having businesses, being a soldier, a whole bunch of things where like, there's some, you know, you know, liability associated with all the lies that I've believed and continue to believe about

who I am, right? But I had an experience of a non-ordinary state of consciousness in my 42nd birthday, and I'm going to tell you about that one. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, what's 42? The secrets of the life to life universe and everything, right? Yeah, exactly.

You get it. See, you get it, George. Even if nobody else does, I've always got you. I'm here for you. You become one of my favorite illusions too, George. Okay. You know, 42nd birthday. Two weeks after having that non-ordinary state of consciousness, I got a download that is the anti-heroes journey, the zero with a thousand faces.

For two weeks in a row, I just had to write that book, which is intended to be a psychedelic book, not a book about psychedelic. but a book that is a psychedelic or whatever, right? But I don't know. And maybe you or maybe Christian could help explain to me what exactly the hell was going on. If I give you kind of my journey journal, would that be something you'd be interested in hearing? I love it, man. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So 42nd birthday, you know, doing some holotropic breathwork real hard and get into this non-ordinary state of consciousness. this and I felt like I died every death that anyone has ever died for 13 billion years. Whatever it took from like a single-celled organism all the way up to me sitting on a couch in 2023, all of the death, all of the badness, all of the dark side of things like over and over and over again. I don't know what that is. Like I've read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and what the bardo is supposed to be like sounds similar or like uh understanding of the the nether the underworld or hell or some of those sorts of places in a whole bunch of different religious traditions it felt like i died and gone to hell would be the way to to kind of oversimplify it

and like reincarnating over and over again just to be killed over and over again it's like i got to experience the last 30 seconds of everyone's life for the last however many billion years we've been around. Yeah. And I thought like, okay, I guess I died and went to hell. Now I live here. And I have some like genuine real memories that feel as real as childhood memories of being burned alive and being disemboweled and being drowned and just just death over and over again. What does that say about me that that's what my psyche decided to prepare for me on the other side of some kind of significant experience, right?

but it was whenever I accepted that that okay I guess I live here now I guess I died and went to hell I guess I might as well make the most of it that I started to crack jokes in that whatever other space that was it was like all right you know like they I'd be getting held down by some demon just this hideous thing you know like this is the bad trip of all bad trips like I've compared notes with plenty of people they're like yeah your your trip sounds way shittier than any trip I've ever heard or whatever right I'm getting held down by a bunch of demons and they're slowly cutting my head off with like a dull toothbrush and I'm just cracking jokes now. I'm like, oh, didn't we do this like three billion years ago? This is real fucking original guys. Like if you run out of ideas for tormenting me. And then, you know, like they get all the way through my head and I die. And then I get recycled again and somebody come and stab me in the back.

I'd be like, ah, you backstabbers. We're like, and just shit jokes, just dad jokes. But they were making me laugh or whatever, right? which was where I kind of connected with the Deadpool character from Marvel Comics, right? Because essentially he feels it all and has like the, he has like the regenerating properties that Wolverine has, right, where like he can heal significantly. Like in the movies,

he gets pulled in half and grows new tiny baby legs or whatever, right? And, but he doesn't have an adamantium skeleton. He just has, you know, a regular human. skeleton just has to suffer through all of this stuff. And his way of getting through it is talking to himself and cracking jokes. It's this humor that gets him through all of the amount of pain that

defines his existence. In the comics, like, he wants to die over and over again. He tries to find ways to die by suicide and just can't pull it off, right? He has like a love affair with lady death. Like that's his dream girl is death and he just can't make it happen no matter how hard he tries. And that was what it felt like for me, right? But it was when I connected with humor, when I started to laugh, when I started to just say, okay, I guess I live here now. And I connected to joy. That was when I escaped.

I got out of hell. And I think that that was something that I needed to have sort of cemented in for me is that, you know, joy is the way that I have gotten out of suffering. It's the way that I've endured deployments and being separated from my family. It's the way I've endured, you know, having toxic leadership in the middle. military that you just have to obey these orders that could potentially get you hurt or killed or whatever or like just having a mixed bag as far as childhood goes right but it was always just finding joy hunting the good stuff having a laugh that was my way out of suffering um does that make

sense so far yeah man it makes total sense i think that humor is like the last you know like like gallows humor or any kind of humor. It's like when you come to that situation on the precipice, you can laugh or you can cry. I'd rather laugh. Right. You make yourself laugh, right? That's all you got, man.

People hate it when you, Briar Rabbit, you know? I mean, like all these tricksters is like, just say the joke. Just be in that, Briar Pat.

Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. It makes perfect sense, man. That's our baby. That's where I was stuck. Yeah. So as soon as I started to laugh about it, a few deaths in a row.

I was just cracking jokes and then I escaped. And I got out of hell and I was back on earth. But I was on earth and I was a 90 year old man dying of bright red blood per rectum. I was bleeding out of the chest. And this is where like my medical background shows up some, right? I was riding shotgun in a car and I'm a 90 year old man and I'm just bleeding everywhere. And I'm suffering and this is the end. And I was like, oh, well, this isn't as bad.

Like this isn't a demon burning. me to death. Like, this is, you know, I had a long life and I'm just riding in a car to my death or whatever. It felt like a step down from the intensity of what was going on before. And then I looked at the driver's seat and I saw my 50-year-old son. And if I made eye contact with my 50-year-old son, I became my 50-year-old son. And now I'm driving the car. And I'm like, oh, God, my dad's going to die. I don't let him die. I got to get him to the specialist. I got to get him to the guy. I got to find the hero. I got to find the hero with a thousand faces in this medical system, right?

And, you know, everybody's looking for that answer outside of themselves. Where can I find somebody who's going to save me from death and dying and suffering and pain and all of the problems? I can't do it myself. I got to go find somebody who's been to school for 50 years to figure out how to heal whatever this particular issue is, right? And some of that, you know, like as a physician assistant, you get the opportunity in school in my clinical clerkship, you rotate through all of the specialties. Like I get to shadow the general surgeon and the dermatologist

and the ER physician and the trauma surgeon and, you know, the psychiatrist and every one of the medical specialties imaginable. You know, urology was fun. They got a great sense of humor to be working in that particular specialty on a regular basis, right? But you get to follow all of these specialists around and learn from them. And that was what it felt like was I was going around at the end of life for a whole bunch of different people. And I was so I'm driving to the hospital with my dad who's dying and I get in there and I make eye contact with the specialist who's the surgeon that's going to, you know, try to stop the bleeding in my dad, right? And as soon as I make eye contact with him, I become him.

And guess what I discovered as soon as I became the hero? And you're not the hero. That there is no hero. It's just another dude. Like the guy is not the guy is suffering himself of a bleeding. ulcer like he's doing scopes on people all day long and he's got a bleeding ulcer himself from the stress of being the guy that's supposed to be scoping everybody else out right right and he's got all this crushing student loan debt from going to medical school

and he's trying to build a practice and he's not home enough and his wife and his kids don't know him and they you know they're mad at him for never being there and when he is home he's exhausted and he's useless and uh you know and He just, he's like, he looks at this 90 year old dude and says, like, why is this guy even still alive? Like, oh, my God, he's so old. Fine. I'll save another one of these just so that the insurance company will get off of my neck. And sure enough, he goes in, does whatever surgeries needed to repair whatever the problem is to like, you know, buy this guy another week or whatever it might be.

Right. And then, you know, Bill his ancestors, you know, his children's children for what it's going to cost to fix it. And they'll be in debt forever for another. you know, week with great, great, great grandpa. And then goes back to his office and, like, just drinks a shot of whiskey and wishes he was dead, too. Like, it was just misery on misery on misery, right? And I know that's not like every person's experience, right? I don't want to go super, super duber dark here or whatever, right?

But, like, beautiful. You know, like, I've recycled. And then I'd get done with that and I'd recycle through to like, okay, so now we've got, you know, ortho, right? Like, somebody's got a bone tumor and I'm the guy like, oh, God, my leg. and I'm holding my leg and I'm going to die of this, you know, bone cancer. And I'd make contact with eye contact with a family member who's trying to, we got to find the guy.

We've got to find the guy who's going to save us. We've got to find that savior. They'd make eye contact with a surgeon and the surgeon. It was just another person over and over again. It was, we're all just people. Like you can have a million degrees. You can have, you can be excellent at your job. You can be a very good person, but you're still just going to be a person.

You're like this, this hero concept. needed to just get put to bed for me. And then I wound up writing this kind of book about what I think is a way to try to put, to try to outgrow what are children's stories about needing a hero to come and save you and just being whoever you actually are, rather than trying to put on a thousand different faces

of being the hero that someone else needs. Just figure out who you really are. That's what we need more than anything else. This is what it is to be. on the anti-heroes journey is to be fully human with all the flaws associated with it, with all of the problems associated with it, to not have to just go out into the world with this bullshit spandex suit and this mask and pretend to be something that you're not in order to get by.

That we need to make room in our consciousness collectively for it to be okay, to be whatever each one of us is, and to make the kinds of communities around people that are compassionate, and caring and supportive all the way through life, acknowledging that it will end at a certain point and that it's okay to carry people through that in ways that I'm, you know, I'm still trying to figure out how to do that right myself, right? Like figure out how to raise my kids, like I was saying earlier. I'm trying to figure out how to love my wife and to be a good neighbor and to just, you know, care for my patience and my colleagues and all of those sorts of things from a place

where I'm just being reasonable with the expectations that I said of myself and everybody else. Does that make sense? Man, I think you're speaking to the collective delusions of our society, man. It's just everybody feels like they're not enough. And you're surrounded by this pornographic message of, look at me. I have this. Look at this thing over here. You suck.

You don't have that. And it's just this never-ending fire hose of bullshit that's aimed at people. And it makes them feel so alienated. Yeah, man. Feeling adequate, right? Yeah, man, yes. I'm a member of the veteran mental health leadership coalition. Like, we're doing a bunch of work behind the scenes,

advocating for getting access to psychedelic assisted therapy for everybody, really, but for veterans in particular is kind of like the doorbuster, right? Like, here's some people who we've sent into harm's way as a society, and they have suffered the consequences. of that. And here's some medicine that science suggests should be able to help them heal in a way that is leaps and bounds, orders of magnitude greater than anything that we have currently, right? And what's, what's it going to take? Why is this taken so long? What do we got to do? And one of the, co-founders is General Martin Steele. He's a retired three-star general, two-tour, platoon leader in

Vietnam and the Marine Corps, you know, worked in intelligence community thereafter for a very long time. You know, if there are any heroes left, or if I was going to believe in one, he might be one, right? Like, he's just a good man in so many ways, right? And through some weird psychedelic synchronicity, I wound up picking him up from the airport one time before I had become a member of the coalition and giving him a ride. And we wound up, what we wound up talking about was teenage suicide in the car. Like I had just been to visit Fort Campbell with my family where I'd been stationed before. My daughter had reconnected with a friend of hers.

And my wife was talking to the girl's mom. And she said, you know, like this is eighth grade. And there's three girls in my daughter's old school there that had died by suicide during last year's school year. Like, you know, 13 year old girls, 14 year old girls. And it just, you know, it crushed me. It broke my heart. Like, why? Why? You've been here for the blink of an eye, but you're done. You're done with this planet. You're done with who you are. You're done with whatever mask it is that got laid on you from the outset, right? What is it behind that, right? You know, and that was what, you know, General Steele and I were just kind of trying to make sense of, you know, from his vantage point and all the years of experience that he has from my vantage point as a clinician, trying to understand it. And I don't know, man. That's the answer behind a bunch of it.

It is like I wish that I knew. And I would, you know, like there's things we can point to in research. Oh, you know, online bullying is a new thing. But, you know, bullying's always been there. You know, the identity thing. That's what I come back to over and over again is we don't know who we are and we don't know where we're coming from. And then we feel disconnected, isolated, and alone. And that feels like it's not worth continuing, right?

Like the survival instinct, the instinct to survive is one of the most basic biological drives we have, right? Like if I held somebody down by the throat, they would try to fight tooth and nail to live under normal conditions. It's that fight-flight response. We've all got it hardwired into us. And how much do you have to suffer for how long to override that yourself to decide, I don't want to be here anymore? That level of suffering is unique. It's an unconventional headspace to get locked into, especially that young. What are we supposed to do about that?

How do we address some of those sorts of things? You know, and he and I got to connect in about trying to make sense of that. And just sharing a bunch of stories, right? And I feel like maybe that is the biggest corrective, right? Like a bunch of my life right now has spent on this psychedelic science stuff, on advocacy, on education, on medical practice. And yes, psychedelics are interesting molecules that open up the world. But what I think is going to actually save us all is friendship. I think that friendship is the thing, is the key, is the cornerstone, is what we're all actually looking for,

and what could actually save us and create communities that are healing in and of themselves, whether there's any mushrooms present or not, whether there's any plant medicines present or not. I think that that's what we need more than anything is, you know, that level of connection among people. I think friendship is the answer. I think that's what we're all looking for. think if we were just better friends to each other, that would go as far or further. And then if we were being friendly, we would probably legalize psychedelics as fast as possible, right?

Yeah. So the, I got recycled over and over and over again through all these different medical specialties, right? To the point where I just did, you know, like I was sick of being the sick person and sick of being the family member and sick of being the guy until I realized there was no guy. There is no hero. No one's coming. It's up to us.

We got to figure this stuff out together. And that was whenever I got out of earth and got thrown into this super weird, you know, space, like where I don't know if you call it heaven. I don't know if you call it, they call them entities or whatever. You know, like you just see aliens. I don't, like what's your experience been of some of that stuff, seeing weird things on the other side of a breathwork session or a mushroom, you know, you've got way more experience than this than me. What is all that? I think it's you being honest

with yourself for the first time. I mean, that's what I think it is. It's the first time having the courage to see beyond the bullshit. And I, you know, and whether it's psychedelics, it's, to me, the idea of someone being broken and then being helped through that situation with psychedelics, Like, I think you have to be broken. Like, man, my niece died of a fit in all over this. It makes me want to fucking cry when you start talking about that kind of stuff. Like of goosebumps. Like, I hate it.

And I hate it. And you go down this rabbit hole of like, okay, this is, it seems to me that it's not a mistake. Like, the conditions in which we're living are being thrust upon us. Now, the question is, what do you do with that? Is that a catalyst for change in everyone becoming the best version of themselves? Or is that a way to refresh the tree of liberty with blood? You know, I don't know that, I don't know that answer. My idea is much like you.

Like there's no tearing down this empire. It's the only way to do that is to become the very best version of yourselves. And everybody, every teenager that's died, everybody in your family that's tried to commit suicide. Like, you should learn from that. This profound unhappiness is something that you can fix in yourself. And when you do it, it becomes contagious. The same way illness is contagious, so is wellness contagious. Now psychedelics, when you see the alien, you're seeing a version of what is possible. You're seeing an original idea. You're seeing something you haven't seen before. And I think that that's what psychedelics, whether it's through the other side of breathwork,

whether it's through psychedelics, whether it's a profound mushroom trip where you understand that you're part of this planet, that is the beginning of healing. That is the beginning to expand your senses in a way in which you've never done before. And that's what makes moving forward possible.

All of a sudden, when you're sitting outside and you're like, is it even worth it? I'm going to do it because I got a kid. I'm going to do it because I love my wife. And that's the only reason I'm going to keep moving forward. But then all of a sudden, through this psychedelic journey, you go, you know what?

maybe I'm the problem, maybe believing all these lies, maybe believing that I'm not enough is the problem. You know, and then like that to me is the alien, is seeing yourself for the first time in a way you haven't since you were four. Like that's alien because you can't even describe it. It's been gone so long. But that's what I think these entities are. They're versions of a possible truth that could be there. You know, and we talk about truth. Maybe it's the, maybe seeing these things in a psychedelic journey is,

to live your own truth. Maybe that's the real truth is your truth. What's meaningful to you? What? That's my definition of what these things are on the other side. They are shards of what can be. What do you think? I like it a lot, right?

Like, there's just, I get overwhelmed by the amount of options or alternatives for trying to understand some of the sorts of stuff. And maybe that's because of like reading too much when I was younger or whatever, right? Like do you interpret it as a dream in like a psychodynamic way? There's there's, you know, there's like the what are the channeled works? Like I don't know, you know, like the law of one or are you familiar with Edgar Casey? Of course, the Akashic Records. Yeah.

So like, I don't know what that stuff is, man, but that was like Hopkinsville, Kentucky. That's like down the road for like I've been to Hoptown a whole bunch. I got friends who were on the police force there that deployed to Iraq with me and stuff, right? Yeah. That's my backyard is this Edgar Casey character, right? Who is very, very fundamentalist Christian and then would go into these trances and say all of this super woo woo new agey sounding sort of stuff. And then would also like say, hey, mix up some like nutmeg and three rice kernels and feed it to this kid who's got this horrible. fever and the fever would break or whatever, right?

Like this like medical, intuitive thing that nobody could make sense of, but that they like built a whole hospital around back in the 19th century just so that people could come see this dude and try to like let him heal them in almost like a, you know, touch the hem of his garment, Jesus kind of way that, you know, like what are you supposed to do to make sense of any of those sorts of things, right? The, uh, go ahead. on some level, I think the, I think answers are revealed to you. They're not learned.

You know, and look at, choose your faith, whether it's the Christian tradition and, or it's the Hebrew tradition, or it's the, some of the Eastern traditions. The answers are all around us, man, and they're revealed to you. And on some level, science has taken us so far away. I'm not just bad, you know, using science as a pejorative or anyway, but on some ways, we've gotten to this point where we can only take. for truth what's measurable. We don't have the language.

We don't have the tools to measure everything. We're very narrow in the world that we participate, in the world we see, and we look at the way the world has become specialized. We're getting even more narrow. Look back at Edgar Casey. Look back at some of the ways in which indigenous tribes talk to plants and figure out how they heal people.

That is innate wisdom. That's the world talking to us through us. The world is full of answers if you just sit down and listen. But sometimes maybe we need to ingest a little bit of nature to speak that language. Like, why wouldn't you need that? What's wrong with these things as being exogenous neurotransmitters? It seems to me like if you're part of this planet and we're part of a body, maybe this thing that we take over here helps us see things more clearly.

Like maybe we're sick. You know, maybe nature has the answers. And I think that the answers are revealed to you. And you don't need to be, you know, you don't need to be depocations. Chopra or you don't need to be Elon Musk. You just need to be Ben or George and sit down quietly and start thinking about things, man. The answers are there.

Yeah. I had, you know, I sat on my front porch in a rocking chair and drank coffee this morning and I thought about nothing. And it's like my favorite thing in the world is to think about nothing. Not nothing Ness, not

Sart, not Kierke-Ker, none of the philosopher, nothing, bullshit, nothing. literally just nothing and it was just blissful right so uh here i'll i'll tell you the like third chapter of this experience and i'll tell you that i don't have yeah i don't have a fucking clue what to do with this man or whatever right so because uh you know like i wound up in this it was like uh you ever see so like in the matrix movies he meets the architect right right right and uh the there's all these tv screens with different versions and

that found his, you know, happy way into the architect or whatever over and over and over again. And there's all these different outcomes where he just fails and comes, he's going to get recycled again. And then the architect's like, this time's a little bit different or whatever, right? It had a little bit of that feel to it. Like, you've peaked behind the curtain or whatever, right? Yeah. I walk into this room and I was in the presence of what I would call ancient ones. And immediately I knew that was what they were, that they have been around a shit ton long.

than the blink of an eye that I've been here, right? It had the feeling of, like, being a little kid when you walked in on your parents at, like, a teacher meeting and you were supposed to be in the car, you know, like, you and your brother were fighting in the car, and I'm telling, and you go inside, and you go in, and parents and the teachers all turn to look at you, like, what are you doing in here? You're not supposed to be here, Jr. Like, I was interrupting some cosmically important things that were going on. At the same time, they were kind of impressed, like, oh, you had to have been through some

shit to get to this room. It was like they instantly knew that I had died 13 million years worth of deaths. And then I'd gone through this weird medical specialty vision of, you know, what the hero is or isn't, right? And they were like, okay, well, if, if you went through all that just to get here, you must have a question, right? You must have set some intentions. You must have wanted to like, know the answer.

Like, what's the secret of the universe? Like, if it's turtles all the way down, I want to talk to the, turtle at the bottom. What's the turtle at the bottom got to say about all that? Right. And I couldn't talk, man. I couldn't say anything. I couldn't remember who I was. Couldn't remember where I came from. Couldn't remember what was going on because I was just in awe of whatever these three things were, right? And somehow I knew that their names were Anki and Leelan anew. I don't know what that means, man. Like, I didn't know what those entities were. I had to look that up afterwards, right? Like, what does that mean? That I knew the names of these super weird space alien,

looking things that were super scary, right? And that I couldn't even talk to and were gigantic and I was tiny and whatever. So they were like, how about this? We'll show you every universe that could possibly exist where you married someone other than your wife. And if I looked at one of the like Neo TV screens, I'd slide down into this other universe. I looked at one of them and I was like a pharaoh in ancient Egypt and I had like a herom of a thousand women. And I was like, oh, that's not my scene. This is not my thing. You know, it was like an eyes wide shut party. It was horrible.

I was like, I don't know. This isn't my thing. Like I am, I'm hardwired for monogamy, man. That's not my scene like the, whatever. I just slid back out of that universe. It was like,

I'm not looking at any more TV screens. They're all super gross and weird. And they were like, all right, like you don't want to pick. You don't want to whatever. There was a, there was a girl that I had a crush on during like my developmentally

formative years, right? And they were like, hey, we could send you to that, like dream girl universe or you could, you know, stay married to the girl you've been married to all of this time. And it was like the whole room started to shake. And it was like, uh, you know, they wanted me to give them an answer and I just couldn't talk. And then from like the deepest part of me that I could access, uh, I knew. I knew who I wanted to be with. I knew that my wife was my

girl, that she always has been that like, I, you know, like, I don't know if reincarnation is real or not, but I'm going to go, I'm going to go try and find her in every life. I got. got left, you know? And like, she's, she's the key to a whole bunch of questions that I haven't even been smart enough to ask yet or whatever, but when I do, I know that she'll have them. And I said my wife's name and it was like everything came together, right? And they were like, yeah, exactly, you know, which is funny, right? Like, you go through all of this, just to go right back to where you were in the first place and like appreciate it for the first time that there's this person here who has endured being with.

you for all these years, all these deployments, all these kids, raising these kids by herself a whole bunch, just struggling and enduring and having your back and caring and looking out for you in ways that you couldn't even have imagined, right? It was like, uh, yeah, we're real, we're real proud of you. That was the right choice. It felt like everything else was a temptation, right? It felt like maybe, you know, like if I had to pick one of those other universes, they'd have straight up killed me or something like that, you know, like, ah, you fucked up. You got to start all over again. Right. Yeah, you're not who we thought you were or whatever. You got to go back to being a fetus and learn all these lessons again or whatever. Yeah. They were like real proud. And they were like, all right, go spend some time with her, right? And I just spent the rest of my birthday with my wife, you know, enjoying who she is and loving her. It was like, I don't feel like I need some kind of other state of consciousness anymore or whatever. I just need to be here now with you and these kids for as long as I,

get the opportunity to do that. And there was this little itty-bitty blink of an eye between like there's this truism or whatever, you know, this aphorism in integration therapy where they talk about

if you get the message, hang up the phone is what they say. Like don't just keep going back. You know, don't keep calling the same number after you've been given the information that you need. Right. And it was like, all right, hang up the phone and go be with your wife and uh in between here and that and going to be with her that i feel like i touched that nothing

on the on the on the on the back end of the before the first lie ever got told whatever that mystery is whatever you know people can call it god people can call it uh you know source you can call it the creator whatever that particular energy is and it was like i was like i got to see all the way through that like whatever you know story i'm telling myself whatever the Nunuaki are that you just met or whatever ancient alien theory there is, how Earth got, you know, colonized in the first place or whatever. It is. It's all just stories.

It's all an illusion. It's all bullshit. Be here now. And being here now meant, you know, be a husband. Be a dad. Be who you actually are. Right. And I wrote this, you know,

book about like enlightenment and what all of that means. And that's, you know, like, I'm saying like I think I might be more enlightened. than any of the people who ever claim to be enlightened along the way. Also, I'm not enlightened at all. Try to make sense out of that, right? Like, you know, that's just another paradox that I think we get to the joy of trying to live in the tension of, but we'll never, you know, fully wrap our heads around. So my way of being in the world is just trying to love my wife and my kids.

and imagining that there's really not any line of difference between them and me and everybody else that I interact with. And I felt like the message that I got from that nothing, from that zero behind all the thousand faces, was that it's all okay in the end. That was the message that I got from, you know, the Virgin Mary in the chapter in the book about the Virgin Mary is that there's this deep okayness at the end of everything, whether that's the heat death of the universe or that's my own death in particular or if there's even a difference, I'll never know. but that I can live out of today knowing that things are okay in the end. And that that's the message that I want to bring to everybody out there is that you can be deeply okay too. I love it, man. I think it speaks to the idea of giving people the courage to do that. Like how many, and I can only speak to my, I know in my life, like I wanted so much because I wanted my

family to have more because I equated having more with being happy. But the more I tried to get more, the more unhappy I got. And like the further I got away from my family, like, okay, if I could just make a little bit more money, then I could go on more vacations and me and my wife's relationship would be better. Or if I could just, you know, get this other thing and I could pay for the tuition and I could, my car alarm wouldn't be going off all the time because I can't afford a new one when I'm driving and people wouldn't be laughing at me, you know, and like, but what I came to realize, and I think this speaks to this idea of being here now is that that that's the bullshit those are the lies you tell yourself and when you realize that it gives you the courage to make maybe money's not the

problem you know maybe the problem is is is not honoring the relationship that I'm in right now and when you when you have your wife and your kid there and it doesn't take a whole lot to look around and see how many marriages fail it doesn't take a lot to look around and see how many parents can't be there for their kids. And to know that you can, when you're in a position where you have your family intact, you got your health and your safety and your family's intact, and you got everything. You got everything right there. And if you can get to that point, you can go, okay, let me just pause for a minute and be like,

you know what? Maybe I don't need to do that. Maybe I don't need to chase those dreams. And whose dreams are those anyway? You know, was this a dream that I didn't even talk to my wife about? Like, whose face is this? The thousand faces, man. Like, just peel them off.

Peel them off. Underneath all the false selves isn't a true self. It's just no self. Yeah. Okay, so, but this kind of speaks to the, you talk about grand priest and true paradoxes a little bit. And you just talk a little about paradoxes. Maybe we can unpack that a little bit.

Like, is that why you enjoy reading some of him and wanted to talk to him so much? Is because he represents this idea of true paradoxes? Yeah, at least Graham Priest's work is, so you had him on your podcast. I had him on my podcast. He's a really interesting cat. I felt like an alien. Yeah. I was like, do I know if I can talk to really enjoy his work. Yes. You get a chance to, you know, if you like philosophy, you haven't read Graham Priest pick up his books. But he does, he has this way of still persisting in being logical while acknowledging that we can't establish logic. in the first place and the way in which it was classically presented since, you know, like ancient times, right? There's the classical laws,

like the basic laws of logic, like the law of non-contradiction. And this guy is, there's been people who've raised this throughout, you know, generation after generation, somebody said, hey,

I think this logic stuff is bullshit. And everybody's like, boo, you know, stone him. We get this, kill the her attack, cut that guy's head off.

Like he, he saw behind the curtain and he's, you know, like the anti, hero has not fared well in the history of thought ideas of religion, right? But he's somebody who's been given the opportunity in his capacity as a professor to say like, hey, I think we should at least acknowledge that there are problems that we can't solve in the background of logic. We can still function and we can still use logic in ways that are appropriate to different contexts. But the

idea that this is some sort of, you know, infallible, uh, irrefutable system that was handed down to us from God or something like that is, uh, yet, yet another, you know, initial lie that you can decide whether you want to accept or not. And he proposes these, what are called paraconsistent logics that are actually used in, uh, developing the technology that you and I are using for talking to each other right now from halfway across the planet, right? So without, uh, denying some of the classical stuff around logic. you can actually do some really cool things in technology and in the world, right? And there's a whole bunch of these, you know,

there's a bunch of examples of the way that technology is going to take off. And, you know, like our kids are going to be whatever, transhuman or, you know, whatever you want to call it. There's a bunch of ways that they're figuring out that the universe is made of light and the world just light beings and that were reflected through DNA as a hologram or whatever, you know, whatever the actual thing winds up being that we discover is true about what we thought was mere matter and motion. is actually a lot more complicated than that, right? But living in the tension of paradox is what I kind of harp on a bit in the book over and over again

is this idea of living with living out of that mystery between, you know, the law that says that something can be, it has to be either A or B, not A and B. And then it can actually be both. and neither, and we can still make sense out of life and function in the world. So that what I wind up doing whenever I'm searching for what's true is simultaneously holding everything in tension so that I'm open to the possibility that people are actually talking to aliens whenever they're on some psychedelic journey or channeling or whatever.

I'm also incredibly skeptical that any of that has happened at all ever, and that we might be completely deceiving ourselves. And I hold both of those things in tension all of the time. And that's what I think is the way forward so that if something is true, you don't simply dismiss it because it doesn't match your ideology. But you also don't just fall for anything that gets thrown at you that seems plausible along the way. So you have to hold, you know, like these extremes of truth and falsehood intention. And I think that that's a meaningful way of staying. what's been called, you know, anti-fragile in the way that you hold your belief systems about

whatever it is, about anything from your, you know, career plans and financial retirement planning to like your way of parenting or you're scheduling your life, whether you go to church on Sunday or mosque on Friday or whatever it might be or temple on Saturday or however you spend your time, just understand that there's a tension there that has to be embodied rather than articulating. over and over again, I'll talk, you know, like I'll suggest like stay zero or going zero or be zero or whatever. And like all that all that that means at some level is that it's time to stop talking and start doing. It's time like the words are tools for certain purposes, but they're not everything, you know, that, uh, that there's a lot more and a lot less going on than we're capable of talking about. At a certain point, it's time to like spit on your hands and, you know, grow some plants and take care of

animals and hug your loved ones and say good night and take a rest and just do it all again tomorrow that's what i mean i guess by holding these paradoxes intention is you know and it's a lot of reading and a lot of writing and a lot of talking to say like start a garden do yoga drink coffee on the porch and a rocking chair you know like if my dreams would come true i want to be this eventually i want to be the psychedelic wendell berry like i'd like to just sit on a farm and write some books and be with my kids and take care of some animals and grow some plants tell some of them some of them as true as i can make them some of them absolute bullshit but at least they'll be good stories my commander in iraq always used to say uh don't let don't let

the truth get in a way of a good story you're like give us the report but make sure it's a good story the way that you do it or whatever right like yeah and don't you know don't lie to me so much that like somebody gets hurt right yeah it's true yeah the the grand peace is fascinating and the idea of the paradox i think you could see it everywhere you know you can see it on one side being science and one side being fate we could bump up against it in the psychedelic experience where you find something that's ineffable you know like you just I think it speaks to the idea of the limiting power of language. Language is one of our most amazing tools,

but yet it's so limited that we can't really describe meaningful things to each other. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's a rusty hook, man. Like, we want it to be this real specific, like, especially like the analytic philosophers are the worst. Like Graham Priest is an analytic philosopher. It's all like these words, if we can turn words into math, then, you know, it would be,

perfect or whatever. Right. Sure enough, math has its own set of problems, too. You know, I kind of run through punk rock style in the book, too, or whatever, right? But I think once you get to where you're open to that,

like you stay open in a very closed way, or you're, you know, accepting of everybody's hypothesis about anything, but also skeptical of everything. There's that like, like I was describing it to a friend of mine the other day is like I feel like I don't give a fuck about anything at all anymore.

And the way that I don't give a fuck about anything at all is by giving all the fucks about all the things all of the time. Like it's just this tension all the time of like, yes, I care about absolutely every living thing that I interact with all the time. Also, it's all going to die. Jesus Christ, I don't give a fuck. I just need a nap. And it's not like I'm vacillating back and forth between those things sometimes. I'm not great at figuring this stuff out. But for the most part, it's just trying to live out of this tension in between of like, what matters, you know, what can I reach?

What can I actually to come back to your influence question? What am I actually influencing? Right. Like, I'm on all the social media now. Well, it is a cesspool, right? Like, it's amazing to me how many people will click like, how many people will comment, but how many people don't actually read like you can look at the stats. and they're not actually reading that article. Like, you know, you get 90 comments and it's 45 people click the link or whatever, right?

Like, what's it going on here? How many people actually buy the book versus how many people say like, cool cover, bro on Facebook or whatever, right? Like, the disparity there makes me laugh all of the time, right? But I get, you know, like my, the only reason that I stay on social media at this point is the direct messages that people, send me, which again is a mixed bag, right? There's like all these confusing honeypot thirst traps sorts of things. Like, does this actually work on anybody? Like, I couldn't believe it happens as often as it does on LinkedIn where it's like, oh, hi, I looked at your profile and my boss thinks that you and I would be very compatible. And it's, you know, like a pretty young girl's

picture or whatever. Does anybody actually answer these? Does this work on anyone? Right. There's those. And then there's trolls. There's just like, obviously like, mean people. people who hurt you. Like what happened to you that you want to be this awful in public in front of everybody or whatever, right? And then there's, you know, people who need help. And there's enough people who reach out to me that need help or that want answers that I stay on social media just for that. Like there's, there's people who I'm doing therapy via like, not real therapy, right? Like I'm not practicing medicine or something that way. But it's like, hey, let's find you a therapist in your local area. Like you really need to talk to somebody. And I'm going to stay. on this messenger thing until you make an appointment with somebody, right? That's the influence that matters to me to some extent. I don't care if anybody buys the book and reads the book, man. Like, it's just a, you know, it is. It's just a coaster.

You can prop up the table with it if you don't like it, right? But like, that's the kind of influence that that's worth my time from time to time, right? So long as it doesn't take time away from the people that are right in front of me. And that's that tough balance to strike for all of us, right? Where do I put the phone? I just want to throw it into a lake at this point. Yeah. But here,

can I tell you another weird story? Yeah, please, man, absolutely. Ever since having that experience, I've tried to live out of this tension, right?

This paradoxical tension. Like I've said, my mission in life is to embody all the paradoxes in a way that overcomes fear with love. And then I feel like the universe ever since then has repeatedly tried to tempt me into believing that I'm a hero. And I am convinced that there, It's like, heroes don't exist.

And then like, they're like, oh, yeah. Do you want to, do you want to prove that that's not the case or whatever, right? I did the psychedelic science conference in Denver in June. And I shared a story on a couple other podcasts about, like, doing some suicide intervention therapy in my book booth. Like, I had a booth where I was reping the book. And I wound up like, there was like four or five people in a row one day that I was talking into wanting to live instead of rather die. after they were reading the anti-suicide chapter in my book, right? I got all done with that week out there five days or whatever it was.

And I had planned on stay in an extra day to have some me time, right? Oh, yeah. Like, I worked hard. I deserve a massage and to sleep in one day. And I suck at that stuff anyway, man. It's honestly a waste. Like, if somebody sent me like a gift card for a massage, I'd give it to somebody else because, like, I get all done getting a massage and I was like, that was a waste of time.

Like that didn't even, that was, yeah. Nice things are wasted on me, honestly. So I just missed my family. Like I got all done. I had a flight out a full day later. And I was like, I'm going to move my flight up. I'm going to check out of the hotel a day early. I'm just going to go home.

I want to be with my kids, right? I've had to be away from home a lot because of the military. And at this stage in my life, like, it has to really be worth it for me to go someplace else or whatever. Like, it has to seem like a real opportunity to do some good in the world. or to pay a lot of the bills that I have or whatever. Right. And I was like, I just want to go home. So I got up, changed all the plans, got an Uber to the airport.

And I guess the entire city of Denver, they like had to announce an unofficial evacuation or something because like everybody in the universe was on the interstate at that moment. And they were all going to the airport. I don't know if like everybody at psych science had already planned on leaving then or like there were 12 or 16,000 people there or something, right? So like if everybody was going to the airport that day, I should have waited until the next day. Right. Like and that's something that, you know, classically would have made me anxious or angry. Like, oh, here I am. Stuck in traffic.

I'm looking at the time. Move my flight up so that I could get out of here early. It does not seem like I'm going to make it to the airport itself in time. to catch that flight, right? And the very nice Nigerian immigrant that was driving the Uber, you know, like we're striking up a conversation, and he's

very certain that he knows a shortcut. And I was like, oh, man, I am fucked. I'm watching the GPS, and every turn he takes, like the time moves up and stuff down or whatever, right? Like, you know, he's a nice guy, but we are lost. We are officially lost out in, like, the sticks or whatever. We finally get to the airport and I get checked in.

The airport's under construction. There's like around the outside way that they want everybody to go through security. And I was like, this is insane. There's no way that I'm making this flight, right? I get to like security to check in there. And they're like, oh, there's a discrepancy between your ID and your ticket. You're going to have to go back to the counter and fix this. So I went through the line one time just to be told to go back.

I was like, oh, man, this is insane. There's no way that I'm going to make it. I go back and it fixed, get through security again. And I'm not getting mad. For like the first time of my whole life, I'm like, okay. You know, there's something happening here that I don't understand was the thing that I kept saying over and over again. It was just really peaceful about it. It was like, well, if I miss the flight, I miss the flight.

It's not the end of the world. Everything's okay. There's something going on here, right? Finally get through security, finally get to the gate. And there's all these people crowded around this dude who's like sitting on the ground over there. And I was like, oh, that looks like a medical emergency. Having worked in emergency medicine for, you know, an extended period of time, I'm familiar with what an emergency looks like.

Working on an ambulance for, you know, a decade and being in the military and whatnot. So I hear one of the nice ladies at the counter that was checking on this guy, say, okay, so we've called the paramedics. They're on their way and they'll be here in a minute. And like kind of the crowd dispersed a little bit at that point. I walked over and sat down next to this guy and was like, man, what's going on? Just struck up a conversation with this guy who he believed he was having a stroke.

And I started just asking him, you know, doing doing a thing, asking all the medical questions, figuring out what's going on or whatever. And I just, I don't know, man. I don't know what it means to be medically intuitive or any of that sort of stuff. But I put my hand on this guy's wrist to check his pulse while I'm talking to him. And I had in my head a flash of an EKG strip of atrial fibrillation with rapid ventricular response. which is not a common thing that you would like have pop up or whatever like it you know it happens to people but uh you know i was like aphib with rv okay what i don't know what that means right so i'm asking him all these questions he thinks he's having a stroke

because he'd had a transient ischemic attack just before that i was like i don't know man like i'm asking all these history questions he had super complex medical histories on like a fistful of meds three times a day for a whole bunch of different stuff you know this is a very chronically ill person right Paramedic shows up and he's a young super green paramedic. And I was like, hey, man, you know, like they're all, everybody's chasing stroke. Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. And I'm like, I really don't think this guy's having a stroke. I think he's got, you know, an arrhythmia.

And it might put him at risk for a stroke, but I don't, I don't think that's what's happening right now, right? Just, just humor me. Like, they wanted to put him on some meds and take him to the emergency room. And I was like, humor me. Put a, put a monitor on him and just see what his heart is doing. Afib with RVR, man. Like they put the thing on them and it was the exact like EKG reading that I had like flash into my head from you're not going to get that from somebody's pulse. You're just going to get like this is irregular or whatever.

Right. Yeah. And then even like so then I looked it up that I'm not like some kind of medical genius. I pulled up on my phone and I have an app that says like, hey, the up to date app is a really good app for like clinicians. I have a subscription to it. So I was like, hey, like the, you know, the paramedic, the kid was like, oh, okay. Well, if he's got that, I'm just going to do this to treat it or whatever. and I was like, no, hold on a second.

Like the med that you're going to give him interacts with this other med that he's taken for this other thing that he's going to. And that would have bottomed out his pressure. And he would have died right there if this kid would have given him the med that he had planned on giving him. I talked him into like, no, don't give him that med. Like, just take him to the hospital. Like, just take him to the hospital and figure it out whenever you get there instead

of that or whatever. So now whatever that guy's name is, he gets to be with his wife a little bit longer than if like my flight had been the next day, right? Because the people who were going to show up there, probably we're going to kind of goof things up and you know like the third leading cause of death in America right now is medical error so we managed to dodge that bullet and I don't know how to make sense of that man nothing like that's ever happened to me in my life before then nothing like that's ever happened since or whatever but like a lot of weird little things like that have been happening to

me ever since my 42nd birthday and I don't know what to do with any of that maybe maybe things like that have happened to you just haven't been aware of them and I that's something that a good friend of mine suggested is like, yeah, maybe you just been like so heads down focused on yourself. There were tons of opportunities to do those exact things all the way along. And now you're just in a place where you're actually like looking out for your fellow man in a way that makes those opportunities available. Like it just was you wouldn't have seen that guy before. And now you're the kind of person that sees people who need help in a different way. Right. They're like, oh, it's a burden. Oh, look at this mess over here. I got to work my way around.

It's, oh, hey, what's going on with that dude? Why don't I just see what's going on? Right. So now he's okay. He went on his way. I had a salad and I still caught my flight. So everything worked out okay. Maybe this speaks to the idea of friendship that you were talking about earlier. Like maybe this is how things get better. When we don't have our heads down, but we're looking for the opportunities to make the lives of those around us better. Like what happens in that world? Yeah. That's what I, that's how I've described it to, uh, I get a lot of soldiers asking me about, you know, psychedelics for PTSD and that sort of thing, right? And there's a lot of concern like, hey, if, if, like, active duty troops start doing

psychedelics, are they all going to, like, lay down their arms and refuse to be soldiers and all of that sort of stuff? And I'm not real concerned about that. I don't think that's a thing. I think, you know, warriors are warriors all the way through. I think what happens is, for a lot of my life, there was this hypervigilance and hyper arousal where I was always looking at everybody's hands to see if they had a weapon, right? and I still feel like I'm wired up that way in a bunch of ways,

but I'm not looking, I'm not afraid. Like it was all kind of fear and anger. I'm like, okay, like I'm sitting in church concealed carry and watching for an active shooter. Like the likelihood of that's pretty low. Statistically,

it happens sometimes, but I'm like hoping for it, right? Like, all right. Today's the day. Today's the day there's an active shooter in church and I'm going to be a hero or whatever,

right? Like that's how messed up you can get ahead around some of that stuff from time to time or whatever, right? Now it's more. like, just as aware, just as, you know, hypervigilant, but I'm looking at people's hands to see, like, are they empty and they need something? Like, is, is there enough in that person's bowl over there? Not are they a threat to me or anything like that? Because I think like that, you know, the threat response stuff, like I said before, fear flight, your freeze fight flight is hardwired

into us, right? You can kind of trust your nervous system to do the right thing in an emergency as much as your training has allowed that to be possible, right? You don't rise in occasion. You sink to the level of your training. But outside of those rare situations, like, I can still feel the switch just gets flipped from fear and anger to love and compassion, but it's the same level of awareness. It's the same watching the horizon, watching the room, looking for everybody. And it's like, hey, that old lady needs some help with her groceries across the parking

lot there. I'm a strapping young man. I'll go take care of some groceries for her or whatever, right? Like, yeah, it's the exact same thing. Like, you know, nothing's changed on the outside and everything's changed in how I'm perceiving myself so that I wind up showing up differently to everybody, maybe. Yeah. I think there's profound lessons in there, too. I've found that whenever I take the time to listen and help somebody else, I become the student in some way because I started thinking like, oh, yeah, I do that.

Oh, you know what? I always do this one thing. It's kind of like that. So in helping other people, for me, I always get pretty introspective on it later and be like, I wonder what they were thinking, like why they did that. And then I'll come up with a nugget of why I would do that.

Right. It's just projecting. Everything has a projection. I'm a projector. I'm just walking through life projecting. If I were them, I would be a moron to do something like that. Therefore,

they must be a moron. And then sure enough, they had a really good reason for what they were. Right. Right. Turns out they knew more than you did. And now they're a Bitcoin millionaire and I'm still working a 9 to 5 or whatever. Early adopters of Facebook are all retired.

What is this Facebook? Is it like a yearbook full of faces? I don't understand. You know, yeah. It's interesting. You know, in your book, too, I remember there was one chapter where you spoke about a friend that you knew in high school. They were good friends. and then something happened to him.

And without even blinking an eye, you're like, I'm going to support this person. Like I think maybe you could speak to the idea of your ideas about, about worth and money and giving and how that all plays a part. Because I think it's kind of connected to the awareness of helping people on some level. Yeah, I may not be the best person to comment on any of this sort of stuff because I'm not a rich man by any stretch of the imagination. But I,

I, you know, like any time that I get, I'm awful at this man. Like when my wife and I first got married, I remember it was like Christmas time. I was like 25. We had our first apartment. I got like my first credit card and we got one of those like World Vision catalogs in the mail. And they were going to, they were asking for donations for little girls who had been trafficked. They were going to get them hygiene kits. It was like hairbrushes for these little girls.

and I was like, holy shit, I have to buy $5,000 worth of these, like hygiene kids for these little girls. You know, like, my heart broke. And I was like, well, I've got access to $5,000. Why wouldn't I give $5,000 to this? Like, that was the level of impulsive money decision making in my 20s or whatever. It was like, I got a good job. I can pay off $5,000 in, you know, a couple months. But these little girls are suffering right now.

Here, I'll just max out this credit card. It's not like I didn't talk to my wife or whatever, you know, like, She's like the best. She's the most loving person. She's like, you're an idiot, but I'm in or whatever. You know, like, okay, sure. Merry Christmas to all these little girls. Now they have hairbrushes or whatever, right?

That's the heart that I just can't escape from is trying to be that good to everyone around me. And it's made me go broke multiple times along the way, right? To where like, okay, that, yes, their lives are better. Yes, you know, like, but also now I got to hustle. If my kids are going to have a roof over their head. whatever and being a lot more strategic about some of that sort of stuff has been an important lesson for me to learn you know like to get mentors who are steps ahead of me on all of those sorts of things and figure out like yeah actually like there's a cycle to this it's predictable you can make financial

projections they're not you know imaginary or whatever like they are and they aren't like I'll argue with them I'll be like yeah this is imaginary but I sure hope it comes true or whatever right But I think the issue is treating money as an end in itself is always a dead end. Like it's just the accumulation of this thing, whatever this thing is outside of me, that's a mistake. But if you see it as a conduit, if you see it as a way of conveying what worth is, if you see it as a means to an end, what are the ends that you want? The ends that I want are to set my kids up for success in a way that I wasn't set up for. And once that is made possible, I just want to be as generous as imaginable with everything else that I see around me. Right.

And there's plenty of worthwhile endeavors in that regard. But I also want them to be the sorts of things that I can watch that, you know, like I want to be, what do they call it, you know, doing things locally that have a global impact. Like there's plenty of good nonprofits in Kentucky to give to where I could kind of. see what the outcomes are there. And, you know, there's some groups here that I've been researching a little bit to figure out like, okay, once, you know, once my kids are set up for success, how can I help those organizations to do the work that they're doing with? You know, again, some of the things that are nearest and dearest to my heart are, you know, mental health related, you know, especially around trying to end suicide. My friend, uh, Wiz Buckley has the no fallen

Heroes Foundation where they want to take, you know, the 22 to 44 veterans that the statistics suggests a die by suicide every day and we want to take that number to zero. That's an organization worth investing time and money in. There's a there's a organization here in Kentucky called No More or slaves no more that are working to try to prevent and combat human trafficking on both the front end and the back end. Like it's not well known but because of the way the interstates are laid out in the Midwest. Kentucky and Ohio are really big states for people being trafficked through here to the northeast and down to the southeast.

And if you're going to stay moving, you've got to come through here. So there's a ton of problems around some of that stuff that I'd like to do something about. So the way, like I see dollar signs and I immediately think of the needs that those dollar signs could meet in the people that I've met and interacted with. The people like my friend that I describe in my book who, you know, died of a fentanyl overdose, the people who I've served with and who've suffered in ways that I know acutely the same sort of suffering. And then just like I more than anything in the world, man, I want Earth to be a safe place to be a kid for like the first time in history, right?

Like to the degree that I could make something like that possible, even like in my county, like I feel like that would be worth bleeding and sweating and crying for, you know, like I'd do whatever I could. you know, we could kick in some doors and beat the brakes off some pimps and rescue some people. And we could do some psychedelic assisted therapy on the back end for everybody that gets rest, whatever, right? And then, you know, just come, come spend some time on the farm and let your nervous system be a little less nervous and go back out in the world and do good and beautiful things being who you are. That's what I'd like to see happen for myself, the people in every concentric circle around me as I reach out in whatever network. I get to participate in. That's not really answering your question about money very well because I'm not an economist

or anything, but I'm trying. Yeah. I think it's beautiful. I think that community is the one thing that's going to make us better. And it just seems like there's so much division lately. Here's a question. Like when you look at, I was never in the military and I don't know a whole lot about strategy, but it seems to me that.

division is the way in which people are manipulated. And it seems like there's so much division in our country right now. I can't help but think that if there was just some way for us to see ourselves as Americans or just see ourselves as neighbors, that would go a long way instead of blaming someone else that you don't even know for some silly reason. What's your take on all this division? Is this something that is just economically viable? Is it something that is a way in which to keep people distracted from solving bigger problems?

Or is it just, what's your take on this division that we say? Yeah. I think we live in a simulation that's the simulator is tired of us not recognizing that it's a simulation. And it's turning up the volume on all of these divisions. So it's just so loud and so obvious that it's like, wake the fuck up. Do you really think this stuff matters, right? Thank you. Like what's the, I don't know, what's a good example?

You know, like, so I have people who come in, you know, like, who are struggling in my, in my practice or just friends that I'm talking to in general, right? And like, they're just fixated on either they just absolutely hate Joe Biden or absolutely hate Donald Trump. But they sound exactly alike. If I could remove the name of who they're referring to. And if you just made these two people sit down and talk about what they hate the most in the world, but neither of them was allowed to say the name of who they were talking about, it would sound like an echo chamber between them. And if you let them talk for an hour and they thought that they were both talking about the same person,

they would be the best friends in the, oh yeah, this guy sees the way the world is. Like, he just gets it. Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right. complete narcissist. He's just a worst. Absolutely. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Wait, wait a minute. Are you talking about Joe Biden? No, I'm talking about Donald Trump. Oh, you piece of shit. How could you be this wrong about everything? Like, does it really? What is the impact on you being who you are right here, right now,

other than that you're paying attention to that stuff around the clock? So now you're angry. and irritable and nobody wants to be around you and you start to resemble what you're describing in Washington all of the time, right? Like your wife and your kids want nothing to do with you because all you do is ramble on about this nonsense in D.C. that really the ripple effects on your day-to-day life are relatively small. Now, don't get me wrong. It's not like D.C. doesn't matter or like laws don't matter or any of that sort of stuff. But the amount that it matters compared with the amount that people get. hung up on it is staggering to me, right? So the divisions are stuff that I think are as artificial as anything could get.

Like they only exist inside of your head. Yeah. And as soon as you decided to put those things down, you could figure out how similar and how different somebody actually is by getting to know them rather than the large wall of opinions between you and them that. preventing you from getting into actual human contact with someone else, right? That's a ton of what I'm trying to do with my podcast, man, is like, I do these Q5 episodes where I ask everybody the same five questions.

And the point is, you could listen through the whole thing, episode by episode, and now you get to compare notes. Hey, here's the Joint Task Force Surgeon for Special Operations Command in Afghanistan answering these questions. Hey, here's a professional podcaster answering these questions. Hey, here's somebody who is of this particular ethnicity or this sexual orientation or here's somebody famous or here's somebody you've never heard of. Nobody knows who this person is, right? But here's the same five questions and over and over and over again.

I am shocked to find out that we're not that fucking different once you scratch below the surface and you start asking people questions that are really meaningful questions rather than the more meaningless superficial sorts of stuff. whether you're like red state or blue state is maybe one of the most superficial things about you, unless you choose to pretend that it's much, much more important to you than that, right? The same thing with religion, right? We're talking about religion and politics now. Might as well lean into being as controversial as I can, right? The history of religion is us killing each other over not loving the right way. You know, like there was some enlightened one way back in the day that said love people.

The whole point is to be love and light. and within like a generation it's like hey you're not loving people the right way i'm pretty sure i'm going to have to kill you over this that's the most loving thing i can do right now is violently disagree with you about the way to love like what what does that say about us man that's like a species you know like just it's okay it's okay to disagree about the stories if the point is love if the point is actually taking care of each other right if that's what's behind it all, like over and over again, you should be able to reach out across the aisle the way Dan Crenshaw and Alexandria, KZO Cortez helped to do around MDMA assisted

therapy for active duty soldiers, right? Right. With the National Defense Authorization Act in December of last year, right? Like, there's hope. There's hope out there. If you're looking for it, you can see hope everywhere. If you're looking for division, you can see division everywhere. What do you want to be?

You want to be a divider or a unifier? What's the first principle? What's the first story? What's the first self-deception that you're willing to take on after you go all the way to zero and start all over again? After you deconstruct all the things, you don't just get to hang out there and keep deconstructing everybody else for them. You got to actually go about reconstructing. Oh, man, crap. Now I got to actually build something.

I got to be somebody. Yeah, you can't escape it. You're going to have a face. And that's the point of like some of the zero thing, right? It's like the zero with a thousand faces. at least you get to pick the face once you figure it out, right? You get to decide if you want to look like an avocado that fucked in even your avocado.

If you want to be a guy who's, you know, got all more degrees than Fahrenheit, but where's a Deadpool mask around out in public or whatever? You can do that, right? You can be that guy if you want to. It's actually not that bad. What, like, what's next? Like I, you know, maybe we should talk about, didn't you speak it in Kentucky about Iboga?

Yeah. Maybe we talked about that. They had an event back in November here. So the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission was looking at, they had received upwards of $840 plus million from pharmaceutical companies in a settlement around the way in which Kentucky, you know, Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia, we're all kind of, now we know targeted. several large pharmaceutical companies for setting up these what are basically pill mills in eastern Kentucky, right? Eastern Kentucky being coal mining country, right? I, you know, I deployed with a bunch

of people out of eastern Kentucky. There's some of my favorite people on Earth from out in Barville and that part of the country, right? It's hard living, hardworking, good salt of the earth people. The sort of people you can call up in the middle of the night if you needed help with something, and then they'd show up. That's the kind of people that got targeted for, hey, we noticed you got back pain. And boy, do we have a cure for your pain. It's called Oxycontin.

And don't worry about, you know, getting hooked on that. And it's ruined generations of people's lives out there, right? And there's documentaries about this online now. I think they dramatized it in dope sick. And, you know, it's a horrible chapter in America's history, right? that that happened. And then there's this settlement money that's being allocated to take a look at trying to address the opioid crisis. And a bunch of the money's been allocated to harm reduction, which is great towards building infrastructure, you know, halfway houses and places for people who are

struggling with addiction to have some place to live and to try to establish jobs and, you know, intensive outpatient programs and opioid replacement therapies are kind of the best evidence-based medicine at this point, you know, methadone clinics and buprenorphine clinics and, you know, trying to just address reversing the problem that was created here a couple decades ago. And one of the things that the Attorney General's office was looking at allocating was $42 million towards trying to study ibogaine for opioid withdrawal treatment. And, you know, that was always a Hail Mary pass, a moonshot. in my mind because of how far behind MDMA and psilocybin in terms of the available clinical trial data ibogane is on the one hand, right?

So like MDMA just filed for, you know, being rescheduled to a Schedule 2 med late last year. And hopefully before the end of this year, you know, MAPS now like us will get approval to start doing MDMA assistant therapy. And that creates a pathway with, you know, the data that around psilocybin. for treatment resistant depression coming out Johns Hopkins at Stanford. There's the hope that that will also be running right along on the heels to get not legalized but medicalized, right?

It's probably going to be quite a few years worth of clinical trials before Ibo-gain could get FDA approval, but the idea was to get started. What can we do? We'll plant a seed here. If Kentucky, as a government says, we think this is worth planting a there'd be more money from, you know, private investors, from a whole host of different ways of

gaining funding to try to run a full-scale, several full-scale clinical trials, right? Clinical trials are extremely expensive. Forty-two million wouldn't even get us close to there. But, you know, the idea is a good one. The issue with Ibogaine is that it's, they call it the Ph.D. of psychedelics. It's supposed to be, you know, like, there's grandmother, Iowasca, and there's grandfather ibegain and they've got you know south america and africa are looking out for the whole world via these plant spirits or gods or whatever you have you um but ibrahim gain also if you have any kind of cardiac history uh there's a particular way that it binds to uh what's called a herc receptor in the heart that can cause arrhythmia is much more uh predictably than uh a lot

than any other psychedelic medicine and even more than most far pharmaceuticals, right? So that was the issue is, is this, we need to do enough safety studies before we could even get into a clinical trial to make that make sense. Now, do I think that that is going to happen? Eventually, yeah, I do think that the clinical trials will get done for Ibrahimagane. It doesn't seem like, it seems like the political winds have turned a bit here in Kentucky to where that's not, those funds won't be allocated here. But I don't think that that's the end of the Iba Gain story by any stretch of the imagination. I do think. think other states have taken notice at least and are willing to kind of pick up the baton there. I think I said in an article I wrote like it doesn't it's not a question of whether or not this study or this you know medicine's going to get studied it's whether or not Kentucky will be a leader in that regard or not. And there's nothing wrong with deciding not to be the leaders of studying something that's you know that has risks associated with it right. But I was hopeful that it would happen here just because I live here.

And I care about the veterans that live here. I know that this has been ground zero for the opioid crisis. So there's a level of poetic justice about the idea of beginning to be ground zero for healing that, or at least developing some of the science that could make some of that healing possible. Because the available data, the anecdotal stuff and the clinical, or excuse me, the case series level publications around some of that stuff does suggest that even more so than any other. psychedelic molecules, plant medicines out there. Ibo Gain can crush out opioid withdrawal symptoms and alleviate suffering. What winds up being, you know, three very sketchy months in treatment as usual when somebody's withdrawing from, you know, high dose opioid use or abuse can happen in a matter of

days is what all of the reports are around, you know, ibogaine's use. What's also interesting, you know, there was a Nature journal article published by Dr. Nolan. Williams just last month about stabilizing the cardiac myocardium with doses of magnesium. So there's the potential to be able to make the medicine much safer in a clinical setting for running some of these sorts of clinical trials. But the other thing that they looked at was reversing traumatic brain injury as well as kind of the age of the brain. And having, you know, played high school football and been in the military and done boxing and

mixed martial arts and my wasted youth. super curious about what can I again do for somebody who's banged their head around as much as, you know, I have or whatever. So from, you know, like a clinical standpoint, I wish that we would allocate some of those funds here in Kentucky. Just again, I think it's going to get done somewhere. And it would have been nice to watch it happen here in my home state. I don't think that that's going to happen soon. But I'm at like a personal level, super curious to know also like how much this medicine is or isn't safe for the general populace. Seems like if you've got, you know, a history of cardiac problems in the background,

that would rule you out of the clinical trials. But we may be able to make that safe with magnesium. As always, more funding needed, more data needed, more investigation needed around a bunch of that stuff. I was invited to speak on a panel with Talia Eisenberg, who is, and her and her husband are involved in running the beyond clinic down in Mexico where they do clinically supervised ibogaine treatments for people. They're on social media. You can look and see the various testimonials on their Instagram.

I'm always resharing that because I think they're good people doing good things in the world. And then Cypriana Kwan is a very influential and lady with a very powerful story of recovery from childhood abuse. and a lot of difficulty in her life that was, you know, she'll tell her story of how Ibogaine healed her. And she was, you know, a patient down at the Beyond Clinic. And then Scarlet, Scarlet Mazius from Tactogen was sort of the panel host. And we all just kind of shared our stories of healing. Mine being more, mind not having any direct tie to Ibogaine,

but more with just being a Kentuckian who could kind of testify to the value that both the, you know, the science and the experience of psychedelic-assisted therapy that I've benefited from in my own small, non-psychonautic way, you know, with losing friends to fentanyl and losing friends to suicide and drunk driving and some of those sorts of things and just kind of feeling a calling to working in mental health. Got to share a little bit of my story there. Yeah. I'm glad you did, and I'm so thankful to hear Kentucky being a voice in the room. to make things better. I think that they are setting an example.

Just by having that conversation and bringing people around to help the people in their community, I think that they're setting an example for the rest of the States. What about, what on the street is, there might be a new book coming out soon.

Do you want to talk about that? You know, I, like, it's a, I don't know, man. I don't know what to do with anything anymore. Like I just, like I wrote the sequel right after, writing the first one, but I feel like I need, like the sequel won't make any sense to anybody until enough people have read the first one, right? That's, and we talked about this last time,

like, I tend to run out ahead of anything that seems reasonable to anybody else. Like, what is that guy doing over there? Why is he doing that or whatever? You know, like they project all sorts of things. If I was him, I'd be a moron. What is he doing over there? Like, who publishes a sequel to a book that nobody's read. A lot of people. I said that's some of the best books out there. Like the best ones come back and people find, you know what I mean?

Everybody watches Terminator 2 and then goes back to see what the hell that was about because that's a way better movie than the first one, right? They'll all be disappointed if they read the second one first. Yeah, you know, I don't know when I'll just probably wait for Enki and Enliel and Anil to let me know when I should publish the same book or whatever. Um, yeah, I like, I just feel like I need to kind of, uh, something that I felt like I sat down and, um, did some reflection with, uh, one of my therapists and some of my friends at the beginning of the year. It was like, I need to, I need to slow down was the, the feeling that I had and the feedback was affirmative from my wife and children and friends and everybody in my, it was like, all right, man, like, you wrote a book, started a podcast open to clinic, a lot of farm. Like you did a whole bunch of crazy stuff.

How about, like you planted some seeds, how about you just chill out and water the ones that you already planted and take care of the things that are in front of you and stop like, you know, chasing shiny objects. Look,

squirrel or whatever, right? And that's where I'm at now is like, when it's time to publish the sequel, if ever, I will know, but that time is not now. Does that make sense?

It makes total sense, man. I hear you on the shiny objects. They're pretty. Yeah. Yeah, they are. You know, like I was talking about there's the farm next to mine is for sale. It's like 110 acres. And I'm like, I like, I could talk somebody into buying that and then we could make a therapeutic retreat out there or whatever. It's like with what time? What would you, where would, when would you do anything like that, right? I don't know, you know. Right. But it would be cool, wouldn't it? There's potential there. We could put tent. We could put tents up and people would come stay in them. Who? right the people that uh click like on facebook and then keep on doom scrolling until you know something yeah exactly it's fine the children are fine nothing to see here yeah right man then i love it man

it's such a fun conversation it's always a pleasure yeah man i'm so thankful to to to have begun a relationship hanging out the call you a friend and and and get to touch base all the time man i think you're doing really cool stuff and it's really fun to watch and like i said, I think you're probably five steps ahead of everybody, man. I'm super stoked that you're doing it, man. But before I let you go, where can people find you? What do you got coming up? What are you excited about? Yeah, yeah. So if you're looking for mental health care, you can go to advanced practice providers.com. That's my private practice website at this particular juncture practicing in Louisville, Kentucky, just doing general psychiatry with the potential for ketamine

assisted therapy where it makes medical sense for people. So if you want, reach out to me there in that official capacity. And then my author page slash podcast page slash, if you want a bullshit t-shirt page, is anti-heroesjurney.com. If you want a paperback, there's a link there to get it on Amazon that it's self-published, so it's only available on Amazon. Or if you want the audio book or e-book, I'm selling those in a bundle direct from the website in both English and Spanish translations so that 91% of Americans can read the book in their heart language. Or if you can't read and don't want to learn, you can listen to me, read it to you. And you don't have to pay any extra for that, right? It's the same price as the paperback. So antiheroesjury.com or

advanced practice providers.com. And then you can also, you know, my podcast is up anywhere that you could find podcasts. And yeah, I'll be making announcements, probably not anytime soon. But if you want to, you can pay attention to me on LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or some of those sorts of places. And I'm just looking to do good things in the world. And whenever that happens, maybe I'll take a picture of it and put it on social media, right?

That's such an awesome. Such an awesome thing to do. Ladies and gentlemen, hang on briefly afterwards, Ben, but ladies and gentlemen, thank you to everybody that hung out. Christian, Ben, Kyle, everybody that spent some time hanging out with us today, truly appreciated. I hope everybody has a wonderful day and a wonderful rest of your week. That's all we got. Go to the show notes. Check out the book. Check out, Ben. That's all we got. Aloha.