256. The psychology of psychedelics ft. Paul Austin

better way to cope with our everyday experience. So when we hear about something is seemingly life changing as psychedelic treatment for our mental health, I think a lot of our ears immediately perk up. You know, these drug set for such a long time have been really associated with

like a party stone and lifestyle. Like there's suddenly being talked about a lot in the healthcare community, and this scene is very, very promising, even though the FDA did recently reject the use of MDMA therapy to treat PTSD. As we are recording this, it does seem like in general across the world, like the tide is really turning, and I think we have a lot of questions, what

does this actually entail? What would it feel like? Could this, you know, one day be as common as treatment as antidepressants. And it's such an evolving space personally, one that I'm so fascinated by. But I'm definitely not an expert in so today I thought I would bring on someone who is someone who knows so much about this, more than me, more than the average person, more than most of us for that matter, Paul Austin, the founder of Third Wave. Welcome to the show.

school introduced me to cannabis. I started to experiment with cannabis a little bit until my parents found out and they sat me down one Sunday after church, and my dad looked at me and said, you know, I haven't been this disappointed since my brother passed away in a car accident thirty years before that. Before we had sat down before they found out that I had smoked cannabis. So clearly it was a monumental impactful thing that their

only son had decided to start to experiment with cannabis. Now, what I felt in that experience was I felt happy, I felt laughter, I felt like. It was very curiosity provoking, and I was starting to learn more and more about cannabis at that time. Why was it illegal? Why was it prohibited? Was it as bad as we thought it was?

And so that started to lead me down this path of what Carl Jung would say is called individuation, which is the path of becoming oneself right where I was like, clearly, this person who I'm becoming won't be accepted by my family. I'm going to have to just keep this part of myself closed off. And soon after that, when I was nineteen, that same friend who introduced me to cannabis introduced me to psilocybin mushrooms, and at the age of nineteen, I

had my first experience with psilocybin mushrooms. Soon after that, I started to experiment with LSD a little bit as well. And whereas cannabis was like fun and I laughed a lot and helped me to get over some social anxiety, psychedelics are very profound. There were some really deep insights and awarenesses that I came to, one of which was I'm not meant to live a conventional lifestyle. That life is much more malleable than I previously had thought I can create how I want to create, so why not

do that? So soon after university I moved abroad. I taught English and Turkey for a year. I became a digital nomad. Soon after that worked and traveled everywhere, and at the age of twenty four, was in Budapest. This was twenty fifteen, almost ten years ago. Notice that more and more people were starting to talk about psychedelics, Joe Rogan and Tim Ferris, and more clinical research was coming

out about it. Cannabis was being re evaluated and legalized, and I thought, I think this is going to become the next thing. So in twenty fifteen I started Third Wave with the intention of making psychedelic education more accessible

and more available to everyone. And so the idea of this third wave of psychedelics is that the first wave was the ancient and indigenous use of psychedelics, the second wave was the counterculture the fifties and sixties, and then this third wave of psychedelics is the modern sort of

renaissance around psychedelic substances. And I believe it's critical that as part of this we both honor the lineage and the indigenous wisdom of these medicines, and we also utilize best practices based on scientific frame works and what we know about these psychedelics and how they interact with the

body and the brain. So here I am talking about psychedelics, talking about microdocene and it's been a pretty wild ride these last you know, ten years or so, as they really started to come into prominent mainstream attention.

our brain. And of course I'm sure there have been so many populations who have been able to witness this since like the dawn of time, but a lot of their knowledge has been snuffed out through a lot of impacts, through colonization, through just like a genuine disinterest in anything that was like countered to what a Western belief was.

So I really liked that we're acknowledging that because I don't know, I just feel like there are so many things that we're returning to the roots of I think about how there's been this like huge biological reductionism of so much to do with mental health, and now people are like, hey, what if we you know, just made sure that people had community, and what if we like went back to a sense of purpose And this feels very ache into that, like very similar of a returning

to something that's been known for a long time. With your experience, what did you find that it kind of unlocked for you? I know you you spoke quite generally about it, but did you see like a shift in how you saw the world, your attitudes towards the world, or just your own mental well being?

in its full entirety. And that's true. I think of the majority of people who grow up in a religious environment. It's a lot of the rituals, it's a lot of the prayers, it's a lot of the hymns, but it's not a lot of the direct experience. And so I was becoming an atheist until I started to work with high doses of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. And when I had those experiences, all of a sudden, it helped to almost remind me of how connected I was to something

greater than myself. It sort of reopened this concept of spirituality for me, and that had a number of downstream positive benefits, one of which was I recognized that I was deeply connected to everything around me. So the sort of classic cliche of LSD and psychedelics is hip hugging trees, right, And yet anyone who's done a psychedelic in nature understands that because there is this deep love and connection to

everything around us. And how the indigenous peoples who worked with these substances their interactions with it was because it helped them to remember that they were just these organisms. So they were just these people that were part of nature, not above or better than nature. So I experienced that a deep and profound connection to the natural environment. I also experienced a sense of comfort with myself, or authenticity

of who I was and who I am. That when raised in a very religious environment, you are often shamed for who you are or guilted into behaving a certain way. And when I started to work with psychedelics, I came to realize, oh, I could just let go of a

lot of that conditioning. At my core, at my essence, there's actually a deep sort of sense of innocence and love and purity, and I could tap back into that and remember that, which helped me again, as cliche as it may sound, to love myself again and love myself in a very deep way. And I think the outcome of that then was a lot of the depression and anxiety that I'd struggle with when I started to work

with psychedelics. Intentionally, they just helped me to commit to meditating more often, eating healthier, spending more time in nature, spending less time on screens, committing to practices and behaviors that ended up having a really positive and beneficial effect on my mental health. Because certainly, when we take a psychedelic that's doing some really interesting things to the brain.

That's great for some of these clinical conditions, but a lot of it is how are we changing our behaviors after the fact and who we hang out with and who we spend time with. And psychedelics help that because they facilitate something called neuroplasticity. But it's not just the drug that's a magic pill. It really is a catalyst for change, and we still have to commit to making those changes in our everyday life if we want to live better and feel better on an everyday basis.

said about experiencing a sense of oneness. And we had someone on just recently called doctor A. Samilla, who is a professor from Columbia who talks about spirituality and psychology, and I think a lot of us have, you know, who've experienced religion the institution of religion over the years feel very like silenced by it, restricted by it, and

feels very clinical. But there's this new wave of people who are like actually having a sense of purpose, feeling that there is something divine and bigger is incredibly psychologically nourishing, because the opposite of that is feeling like we are completely alone, all of us are alone. No one can understand our experience that like isolation is completely depressing, Like, how does one not experience a level of like endogenous mental health experiences if you.

of life care, Like, what do they actually mean? We've talked someone about like more recreational usage shifting to like more of a medical environment or being used in mainstream care is someone literally going to give you a tap of acid and say off you go, like go and walk around.

Like I said, over one thousand clinical papers were published on the efficacy of LC to trade a range of conditions, And unfortunately, when it got out into the mainstream culture and was associated with Timothy Leary and turn on, tune and drop out, the government prohibited and shut down not only the recreational use but also the clinical research. And that wasn't resuscitated until the late nineties when JOHNS. Hopkins started to study this relationship between psilocybin and what they

called mystical type experiences or you know, experiencing God. And what they found in that early clinical research is that the more profound of an experience, the spiritual experience an individual had, the more likely it was to heal the depression or heal their addiction or heal you know, OCD, or some of these other clinical indications that they were

struggling with. So on the one hand, it could be described at a spiritual level that when we experience the profundity of psychedelics, we are connected to this source of

unconditional love. And when we feel in our every sort of part of our body that experience of unconditional love, it has these incredible impacts in our capacity to love, our capacity to be with ourselves, to understand ourselves, and again most importantly, to start to make changes in our everyday life that really honor and acknowledge that sense of

self love. Now, if we look at it from a neuroscientific lens, the common thread between depression, anxiety, addiction, OCD, even PTSD is that when you do brain scans with people who struggle with these clinical conditions, the two hemispheres of the brain are not actively communicating, right, So the brain activity is sort of withering away, And when you take a psychedelic it's like you know, putting fertilizer into your brain. All of a sudden, it activates both hemispheres.

Neuronal connectivity gets turned back online. They start to communicate across the hemispheres again, and that activation allows for a loosening of these constricted ways of being. So one of the one of the technical terms is called the default mode network, and the default mode network is a network in our brain that helps us to do our everyday patterning. It's sort of the habitual part of our brain that is on autopi that allows us to navigate our everyday existence.

When that becomes too rigid, when that becomes too constricted, then people start to notice that they're struggling with depression or addiction or anxiety. And so part of interrupting those

patterns or interrupting those ruts is introducing a psychedelic. And so the psychedelic comes in and it creates a more entropic system, so more chaos, so to say, and that chaos allows for a new perspective, a new look at things, which allows people to sort of get out of the pattern that they feel they've been stuck in and actually see that they can experience life in a new and unique way, that they don't have to feel that way all the time, that they can actually feel this other way.

And then so much of working with a psychedelic when it comes to working with a therapist in particular, like in medical supervision, is it's not only the drug experience, but also how that coach or how that therapist or psycho hiatrist is supporting you after that drug experience. Because when you take a psychedelic, when the brain becomes more entropic, then it's opening something called a critical learning period. And the critical learning period is like when you're four or

five or six, your brain is in development. It's a sponge. It's soaking up all of these you know, you know, language and patterns and social behaviors and music. It can just soak it all up. And then as we get older that that learning period dies away, which is why they used to think, okay, when i'm by time you're twenty six, you know, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And now what we're discovering about psychedelics is it actually reopens that critical learning period for at least

three to four weeks after the high dose experience. And so people have this experience, they're able to see out of their depression or out of their addiction, and then the therapist or the coach is supporting them in that month after to start to integrate what are actually new patterns of behavior you can start to implement that will help you feel this way more often. How do you have a more regulated nervous system. How do you not eat you know, fast food or processed food. How do

you get more sunlight and exercise? How do you spend more time with loved ones or cut out a toxic relationship? Right, Like, the psychedelic can help us to go AHA, but the therapeutic work, the coaching work, actually allows those AHAs to be integrated and become tangible in our everyday life.

previous experiences. And it sounds like when you introduce a psychedelic, it's kind of like a tornado comes through. It might seem kind of scary. But with that opportunity, you can say, actually, no, like that road doesn't really fit here anymore. That road like isn't really leading me to places where I want to go. Like the roads being the neural highways and your brain, and so it allows for that neuroplasticity, as

you said. And another really fascinating point that you brought up that I absolutely love that you said, is this misconception that our brains are fully developed, were done by the time what twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven for men, twenty five around for women. And that is just being pro And I know that I've said that on the show before. I've been like, yeah, you know, your brain

only gets fully developed at twenty five. It's like absolutely not. Yes, Like you have this frontal like your frontal load basically like locks into place. But within your brain there's so much opportunity for flexibility. It's why as people get older, their personality changes. It's why we see a decline actually in the experience of mental health as people get older as well, like past their fifties and sixties. So the

brain is constantly evolving. Has there been any longitudinal or like in depth studies on introducing psychedelics to a population group or to like a group of participants in seeing what's happened, Like, is there a study you can pull out that is, like a pretty important one that says this has changed people's lives or this has had this impact.

out or becoming schizophrenic or losing their mind? And what they found was when you look at it over a long time frame, psychedelics are really well tolerated by the majority of people in a population that you do have, you know, the one percent who are schizophrenic or have potentially a personality disorder that should not be working with psychedelics, but that the broad population can tolerate psychedelics really really

quite easily and quite well. Now, in the last twenty years, there's been quite a few clinical research papers published on the efficacy of psychedelics. There's probably i would say three to emphasize. One is the research on MDMA for PTSD. So you mentioned PTSD already. When we have an acute trauma, it can often become stored in our body and our brain, and that trauma, that emotional imprint will lead to a

lot of nasty side effects over the long term. When you work with something like MDMA, it creates a space of safety for the nervous system and for the brain to heal that underlying trauma, so that trauma can be opened up, it can be processed, it can be integrated, and it's no longer this festering wound that's in the

subconscious of the psyche. It actually gets brought up and out and it can be healed and probably worked with and this nonprofit group MAPS, which has a for profit arm called Lycos, they were the ones who attempted to get MDMA approval. They did phase three clinical trials, so it was done over twelve weeks. They had therapists that

were there with them. They did MDMA three times over those twelve weeks, seventy percent of those participants healed their PTSD and they had PTSD on average for seventeen years, which is wow, it's.

SSRIs under the guidance of a trained medical professional. And there are a lot of psychiatrists and other clinicians who are currently practicing this, but typically a folks ask, I say, look at ketemine. It's legal, it's available, it's been cleared by the FDA, and check that out. But the research paper that I'm referring to compared the mechanism of action of psychedelics versus lexapro, Zoloft and these other SSRIs, and the big difference was the typical classic SSRIs are almost

like a band aid. They numb the person. So if your typical range of emotion, you know, is one to ten, an SSRI is going to make get three to six, so the lows aren't going to be as low, but you're not going to have the same level of highs either. Essentially numbs you and creates the sort of band aid so you can sort of float, but it doesn't necessarily get to the wound that's underneath the core thing. Whereas

with psychedelics they tend to open up the psyche. They tend to almost force a catharsis where the underlying trauma that may be causing the depression or the addiction, which is in most cases adverse childhood experiences, which for your listeners, the ACE score was developed in the nineties. It was clinically proven that children who had these adverse childhood experiences were much more likely to be alcoholics, or have addictions,

or be depressed. And so a lot of the new context around mental health is it has a lot to do with trauma. It's not just serotonin, it's not just biology, it's actually the psyche and how it's been treated. And so when we work with the psychedelic it opens that up and that trauma can start to be healed, That wound that's been festering underneath can start to be released, and we can look at it and it can be integrated as well. So that's another really interesting research trial.

So the three that I mentioned are longitudinal data from the sixties that psychedelics are really well tolerated across thousands of people that have been studied, the clinical trial showing how effective MDMA is at treating PTSD seventy percent remission rate with participants who on average PTSD for seventeen years, and then showing specifically how are psychedelics different than necessaries, well, lexipro zolof prozac numb us, whereas psychedelics actually make us

more enlivened and they allow us to get to the core thing that's underneath the trauma so it doesn't continue to persist over the long time.

they will prescribe you. And of course you're gonna trust your doctor, as you should, you know, but I think it's also we've gotten to a point where that has been the major way of treating things for a long time and yet and I'm saying this is someone who has been on SSRIs before, and you know, we've been doing it for a long time, and yet rates of

mental health are increasing. So if you can imagine like people being like, oh, we have this cure for cancer, we have this treatment for cancer, and they're giving it to every cancer patient, and yet no one's getting better, Like you do have to start asking questions. Also with the adverse childhood experiences score really worth looking into, because there was a recent study on this and it's really interesting because I actually helped with this study. It was

done in Australia, the child Mail Treatment Study. And you might think, like childhood trauma is neglect abuse from parents can also be civiling abuse. It can also be bullying. It can also be experiencing the death of a parent,

a natural disaster, a family trauma, financial insecurity. So a lot of people might think, well, you know, nothing really that bad happened to me when I was a child, and then you dig into it and you can be like, yeah, but there's also you know, the system that you grew up and may not have actually been able to support you. It's not all about individual events. It's also about a

cultural society that may have been emotionally neglectful. But we're going to take a short break because I'm getting I'm letting time get ahead of me here. I'm so fascinated by this conversation, Paul. So we're going to take a short break, and when we come back, I want to talk about some of the important ethical standards that we should be considering when it's not entirely helpful to be using psychedelics, and also what the future of this treatment

might look like. All right, so we're back with Paul Austin, the founder of Third Wave. Paul, we have talked a lot about how this is like so magical, this treatment just sounds absolutely wonderful, and there is just so much evidence to prove it, so much research being done currently, but we can't talk about this, and I know people are going to be like, well, what about schizophrenia? What about if I have a really disruptive and distressing experience?

So what are some of the important kind of ethical standards that we need to think about as this practice is rapidly growing, both in a personal usage way but also in like a medical usage way.

Schedule nine to Schedule eight. I believe the TGA did that last year, so it's becoming more accessible and available. But these are still largely illegal substances, and that is, in fact the most dangerous part about psychedelics is that

they are illegal. I would say the second aspect of this, and I mentioned this in the previous section about research and the longitudinal studies around psychedelics, is those who have a family history of schizophrenia or psychosis, or personal history of schizophrenia or psychosis should not be taking psychedelics, even at a microdose a very low level. Those who have a personality disorder should not be working with psychedelics. Those who don't feel called to taking psychedelics should not be

taking psychedelics. Right. There does have to be this sort of willful choice that's involved if you want to do this work, because doing a macro dose a therapeutic dose of a psychedelic is not necessarily for the faint of heart. It can be very intense emotionally, It can be very difficult at times. There can be a lot of anger and grief and sadness and challenging emotions that come to

the surface that need to be processed and how. And that's why it's so critical that when working with psychedelics you pay attention to set and setting is the number one set or mindset is how you come into that experience. And setting is a physical environment that you're in. It's really critical to have a physical person who is present with you. That could be for some folks a sitter or a friend who is just there to make sure

you're safe. For those who are really looking at deep clinical issues that they're looking to heal and resolve, that most likely will be a therapist, a trained therapist. There's also other guides and shamans and coaches. In fact, through the Psychedelic Coaching Institute, we train coaches, therapists, practitioners, and

guides and what I call the five key elements. And I'll briefly describe those five key elements because I think these are essential to the ethical use of psychedelics for those listening at home, that if you're working with a coach, a guide, a therapist, a practitioner, they should know how to assess you. So what is the assessment process like? They should know how to prepare you. How are they

preparing you or what's preparation like for the experience. They should have a sense of how to facilitate the actual experience. You should be asking them questions about what medicine is appropriate much of that medicine, where are we going to do it. What's the overall flow of the experience. Will there be music involved? Will there not be music involved? You know, just getting a sense of some of these

questions for how the experience will go. Integration is key, So after we have that experience, will they support you on an ongoing basis to ensure that that experience can be woven in back to your everyday life. And then microdosing. I say that, you know, most practitioners should know how

microdosing can support the integration process. And microdosing is a sub intoxicating dose of a psychedelic It's about one tenth of a normal therapeutic dose that people might do two or three times per week for a period of time because it helps with mood, energy, sleep, and the a number of other things. So the ethical use of psychedelics comes down to I think those five key elements assessment, preparation, facilitation, integration,

and microdosing. Now, the final thing that I'll emphasize is because psychedelics are illegal because they're pro phiboted, it can also be very difficult to get a sense of who who can I work with right because the other shadowy, sort of risky part about working with drugs that make you more suggestible, that alter your consciousness is there have been stories out there where people feel like boundaries have

been crossed. You know, they feel like, you know, maybe they worked with a male shaman or facilitator and there wasn't consent for a certain type of touch as part of the experience. So I think the really big ethical consideration is make sure if you do this experience with an individual, you get references or it's that you know you've had a trusted friend who has sat with them before,

or you know someone who can vet for them. Because unlike doctors and therapists and you know, these people who are certified by boards, whether it's you know, a national board or a state board, there's not a lot of of mechanisms to report people who might be unethical in the psychedelic space. And so it's really critical that if you're interested in this, that you find a practitioner that

is trustworthy who you can work with. And thankfully you know on our website Third Way, we have a directory of practitioners, so we have retreat centers, clinics, coaches, and therapists that we've vetted and that we recommend to our audience as folks that they can work with, because I do think this is the biggest ethical risk is that people are not waiting for the law to change to

start to take psychedelics. In fact, last year in the United States, eight million people took psilocybin mushroom in twenty twenty three alone. That's three point one percent of the population. Four million of those people were microdosing. Right, so interest

is growing. But people who are working with this, if you're going to do a therapeutic dose, a high dose of a psychedelic, have a guide, have a sitter, have a therapist, have a coach, a practitioner who you trust and can hold that space for you as you're navigating.

Is incredibly unhelpful because people are still going to do it, but they end up and can end up not always in pretty dangerous situations. I like that you pointed out the fact that it is illegal means that there is no way to discern at times like whether what you're consuming is something that you want to be consuming. You know, in Australia we have problems with that with like NDMA and it being mixed with things that perhaps you don't

want to consume. And I just think all of that is just more of an argument as to why this

should be more widely accepted by the medical community. Obviously that takes time with needing studies and approval, but until that does happen, you are going to see those instances that you briefly spoke about which don't dominate the experience, as well of it being unsafe because people aren't bettered by you know, you don't imagine like if you had this approved course, like what it would take to become a psychologist or a surgeon, so people could know that

they were going to an expert. And it sounds like you're kind of doing some of that work before the traditional medical community catches up and that kind of brings me to a great question and probably one of my final questions. Firstly, what is holding us back? Is it just stigma? And secondly, if you could like envision where this was part of our medical system, like what would that look like? What would you want that to look like?

sort of specific indigenous groups in communities. In ancient Greece, they had these things called the Eleusinian mysteries that Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius participated in, and they were the mysteries. You couldn't talk about them. If you talked about what happened in these experiences, you were either killed or excommunicated, right, That's how sacred they were. So there is this deep relation between psychedelic use and sort of the underground, the mystery,

the unknown. And so when we're starting to bring this above ground for mental health and for a lot of the current ills that people face in modern society. There's a big question about how to do that safely because in the past, it wasn't that everyone had access to doing five grams of mushrooms or drinking ayahuasca or significantly altering their consciousness. And the drugs that we are most familiar with, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine are very different than

a psychedelic experience. So I think the first thing to point to is instead of a stigma, I think it's more a lack of psychedelic literacy that we are still learning. Oh, ketamine is different than MDMA, and MDMA is different than psilocybin. And these psychedelic class of drugs are actually very different than cocaine and heroin and you know, addictive substances. Because one thing I may have emphasized, but I'll reemphasize again

is psychedelics are anti addicted. They actually help to heal addictions. They're not like these other illicit drugs cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, et cetera, et cetera very very different drug class. So I think, on the one hand, it's psychedelic literacy, I would say, on the other hand, it's just the momentum that is required to develop policy and regulatory frameworks that work for people who want to do this legally. We've

seen this in Oregon. Oregon has legalized psilocybin mushrooms. They now have a regulatory framework in place where you have to get licensed by the state as a service center or a facilitator. The people who want to take psiloheybin mushrooms have to go into these service centers to do it there. Colorado has a bit more of a flexible approach now where it's not just psilocybin but also ayahuasca and San Pedro, and there are various centers that can

be licensed and it's quite open. So I think a lot of it is just, you know, we have a phrase in sort of startup world, which is you're building the airplane as you're bringing it down the runway. It's a little bit like that with psychedelics. It's this thing that's never been done before. We've never made them accessible and available to a wide populace. And that's why I firmly believe in the utility of microdosing. I do not believe that everyone is necessarily suited to do a high

dose of the psychedelic. I think for a lot of people, it's too chaotic, it's too much, it's too overwhelming, it's too destabilizing. What I do believe is that the vast majority of people, and when I say vast majority, I'm thinking ninety percent plus of people would benefit from microdosing with a psychedelic because it's sub intoxicating, it's not changing

your everyday per se. It's shifting things enough, making your brain slightly neuroplastic, but it's not overwhelming it with new information. It's anti addictive, unlike SSRIs. Back to SSRIs, right, fifty percent of people who start taking SSRIs cannot get off of them because the withdrawal symptoms are so bad with microdoses of psychedelics. With psychedelics generally, there's no withdrawal symptoms. So I feel like microdosing is the way of the future.

And so part of what I'm most excited about is, you know, we have Third Wave as our educational brand and company. We have our Psychedelic Coaching Institute which trains practitioners, and a couple of years ago I also started a nonprofit called the Microdosing Collective, and we're focusing on how do we develop policy so people can access microdoses of

psilocybin mushrooms in a safe and legal way. Because for anyone who's listening to this who lives in New York, or you live in LA or you live in Austin, or live you know, in Sydney, mushrooms are everywhere now, right, Like the DEA is focusing a lot of their time, energy and effort on fentanyl as they should, and cocaine

and organize crime as they should. So there's this been this massive growth of interest in mushrooms and all these chocolate bars and supplements and everything that's everywhere, and it's all illegal for the most part except in Colorado, and it's not regulated, and so people end up getting this they don't know what's in it, and so we feel like with the micro dos and Collective, people are going

to do this anyway. We need to develop consumer protection, We need to have third party tested supplements, and people need to be able to access this because as we were talking about before, prozac is no better than placebo, right, and a lot of people who get on prozac and lexapro can't get off, and there's all these nasty side effects.

We need different treatments, We need treatments that actually work, and I do believe that psychedelics and microdosing in particular, is a treatment modality that can transform our medical system where the emphasis is much less on just take a pill to fix every ill, and the emphasis is much more on, how can psychedelics and other tools like breathwork and yoga and meditation, other contemplated practices that facilitate neuroplasticity, How can those be catalysts to behavioral change, so we

eat healthier, we sleep more, we exercise more, we practice gratitude, we spend more time outside. At the end of the day, drugs or drugs, they aren't to fix themselves. But psychedelics are catalysts. They're neuro catalytic, so we can actually change

our behaviors. And that makes me hopeful. It makes me hopeful that we'll move from having a sick care system to a real health care system, and we'll start to focus not just on taking a pill for every ill, but actually taking responsibility for our health and well being and making intentional choices to live in a more connected and loving way.

at experts have a new perspective. What would be your one Your biggest piece of advice for people in their twenties doesn't have to be related to what we talked about today, which is one thing you wish that someone had sat you down and told you.

blah blah blah blah. And I think the most valuable part of our twenties is the capacity to experiment and the capacity to live in a way that I would consider to be frugal, so we can have the freedom to pursue work that is deeply meaningful. I think the biggest mistake that people in their twenties make is they

and this is particularly for Americans. It's not as prevalent in Europe and Australia, but they leave undergrad, they get a job right away, and they essentially stay in that job for years and years and years and years, and they end up becoming very miserable. There's no meaning in the work that they do, but they are now tied to it because of what they call the hedonic treadmill.

And I think the greatest opportunity with our twenties is to pursue work that feels artistic, To pursue work that feels like you are creating something, that you are responsible for something, and to trust that if you are contributing something of value to those around you, that there will be reciprocity in that and that you will be taken care of. That would be my biggest my biggest piece of advice.

you if they want to learn more? I know you have an amazing book, and I was actually reading this is so strange that I was reading some of the reviews and I was like, Wow, this looks like a good book. So where can they find more from you?

Paul Austin three w is my social handle. Follow me there, send me a note. I post almost every day, sometimes fun memes, usually like sometimes I'll post long scientific threads on Twitter about cutting edgy search that's been published. So if you're interested in staying up to date on this the third Wave, Paul Austin and my book.