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Destigmatising Psychedelic Medicines w/ James W. Jesso of the Adventures Through the Mind Podcast- Connecting Minds Podcast Ep04
107 Plays5 years ago
In the episode of Connecting Minds we have James W. Jesso, author, public speaker, and host of the Adventures Through the Mind podcast. James has deep respect for psychedelic medicines and his work is inspired by his healing path through depression, substance abuse, and trauma, and focuses on translating the profound insights of the psychedelic experience into a higher quality of life, for both the individual and society.
Episode show notes here: https://christianyordanov.com/04-james-w-jesso/
Watch this interview in video: https://youtu.be/LnfFPSy05MA
Links to James' website, podcast, books and social media:
Website: https://www.jameswjesso.com
Adventures Through the Mind Podcast: https://www.jameswjesso.com/podcast/
Decomposing The Shadow: Lessons From The Psilocybin Mushroom: https://www.jameswjesso.com/decomposing-the-shadow/
The True Light Of Darkness: https://www.jameswjesso.com/true-light-darkness/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jameswjesso
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AdventuresThroughTheMind
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jameswjesso
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jameswjesso/
Topics discussed on this episode:
- James’ experience with psychedelics.
- James gives us a crash course in psychedelics, what they are, what they can be used for, and some of the history which led to them coming into the limelight and then being made illegal, and the recent psychedelic Renaissance where ongoing research is showing promise for their use in depression, PTSD, addiction, end-of-life anxiety, and other mental conditions.
- How the medicalisation of psychedelics can lead to their integration into society.
- How psychedelics can help us to deal with our own traumas and wounds.
- The Shadow and the Golden Shadow.
- What is psychedelic integration
- The potential dangers of psychedelics when not used right.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Connecting Minds is a space dedicated to honoring the amazing authors, researchers, clinicians, artists, and entrepreneurs who are contributing to our collective evolution or simply making the world a better place. These thought-provoking conversations are intended to expand our horizons, so come with an open mind and let us grow together. Here is your host, Christian Yordanov.
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode four of the Connecting Minds podcast. I'm your host Christian Yordanov, and thank you very much for joining me today.
Who is James W. Jesso?
00:00:50
Speaker
Today on the podcast we have James W. Gesso, who is an author, public speaker, and podcast host with a deep respect for psychedelic medicines. His work is inspired by his healing path through depression, substance abuse,
00:01:06
Speaker
and trauma and focuses on translating the profound insights of the psychedelic experience into a higher quality of life for both the individual and society.
00:01:17
Speaker
He has written two books, Decomposing the Shadow, Lessons from the Psilocybin Mushroom and The True Light of Darkness, which present a model for working with the magic psilocybin mushroom as an ally in personal transformation and in developing psycho-spiritual maturity.
History and Promise of Psychedelics
00:01:35
Speaker
He's also the host of the Adventures Through the Mind podcast and that's his effort to contribute to the psychedelic culture at large.
00:01:44
Speaker
It features interviews with luminaries in science, art and culture across a range of disciplines. This platform expands James' work into a more broad exploration of progressive social developments and the potential role psychedelics might play within them. So as you can guess, we will be talking about psychedelic medicines.
00:02:04
Speaker
If you're new to the topic you're in for a treat because James gives us a very good crash course into what psychedelics are, what they can be used for, some of the history, you know the important events and people that kind of led them to coming into the limelight back in the 50s, 60s, 70s and eventually being made illegal and then he also talks about the recent psychedelic renaissance where
00:02:32
Speaker
Ongoing research is showing promise for their use in various mental disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, addictions, also end-of-life anxiety, for example, in end-stage cancer patients and other conditions.
00:02:51
Speaker
So very, very interesting topic. James is really an expert on the topic. So if you've been meaning to research this stuff, just haven't had time. Now is the time for you to understand a little bit more about the potential that these psychedelic medicines have for us.
00:03:13
Speaker
both as addressing some of our most serious mental conditions that unfortunately the conventional medical system has not been able to address, but also to use as tools for our own personal transformation, development, healing our own traumas and wounds, and so on. So thank you again for joining us. And without further ado, here is James W.
Jesso's Personal Journey with Psychedelics
00:03:40
Speaker
Gesso.
00:03:41
Speaker
And we are live today on the Connecting Minds podcast. We have James W. Jesso. James, thank you so much for taking the time out today, man. Hey, thanks for having me, Christian. I really appreciate it.
00:03:53
Speaker
Awesome. Let's jump straight into it. So the topic of today's podcast will be, I'd like to, because you've had a lot of experience with your podcast, Adventures Through the Mind. You've written a couple of books around your experiences with psychedelics, decomposing the shadow lessons from the psilocybin mushroom and the true light of darkness.
00:04:16
Speaker
I kind of started reading both of them over the weekend. Pretty good books, actually. It's nice to kind of read your story in a little bit, see kind of the lighter side, the darker side of psychedelics. So the topic of today's podcast, I would just like to just have a general discussion around pretty much the basics of psychedelics. But before we get into that, can you tell us what, maybe share a little bit about your journey with psychedelics? How did you get introduced to them and what have they done for you in your life?
00:04:47
Speaker
While I got introduced to psychedelics accidentally, I think, or indirectly as a kid playing Super Mario Brothers, but eating the mushroom, getting really big, eating the flower, being able to spit fire, whatever else. But in all seriousness, I got introduced to psychedelics when I was a teenager. I was particularly interested in drug culture. I was really excited about the idea of black lights and Pink Floyd and smoking cannabis.
00:05:18
Speaker
Mushrooms came into my life as one of these next steps from cannabis kind of thing. In hindsight, it's a very juvenile way to have approached it, but it was what it was available to me in the culture that I was a part of, which was,
00:05:33
Speaker
excuse me, the quasi-suburban North American Canadian culture of drug use, which was not exactly deeply rooted in veins of sacred use or any of that. And so my first experiences with it were when I was a teenager.
00:05:52
Speaker
And it was just mostly youthful experimentation and play and some blips along the way, a couple of negative experiences in the course of it, as you do when you're a kid and you're just playing around with stuff, with fire, you get burned, right? But nothing too substantial. And it pretty much went dormant for quite some time after that.
00:06:18
Speaker
I mean, this was 20 years ago, so it was a little bit harder for me to source things and kind of got into a life of weed smoking and beer drinking, and that was what was what, you know? And then mushrooms kind of came back in my early 20s, around 22, 23, along with a bunch of other psychedelic drugs during a time of pretty intense
00:06:45
Speaker
I'd say experimentation because that's what it was but it was also very detrimental use that included more than just psychedelics and included a number of other drugs and basically a whole lot of partying while I was living overseas and was living in a world that supported that kind of lifestyle.
00:07:04
Speaker
And I got pretty interested at that time in LSD. In fact, LSD was the thing that sort of like broke me out of a, I was coming out of an intense sickness that I got shortly after leaving to go travel overseas, which in hindsight, I realized was something really wrong with my kidneys that just resolved themselves. Thanks, some sort of infection.
00:07:28
Speaker
And I was coming out of that was feeling really lonely really disconnected from home really depressed ultimately and I had an LSD experience someone gave me some LSD I've never taken it before I was afraid of it you know it was like the ultimate drug you know like that sort of like.
00:07:44
Speaker
narrative. And that, you know, if I had an, I could have a nightmare strip that would make me crazy and all these sort of things that, you know, aren't entirely untrue, but are certainly narrativized in a way that is far from truth, a lot of the time. And then during that experience, I had this sort of awakening moment where I literally was outside of my body, or I was literally experiencing myself as outside my body.
00:08:09
Speaker
And I was seeing myself just complaining about my life and realizing that I was perpetuating a narrative that was reinforcing the experience and I could just choose to change it. And I can choose to be whoever I wanted to be and do whatever I wanted to do and be okay and be excited about that. Now, that's also, it's an important revelation, but it's also quite juvenile because it doesn't bring in all the factors around sort of consequence
00:08:37
Speaker
you know, unintended consequences and direct consequences, and also how much environment influences choice making and sense making in general. But then I decided I would just live whatever life I wanted to live, which ended up being a lot of drugs for quite a while until I got myself pretty messed up, like, and sort of confused. And it was LSD that then told me, hey, you know, it allowed me to say something which I wasn't able to acknowledge in myself, which was, hey, you know, I'm addicted to drugs.
00:09:07
Speaker
And that sort of totally revamped my world again. LSD brought me into this world of doing whatever I wanted and just like pushing my mind to the limits. And it also brought me into this place of like, yo, you have limits and you're crossing them and you're hurting yourself. Right. And
00:09:23
Speaker
That experience mostly got me, you know, throughout all of that, I was very excited about everything that justified my psychedelic use as being positive and, you know, generative, be it Terrence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley. These are the people I was into. Now, these are smart people with excellent concepts and have done great work for psychedelic culture. And I was using them as the intellectual justification of reckless use.
00:09:49
Speaker
And so on the other side of that second revelation journey, I will see many times in between that, I went on this sort of
00:10:02
Speaker
this journey in myself to try to figure out what went wrong, how do I change the things that I did that were hurting me and become a different person in the context because I didn't like who I was. There's a lot about this on my website. I've released videos about this, stories about this, yada, yada. Eventually, I felt like I had gotten myself away from the behaviors
00:10:25
Speaker
the drug use but I hadn't gotten myself out of the
Psychedelics for Self-Discovery
00:10:29
Speaker
the damage left over and Also the under the things bubbling underneath in my psyche that gave rise to the behaviors in the first place So I kind of think of it like I killed the mold but the toxin still in my system kind of thing and that's when I started using psilocybin mushrooms and I ended up using them once a month every month for 13 months and
00:10:54
Speaker
with this not knowing exactly what would happen, but just having a sense that I could heal in some way. And that's what ended up happening. I ended up resolving a lot of the stuff I was going through at that time, really fundamentally altering myself as a person in a very positive way. And throughout that developed a really strong relationship with psilocybin and a conceptual model of engagement and understanding of psilocybin
00:11:19
Speaker
as a process and as a medicine and as something that could be integrated into one's life without detaching oneself from the reality of the ordinary responsibilities, but in fact, increasing our capacity to be responsible by helping us become happier, healthier, more resolved, less emotionally repressed people.
00:11:46
Speaker
In those mushroom strips, I ended up deciding like, oh, I need to share this with other people. Other people in my life were telling me that when I shared it with them, it was positive. And since I always wanted to be a writer, I decided to write a book about it. And then I started giving talks about it. And that was in 2013 that the book was released after quite a bit of time of writing it. And then since 2013, the ball has just been rolling increasingly around becoming, I guess you could say,
00:12:14
Speaker
like a citizen scientist or an amateur researcher on psychedelic medicine culture and yeah, just psychedelics in general.
Cultural Impact and Stigmatization
00:12:27
Speaker
And the podcast is a significant part of that journey as well. So that's kind of me just like blasting through it.
00:12:36
Speaker
And so all in all, psychedelics have been incredibly positive in my life, even though some of my experiences have left me with things that I needed to clean up afterwards.
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah. What I like about your podcast is you ask really good questions of some real kind of heavy hitters in the psychedelic community, researchers, authors, doctors, and you're able to really probe well. And at the same time, you have the capacity
00:13:08
Speaker
to play devil's advocate really well and not just take everything they say at face value and really argue well with them on some points because some of those guys can be fairly out there. I was listening to your talk with Dr. Andrew Gallimore.
00:13:26
Speaker
And, you know, he has some pretty far out ideas. That's just one example where you're really able to kind of, you know, just kind of argue the other side. What's great, I mean, to be fair, like who made that extra easy for me is that Andrew is an awesome guy and he is like totally on board.
00:13:43
Speaker
For that kind of thing i really like and so that was one of the reasons like i felt good in that pushback kind of thing because he's just like so game for those kinds of things so yeah he's great and and exactly you have to like you know you have to be able to have your ideas be scrutinized especially when they're so kind of out there as well so yeah.
00:14:06
Speaker
But what I'd like to, at least what piqued my interest in the psychedelic research is there's a lot of studies going on at the moment that are focusing on things like PTSD, depression, end of life anxiety, for example, in cancer, so kind of fear of death, this kind of stuff. And importantly, addiction is another area that I think there's some amazing work being done.
00:14:34
Speaker
Could you I know as I mentioned it before we start recording I feel like the audience for For this particular episode will not be too into the research into the psychedelic culture. So could you Maybe start at the beginning. Could you give us a brief overview of you know, what are the main psychedelics? What can they be used for and what happened with them in the 60s and 70s? That caused them to be so, you know
00:15:04
Speaker
grossly stigmatized in our society and what have recent developments in the last decade or two done to begin the process of destigmatizing these, I want to call them medicines.
Therapeutic Benefits and Research Renaissance
00:15:22
Speaker
Those are three very complex questions. Well done. So, I mean, the main ones, we'll say, are often referred to as the classical psychedelics. And the ones that fit inside of that category, and this may be too high level too quick, so hopefully your listeners just hang on, are ones that directly impact the serotonin 5-HD2A receptor. So this is just like a certain receptor site in the brain
00:15:50
Speaker
that the classical psychedelics tend to impact predominantly, although different ones do so differently, and other receptor sites differently as well. Generally, what's recognized as the classical psychedelics are psilocybin, which is the active alkaloid in magic mushrooms, LSD or acid, mescaline, which is the active alkaloid in something like peyote or the San Pedro cactus,
00:16:17
Speaker
Um, and then also, uh, DMT, dimethyltryptamines.
00:16:22
Speaker
DMT, I don't think, was as hot in the 60s and 70s as it is now, but that's a whole different sort of line of inquiry. And those are sort of the classicals. Now, you mentioned treatment of PTSD. That's generally, these days, that's primarily connected with MDMA. MDMA is not a classical psychedelic, although it does act on serotonin. It doesn't act on the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. It acts on the search gate, which controls how much serotonin flows in and out
00:16:52
Speaker
Oh, cleft synaptic cleft into the inter inter synaptic fluid, whatever that's called. And it's, it's not technically a psychedelic even, although it is kind of lumped in understandably, and I think reasonably inside of psychedelic medicine. So those are the classics, those are the primary ones, there's a host of others, even from
00:17:17
Speaker
50 years ago and still today. People would think say ayahuasca when they think maybe of psychedelics even if they're new and ayahuasca has obviously been around for centuries at least.
00:17:31
Speaker
And it's predominantly a combination of DMT and another set of molecules called MAOIs. And then there's a whole host of ones that are like chemical remixes that are based on psilocybin or LSD or based on MDMA or based on mescaline and that's a whole other world, right?
00:17:52
Speaker
It's a massive, massive tapestry of molecules that could fit inside of what psychedelics are that even sometimes interact with the same receptor sites. But the predominant ones that people will understand will be psilocybin, magic mushrooms, LSD, acid, mescaline, peyote, although that's not very widely used right now for lots of reasons, and then MDMA is sort of like a side thing.
00:18:17
Speaker
So in the 50s, psychedelics were breaking into the sort of Western academic world as a consequence of a variety of major players, one of which was a guy named R. Gordon Wasson, who discovered that there are mushrooms that have psychoactive effects through a
00:18:42
Speaker
through a very complicated interaction he had with a woman named Maria Sabina, who was a medicine woman in Mexico. He's widely recognized in a positive light and on some level, yes, but that interaction between him and Maria Sabina
00:18:59
Speaker
it was on some level quite exploitive and the consequences of it for her life and for that town there was really negative. I don't have a particular stance I want to take on that except that there's lots to unfold there about colonialist extractivism and the destruction of indigenous cultures for
00:19:24
Speaker
you know, us to get their resources from them, which I think was definitely at play with our Gordon Wasson. And this was in the 50s. And then you have people like Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD in 1940. Was it 1946 or 1943? I think 1938 he discovered that in 1943 he accidentally dosed himself. He dosed it, yeah, for the first time. So he discovered the effects of LSD in 1943. OK, so thank you for that.
00:19:54
Speaker
These things are getting introduced into the world and you have major people like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert who is the late great, I mean both Timothy Leary and Alpert are dead now, but Alpert became Ram Dass.
00:20:09
Speaker
So you have all these sort of like major people that are happening in the 50s, also Stanislav Groff. A lot of stuff is happening. A lot of research is happening. LSD is just blowing up. It is like this amazing molecule that's going on. There's research happening all over the world. Even in Canada, the term psychedelic was coined by a Canadian researcher working in Saskatchewan. And
00:20:32
Speaker
inside of the academic institutions, you know, things were coming out. They were looking at LSD as sort of like, um, Sanzlov Groff, a Czech researcher, very important figure in psychedelic science, said that it is, um, psychedelics to the mind are like the telescope for astronomy and the microscope for biology, right? This is how important it would be as a tool for, for psychotherapy. Yeah.
00:21:00
Speaker
Now, that's going on and that's amazing. A lot of good work is happening. And also, it's sort of like broken out of the lab and the usage of it is growing inside of counterculture in the United States, but also the rest of the world. And this is also around the time of the Vietnam War and a variety of other things happening. So now we're out of the 50s and we're into the 60s.
00:21:24
Speaker
So we have the hippie movement, the counterculture movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement and the like the black empowerment movements that were happening at that time. And all of which were sort of intimately tied with LSD and with cannabis. And understandably so, a lot of people were getting hurt as a consequence of very sort of reckless use of LSD. Like a lot of people were just freaking out and having a good time and some people are freaking out and
00:21:49
Speaker
getting really hurt by it. People were going off the rails and getting hurt. But the clamp down of criminalization against LSD and cannabis, I mean cannabis I think was already illegal, but the clamp down against these things
00:22:05
Speaker
came as a consequence of their association to the Black People's Movement and anti-war movement, which one of Nixon's advisors, not that long ago, it came out that he knew and Nixon knew that the only reason they scheduled and criminalized these drugs was actually so that they could use that as a leveraging point to criminalize dissent against the war and to criminalize being black, which is in many ways how cannabis criminalization in the United States continues to operate.
Criminalization and Destigmatization Efforts
00:22:35
Speaker
That's a bigger question. So in the 70s, I think it was 1971, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act comes out and the use of psychedelics, mushrooms, like psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT, all these things, even things that weren't even that popular all got clumped together and they were made like the utmost illegal. I mean,
00:23:00
Speaker
back reference. Nixon even called Timothy Leary public enemy number one because Leary was like out there making a fuss about it. Now, mind you, he was also trying to make up for and fight in the legal system for the right for people to have psychedelics. And also, it's a complex mess. He's not a bad, I don't think he was a bad guy in all of this, but he made some mistakes and tried to compensate for them as best he could. But he also made lots of mistakes. I mean, this is kind of like a
00:23:29
Speaker
a whirlwind stuff, but then there was also Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and The Grateful Dead. There was a lot of places where LSD was just funneling out into the counterculture that weren't Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary was really a lot for structured use, unlike those other characters I just mentioned. It was a Harvard professor, just wanted to add, him and Richard Alpert rammed us. They were actually in Harvard, so they were doing the Psilocybin project as well, weren't they?
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, so they were in Harvard and they had the psilocybin project and they did some good work at the time. The methodology scientifically is questionable nowadays, but it was very interesting work. And they actually, I mean, Leary was
00:24:14
Speaker
like kind of creating a fuss at Harvard but couldn't be fired because he had tenure and he also was doing, he had done incredible work psychologically or for psychology and for the university up until this point until I think he had his first psilocybin journey and said that in Mexico and he said that he learned more in one psilocybin journey than he had and like
00:24:37
Speaker
20 years of psychotherapy or something like that or psychiatry. But he was tenure. They actually got fired because the university had said, like, the university had said, fine, you just keep doing your thing. Keep giving psilocybin to the students as a part of your psilocybin project. Yeah, sure. But just don't give it to, I think it was undergrads or first years. And Richard Alpert had a crush on this guy.
00:25:04
Speaker
and who was an undergrad. And so like, in this way of sort of like trying to create a dynamic where it was like, cool, he would like offered, yeah, we could give you the psilocybin as a way of sort of like, I don't know, maybe, I don't know what he was, his intentions were, but trying to like make himself look cool, or sort of like flirt, be like, yeah, we can, we can get you in behind the door, you know, as we do sometimes, we want to give special access to people that we have a bit of a crush on.
00:25:28
Speaker
And then Andrew Weil, like Dr. Andrew Weil, Andy Weil, like the sort of like famous natural health doctor now, was writing for a campus paper at Harvard and exposed Albert for violating the terms of their agreement with the university. And Albert got fired. And Leary was like, this is bullshit. I'm quitting.
00:25:53
Speaker
to stay in solidarity with his friend and his research partner. There's a documentary called
00:26:03
Speaker
Oh, what's it called? Dying to know. And it's about LSD. It's about Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. But yeah, so he was a Harvard professor that, you know, they say he got fired for his work with suicide, but it's much more complex like that. Most sort of simplistic narratives are usually misrepresented of the actual reality, regardless of how much sort of
00:26:28
Speaker
self-righteous justification or outrage might be behind that narrative or that narrative feeds. So yeah, when they got criminalized in the 70s, 1971, they didn't just get criminalized like, hey, you hippie tripper black person, you can't do drugs. It's like these drugs schedule one means they're like a fundamental harm to all of society and have no medical value whatsoever. They must be completely removed from society.
00:26:58
Speaker
which was not the case. There was, I think at that point, more than a thousand research papers about LSD, you know, if I remember correctly.
Recent Research Developments
00:27:07
Speaker
And so they're fully criminalized. All academic work needs to shut down completely. And in that timeframe from the 70s up until about 2004, 2006, I think I can't remember exactly what day,
00:27:22
Speaker
psychedelics were heavily stigmatized because they were, you know, there was a misinformation propaganda machine that associated them to the heart like harm and damage to the brain to the genetic damage or chromosome damage, not true, you know, and all these things that make it so that even just the mentioning of psychedelics could totally harm your it could destroy your academic career.
00:27:48
Speaker
right, because they were so villainized and sort of like either villainized or delegitimized in some way.
00:27:59
Speaker
And in 2004, 2006, I mean, in the course of this, we have a guy named Rick Doblin, who runs something called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He is somewhere in there, he's involved, and he starts organizing this group that eventually will become the primary means by which, sort of like one of the central means by which psychedelics are in the process of medicalization, which is this organization directly connected to MDMA.
00:28:27
Speaker
which I don't know as much about so I can't really speak to you, but that's all sort of happening congruent with what I'm talking about now. But like later, I think some like the 80s and 70s or 80s and beyond.
00:28:38
Speaker
So in 2004, a highly reputable research psychiatrist named Roland Griffiths, who has a long massive track record of published, peer-reviewed articles on the relationship between drugs and people and animals. And he basically decides that he will recreate one of the most sort of central studies of the psychedelic era, which is the Marsh Chapel experiment, where they basically gave seminary students, this is a
00:29:08
Speaker
This was Walter Panky, who was a researcher at the time. He gave psilocybin to seminary students during
00:29:22
Speaker
during Good Friday in the basement of a church and some of them he gave I think methylphenidate to see whether or not they had religious experiences, which of course they did have religious experiences and some of them to this day look back and say like that fundamentally changed my life. But Griffiths decides that he'll just try with better research methodology.
00:29:43
Speaker
to recreate this experiment and see, does it hold? And with top-level five-star scientific rigor, re-does this thing. And it's this landmark study that says psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences. And that sort of opens the floodgates in some sense. Now,
00:30:04
Speaker
There are other pieces here in the 90s, a guy named Rick Strassman did some human research with DMT. There's other research that's going on here in the midst of that with different molecules that can produce different experiences. There's a lot going on than just what I just explained, but that's sort of the main
Beyond Disorders: Enhancing Well-being
00:30:25
Speaker
narrative. Now that sort of landmark study in 2004, 2006 was followed up by saying like after 18 months, there's still sustained positive impacts in these people after having this experience. And these became the foundation for increasing amounts of studies to unfold, which now look at things around
00:30:45
Speaker
like you said, psilocybin for terminal anxiety, as well as psilocybin for smoking cessation, for major depressive disorder or treatment through resistant depression, as well as MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, LSD for alcoholism that also existed in the past and is being recreated, and a host of other things that's just a massive track record right now of psychedelic research that is in the midst
00:31:12
Speaker
in the mix with a movement to medicalize them legitimately to bring them into medical practice to then integrate psychedelics into society as a medicine.
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think that brings us up to about here. Was that all your question? I know it's a bit of a whirlwind for your listeners, but it's a pretty complex set of stuff there. Yeah, you covered really well. Yeah, so it looks like exciting times for this kind of stuff with
00:31:43
Speaker
With that, obviously, the first step is medicalization. But I think a lot of people pushing kind of on the frontiers of the movement, they don't just want the medicalization. So we don't just want folks that have some type of, let's say, mental disorder or an addiction to benefit from them. There are benefits.
00:32:11
Speaker
As you already kind of alluded to in old psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences in in healthy volunteers so could you maybe talk about what could be The benefits for society or for the individual outside of let's say this medicalization of the psychedelics of psychedelics
00:32:35
Speaker
Well, I'll first call back to everything I just said about the history and encourage people to look into other people who have a more coherent or more in-depth discussion of the history. That was sort of ad hoc, I think, off the cuff sort of exploration, and it's a really rich and beautiful history, so I highly recommend looking into the people who have done good historical work on that.
00:32:59
Speaker
What you're pointing at is something that, and I'm not sure if he said it first, but I know that he said it, which was Leo Rosman, or Leo Rosman, who is a researcher at Imperial College London, was presenting at the, I think it was the psychedelic science conference in 2017. And he had said something like, you don't have to be sick to be better.
00:33:26
Speaker
So, yes, moving towards integrating psychedelics into our society through the tract of medicalization can be incredibly positive because it seems as though they're able to address mental issues and illnesses that aren't able to be addressed by the medicine that we currently have.
00:33:52
Speaker
you know, little known, little known sort of tidbit of information, we have all this info and research and all these drugs for antidepressant effects, which are called, you know, serotonin, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
00:34:08
Speaker
and all the different sort of like evolutions of that over time and then leaning into selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors and all the rest of this. And all of that sort of tracks back to the discovery of LSD and serotonin in the alteration of mind. So SSRIs are actually sort of the brainchild of LSD research in the early years there in the 50s. But that aside,
00:34:33
Speaker
These things aren't, aren't seeming to treat things like major depression or trauma of post-traumatic stress disorder. You know, they're not working. For example, uh, end of life anxiety is they, they, they funnel so many antidepressant drugs into people and pain drugs, you know, because, you know, total pain where emotional, psychological, existential pain manifests physical pain. And it doesn't, it doesn't help. Right. And, and with.
00:35:01
Speaker
psilocybin, we'll say in particular, there's an ability to have an experience that inside of this subjectively meaningful experience, there is a type of releasing of emotional repression of held emotional things, and revelations around oneself, one's place in the universe, the meaning of life, that
00:35:28
Speaker
can fundamentally alter the way we experience life and as a consequence, resolve things like major depression, at least temporarily. And for other people, the anxiety of dying, right? So these are incredible medicines for that kind of thing. With MDMA, people have treatment resistant post-traumatic stresses where nobody
00:35:52
Speaker
It doesn't seem to be working at all and their lives are just hanging by a thread. And then the research shows something like 80% remission. These are from people who have tried absolutely everything and they're still suffering. And 80% of those people, I think, I think after it was like 80% and then after months of not having the MDMA, the number went up.
00:36:18
Speaker
So it's not just like the drug's effect, it's about how it changes the very essence of our sense of self in the world, right? So this is incredibly positive for people who are deeply and profoundly suffering. And that same positive impact can be had for someone who's not profoundly and intensely suffering. For example, is the fact that I am not riddled and crippled, we'll say,
00:36:48
Speaker
with profound depression mean that I couldn't benefit from an experience of letting go of the deep grief I've been holding for 20 years and on the other side of it feel loved and held by a larger cosmic force in the universe where life's beauty is now more available to me
00:37:10
Speaker
And I'm more able to show up to the world and to my relationships no longer, you know, no longer hindered by the, by the deep and profound unconscious emotional load of unprocessed grief and a complete disconnection with the beauty that animates the world that I live in is the fact that I'm not already unable to get out of bed reason for me not to benefit from that experience. Well, no, of course not. It's ridiculous.
00:37:40
Speaker
These things can be incredibly positive for us. And so I think in many ways, that's why we have a decriminalization movement saying like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It doesn't matter if I'm sick. It doesn't matter if I have trauma. It doesn't matter.
00:37:59
Speaker
I still have the right to alter my consciousness however I choose. And I find that these things are positive and beneficial for me. And there's a lot of discussion there about harm reduction and integration and blah, blah, blah. It's not just a magic bullet. You don't just take the pill and it fixes everything by any means. But there's good reason to say, no, this should be a fundamental right for us to be able to alter our mind however we choose.
Integration of Psychedelic Experiences
00:38:23
Speaker
And the fact that it can be positive for healthy people is evident even in the research.
00:38:28
Speaker
So does that kind of answer your question? Yeah, it's like you're able to read books to improve your mind. You're able to meditate, to explore your consciousness. Why shouldn't you be able to enter a non-ordinary, ordinary state of consciousness, similarly to meditation, to explore your mind,
00:38:57
Speaker
Let me jump in. Let's say that the reason, and I don't think this is the best use of say mushrooms, but let's say the reason I want to take mushrooms isn't to explore my mind in deep meditation. It's so I could get like,
00:39:13
Speaker
hella fun on the dance floor and like feel really good in my body or to be able to get involved with like some sort of beautiful sexual experience that's enhanced with molecules and whatever else. Maybe the reason I want to take it is entirely hedonistic. I don't think that's the best use of the substance. It's a great use during lovemaking. That's not what I'm saying. But pure hedonism isn't the best use of the substance. But even if that's the reason,
00:39:43
Speaker
I can own a gun. I can jump out of an airplane. I can ride a horse. I can actively participate in competitive fighting.
00:39:54
Speaker
And I can't take a little mushroom that grows into a forest that causes me to feel like life is beautiful and just so that I can be altered and weird if that's the only reason. It's just like a... It is ridiculous. It does not hold up to logic at all.
00:40:14
Speaker
And when you start to break down the actual or doesn't hold up to good reason. But when and when you break down the actual logic behind why they remain criminalized, it's very ignorant and it's very draconian. And it has a lot to do with decisions that were made a long time ago, paradimatically as in the paradigm that just function and continue to function. I think that's why it's letting up now because people aren't stupid. Politicians aren't stupid. Lawmakers, they're not stupid. You know, they know
00:40:44
Speaker
They see what's happening. They see the fact that millions of people have taken acid since 1970 and society hasn't fallen apart. If anything, Facebook is tearing society apart a lot faster than LSD ever did with the algorithms and increased polarization and all the rest.
00:41:03
Speaker
I think that those things are changing, but the actual current logic around why to keep these things illegal has less to do with it being good reason and more to do with the fact that it's just hard to change laws that were made a long time ago despite how stupid they were.
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah, my personal opinion is there's a, you know, it's beyond ignorance. I think there's more sinister reasons, sinister reasons that these compounds are still illegal. Whereas things like cigarettes, you know, it took, I don't know, 50 years for them to kind of put labels on packaging that they're bad for you to
00:41:43
Speaker
them to acknowledge they're bad and so on. I think that the hippie movement, all those kids that didn't want to go kill their brothers and sisters in Vietnam, was a scary notion that these compounds actually make you love people more, they make you relate to nature more, to other people more.
00:42:05
Speaker
And when you're trying to divide and control people, that's not exactly what you want. So at least that's my opinion. But I don't like to kind of push that on to others. I like where you're going with that. I think that's pretty fair. I think that's pretty fair where you're coming from. Thanks. I kind of forgot my train of thought there.
00:42:35
Speaker
So, yeah, so this is what I wanted to say earlier, right? So you kind of started a good thread about, yeah, so these compounds can help with depression, can help with trauma. They can help well people transform and expand and develop in many ways, but
00:42:59
Speaker
What's unbeknownst to many of us is that we think we're fine. We don't have any medical diagnosis. We have a very functional life. We have jobs. We have hobbies. We might have children, responsibilities, everything. However,
00:43:15
Speaker
We are actually somewhat kind of, it's like we have a crutch, it's like we have a limp. There's this undercurrent of repressed emotions, you know, an unconscious trauma that I like how you refer to it as the shadow.
Addressing Personal Shadows
00:43:33
Speaker
Could you speak to that and how psychedelics can actually help us tap into that process and integrate it so we can actually live fuller lives?
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think about Ernest Becker's denial of death and it's something very simplistically summarized as our fear, the deep fear that prevents us from looking at our own dying is the thing that also prevents us from living our life.
00:44:03
Speaker
The degree to which we're afraid to address and look into our own inevitable death is the degree to which we hinder ourselves from being fully and completely alive while we're alive. A lot of us are carrying quite a bit of pain, quite a bit of shame, quite a bit of anger, quite a bit of wounding as a consequence of the lives that we have lived and the relational injuries that we've incurred.
00:44:31
Speaker
We that we have incurred and occurred on to others, you know, a lot of us are carrying that and for the most part we're mostly coping most of the time. Right. And yet, it's still there. And we still carry it if it's unaddressed we still carry it and, you know, these are.
00:44:49
Speaker
trauma. I mean, I, I say trauma, you might think of a car accident or a sexual assault or something like that. And that is also trauma, right? And this is trauma too, in a way. And all of this stuff sort of buried out all those aspects of herself, we'd rather not feel, you know, that we that we sort of evade or deflect or repress. These are all things that, you know, over time, they take, they put a load on our body. They put a load on our mind.
00:45:17
Speaker
We're almost, we're front loaded with every experience we have that might accidentally trigger or agitate those things that we're trying to get away from. And once they're triggered and agitated, all of a sudden we're not thinking clearly or responding clearly, we're acting out of a wounded place, out of usually a much younger wounded place. And as a consequence, creating or worsening conflicts that could have been resolved otherwise.
00:45:42
Speaker
So we don't, unless we know what those things are and are able to be with them in a way that's constructive, then we are led by them. So it's something like, um, I think, you know, shadow comes from, um, uh, Carl Jung, a famous psychologist.
00:46:05
Speaker
And he says that it's like all that we don't want to recognize about ourselves and know about ourselves, sort of the personification of that. And if we don't actively reveal and integrate our shadows, then it will run our lives for us. So with psychedelics, there is the possibility to
00:46:29
Speaker
open up the defenses because chances are we don't know that stuff's there. The decision to suppress that stuff happened likely much early in our lives or is happening somewhere before our conscious awareness, right? So with psychedelics, the defense mechanisms, the adaptive defenses that we maladaptive or not that we've
00:46:50
Speaker
that we've brought up to protect ourselves from the old wounds that we're still carrying or even the feelings that are present with us now that we don't want to feel because as a society we don't raise our children to be competent and mature emotional beings. We focus on intellectual development and physical development as if emotional development is not necessary. Like it's just like an epiphenomenon of the rest of life that we have to sort of
00:47:19
Speaker
deal with as little as possible just so we could get back to our intellectual lives. So we have all this stuff. I kind of lost my own train there. I got to come back from this little eddy. When we take psychedelics, those defenses go down and that stuff can come up.
00:47:40
Speaker
And in coming up, we can grapple with it. We can feel that pain. We can let it out. We can see at the very least that it's there and we can see how it's impacting the way we show up in the world. Oddly enough, if the set is right, your mindset is in a good place, the context in which you're using it and your dose is right, that just unfolds naturally.
00:48:02
Speaker
It's not like we have to try to do that. It just unfolds naturally. That type of process just comes out, especially with psilocybin or LSD and also with things like ayahuasca, MDMA. We just naturally go there if we create the context, the psychological context, the set, the physical, socio-cultural context, the setting, and the appropriate dose.
00:48:24
Speaker
We just that stuff just comes up and we can properly deal with it. We can bring it to the front of our awareness. And if we're aware that it's there, then it can't direct us from the shadow. Can't direct us unconsciously if we know that it's operating. We have a greater capacity to be responsible with our own reactivity.
00:48:42
Speaker
And as a consequence, also a greater capacity to learn healthy or emotional patterns as we come to acknowledge how destructive the emotional patterns we had previously or emotional behaviors we had previously is in our lives and in our relationships.
Golden Shadow and Self-Worth
00:48:59
Speaker
That's something that can be offered with psychedelics in the royal health context, but it isn't a guaranteed result. That's like an opportunity that we then have to actualize into our lives afterwards. That's a premise of integration.
00:49:15
Speaker
And something else I was just about to ask you, I was just about to ask you, maybe you can weave in this term integration being thrown around a lot. Maybe you can kind of give the listeners an overview. What does it actually mean to integrate a psychedelic experience so that you can actually benefit from it?
00:49:35
Speaker
So I'll speak to that. But before I do, another thing about shadow work, and this isn't often talked about is this is this concept of the golden shadow. You know, if the shadow shadow is the parts of you that you don't want to acknowledge the dark parts, the painful parts, the fear, the stress, the shame, the inadequacy, the hopelessness, the helplessness, the worthlessness, all of that, if that's part of
00:50:03
Speaker
your shadow shadow. There's this other part of you, the golden shadow, which is your beauty, your light, your worthiness, like the context of deep and profound love that holds you knowing that you're already perfect, that you've already fulfilled your greatest purpose on this planet by simply being and that you are worthy
00:50:26
Speaker
of love and appreciation and care, at the very least, give yourself. Those things, that golden shadow is often obfuscated by the shadow shadow. Just like the denial of death is a denial of life, the inability to own our shadow is also an inability to fully live in our golden light.
00:50:54
Speaker
Okay. So there's a lot to all of that. You know, that is just the surface level sort of like back of the book discussion about what that all means. Okay. Don't take any of it at face value. And if you're listening to this and you're inspired by this, look more deeply at the questions that come up for you when I say these things. Don't just take them as what they are simply by the fact that I said them. I believe they're true, but they're also more nuanced and complex and I've presented them.
Complexity of Integration
00:51:25
Speaker
So, integration. You have an experience, and then afterwards, what of that? You have an experience of being deep and profound, or you have a deep and profound experience. Does that make you a deep and profound person afterwards? Think of it this way. If you watch a YouTube video on how to repair a sink, does that mean you've learned how to repair a sink?
00:51:56
Speaker
The fact that you met a plumber one time and they were all about plumbing, does that make you and you were there while they did all the plumbing work? Does that mean that you are now a plumber? That you know how to be a plumber? No, it doesn't. You know, having a psychedelic experience
00:52:20
Speaker
processing all this stuff, accessing this light and this beauty and this joy, this creativity, this curiosity, what IFS might call self-energy, accessing that place doesn't necessarily mean that that's now who you are. The fact that you did a bunch of crying for what an asshole you've been doesn't mean that you're not going to be an asshole again afterwards.
00:52:47
Speaker
That's an active effort. So integration is the process by which we sort of take the most salient and meaningful aspects of our psychedelic experiences and attempt to weave them in to our everyday lives through intentional practices and efforts internally and relationally. If we have a realization that we are worthy of love,
00:53:14
Speaker
that after our psychedelic experience, we actively cultivate that worthiness and actively choose not to water the weeds, this is a quote from my friend, colleague Trevor Miller, not water the weeds that cover up our ability to do that. If we have a revelation that my partner feels care for when I do the dishes and I love my partner, after the psychedelic experience, we do the dishes.
00:53:44
Speaker
We don't just know that because we figured that out, we can access care now and that care is there. We have to actually do the work afterwards. And so integration is about that. Now, this gets more complicated when what we've experienced is some sort of like trans-rational state of consciousness that is
00:54:05
Speaker
beyond the individual. It's transpersonal. It's beyond even time and space. Possibly it's with interactions with what seem to be other intelligence and entities. That kind of thing can happen on a high dose of psychedelics. Possibly the realization is that everything that you've done your entire life feels like a giant sham and you've never really been yourself and you don't even like the people you spend the most time with.
00:54:29
Speaker
Integration has to happen there too, and it's obviously a lot more complex than doing the dishes. But it's grappling with, wrestling with the impact of our psychedelic experiences. Not fighting, wrestling. Fighting is one person dominates the other. Wrestling is an elegant art where you can get pinned and still win for style.
00:54:52
Speaker
So we wrestle with the impact of our psychedelic experience, and that wrestling metaphor is a callback reference to Stephen Jenkins, and I highly recommend checking him out. We wrestle with the impact of our psychedelic experiences in a way that weaves the most salient and meaningful aspects of it into our sense of self, our engagement with life, and especially in our relationships through action and practice.
Potential Risks and Ethical Considerations
00:55:16
Speaker
Practice and action, so inner practice and explicit action.
00:55:21
Speaker
And it's also incredibly complicated and there's really no end to it. In the same way an interaction you had with someone who was really inspiring 20 years ago can continue to inspire you differently as you become a different person over the course of those 20 years, the integration of psychedelic experiences can do the same. So it's not a, I did the dishes twice, now I've integrated that experience kind of thing, right?
00:55:46
Speaker
Again, complex, nuanced. If this excites your listeners, there's lots of interviews on my podcast that go much deeper into these inquiries.
00:55:57
Speaker
Yeah, I love, um, there's some of those interviews I'll have to listen probably two, three times to fully, you know, absorbed what's being said. Definitely. Especially the ones around transgenerational trauma and, uh, you know, the epigenetics of trauma, this kind of stuff that really, really fascinates me. And I feel like this is where psychedelics can shine. If, if we as a society can process our own pains, our own traumas,
00:56:25
Speaker
before we have a chance to pass them on to the next generation, I think this may be a foundation for steering us into a better direction as a species. That's kind of one benefit there I can see. So we've covered a lot of- Possibly, possibly.
00:56:46
Speaker
Let me jump in here quick. In all of that, it's still possible to use psychedelics and have instead of it sort of deconstruct our ego and make us a more receptive, humble, loving, compassionate, caring person.
00:57:04
Speaker
they can also inflate our ego. And that mystical union with the essence of life can just affirm that we're on the right course and we should continue to do our extractive, excuse me, extractive technologies and whatever else. If you look at what's going, a lot of what's going wrong with the world right now around sort of a
00:57:26
Speaker
part in the terminology, but the consequence of tech bros running the very essence of how we interact with society because there's 50 programmers that are behind the platforms that are the primary means by which we navigate and understand events in our lives socially.
00:57:44
Speaker
and personally, which is all led by algorithms that distort and disconnect us from the objectivity of what's happening and funnel us into extreme polarity. Those guys are all taking ayahuasca. They're all going to Burning Man. They're doing all this stuff and they're still doing these things.
00:58:01
Speaker
Right? So again, it's so much more complex than it's such a complex issue. It's as complex as why we are, who we are, and what is this world we're in? You know, how did we get here? How do we get out of it? This is how complex it is. So I want to be clear that they're not, they're not beloved, beloved, benevolent agents of betterment, right? But we can work with them in a way that invites that into our lives.
Legalization and Societal Impact
00:58:30
Speaker
Well, you kind of, you almost read my mind there. I was, I was going to kind of, um, you know, we've covered the potentially positive aspects of psychedelics, but there now that they're becoming more and more. Distigmatize in our society. What are some potential negative sides that you can kind of foresee that they can bring into society? I mean, you're already covered one. Maybe, maybe you want to discuss further.
00:59:00
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if society can get, I don't know if bringing psychedelics into society could be too much worse. I mean, something like maybe the Brave New World, like the consequences of Aldous Hux's book, The Brave New World, but I'm not sure something like LSD or psilocybin will create that. I mean, personally in your life, we didn't say it, but you know, full blown psychosis, total loss of capacity to appropriately show up to the responsibilities of your life.
00:59:29
Speaker
complete detachment from the people and things that you care about. Here's a negative consequence that can result from a positive experience. You realize you don't even like the people you spend your time with, but they're the only people you know. They're your friends and now you're isolated and lonely. That's a possibility. There are so many things that can go wrong when we start playing with the integrity of how our minds hold themselves together.
00:59:56
Speaker
appropriately held context, set setting dose can help mitigate those risks significantly and optimize the benefits. But the risks are still always there. Yeah, for people who want to know about the risks, you can listen to James Kent's last 10 episodes of final 10 episodes of dose nation.
01:00:17
Speaker
I wouldn't recommend starting there because it's a very dark and somewhat dismal take on psychedelic culture and history. And I think that it is pretty biased in its exploration of the negatives. But if you want to know how things can go wrong, well, there's a good example of how they can go wrong. He lays it out there step by step over the course of something like 30 hours of podcasts. But I wouldn't start that. I'd say it's my podcast. Go ahead.
01:00:47
Speaker
Yeah, I listened to that interview with him. It was actually very interesting, somewhat kind of shocking. Yeah, so definitely don't start there, but I would highly recommend Adventures Through the Mind, your podcast, for those that are interested. Of course, nobody here is saying, I personally, and I'm sure you agree, James, is maybe we could even go as far as to say that most people
01:01:15
Speaker
won't and probably shouldn't take psychedelics and those that do better be prepared to put in many many many many days and hours and weeks and months of preparation and then many more in you know like you said integration and
01:01:32
Speaker
in order to reap those benefits. It's not the kind of thing you go out to the bar and have a few pints and nobody is, especially if this is illegal in your country, nobody is recommending that people should go out and start looking for mushrooms and things like that.
01:01:49
Speaker
at least that's not the optimal way to work with it. I mean, I'm a pretty strong, I don't think this is the best use of them by any means. But also, you know, like if you want to take a couple grams of mushrooms and go to the bar, I can tell you firsthand it's
01:02:04
Speaker
It is usually not very comfortable experience, you know, but that should be your choice, you know. And you know what, I don't think everybody should, but I think more people should than there are people who think that they should.
01:02:23
Speaker
You know what I mean? And I also think that, yes, if you want to deeply work with psychedelics in a way that they become allies in your journey towards becoming a better person and in becoming a better person, becoming a better citizen of the society that we live in, yes, it takes ample amounts of preparation, well-structured use, integration.
01:02:45
Speaker
But you don't need that to have a good experience. You just need to be prepared enough and have the right set setting dose things put together that you don't freak out. And if you do, there's somebody there to hold your hand and to talk about what happened afterwards. So I want to make it clear that there is a lot of complexity here. There's a lot of hard work that can be done here that's really positive. And also, it's not like,
01:03:13
Speaker
And also if you just want to take psychedelics, just do your absolute best to have your benefit optimization and harm reduction strategies on hand and ready to go so that you can do so in a way that's not detrimental to you. So yeah, I don't want to like create, I don't want to gate keep this with like, it has to be like hard work and this and that. And those things benefit the work by far, you know, but it's like, you know, if you want to just, if you want to just,
01:03:42
Speaker
call up an ayahuasca center and go down there and do your thing, then just go down there and do your thing. I mean, there's a lot of complexity there about extractivism and ayahuasca tourism and the impact of colonialism on sort of like Central and South America. And there's a lot of complexity there too, you know, so it's
Resources and Conclusion
01:04:02
Speaker
Maybe not just go up to whatever ayahuasca center, but I don't want to gate keep this. I do think it's important. It's serious work. But it also makes me think of Nick's son. He's a comedian and an ayahuasca person out in Australia. And he said something along the lines of the acacia, which is a psychoactive tree in Australia that contains a DMT and a collection of other things. He said something like the acacia taught him that life is a joke.
01:04:32
Speaker
you know, you just don't get it, but you won't get it if you don't take it serious. You know, so it's like that kind of energy. And so yeah, I just I think I wanted to just point out be like, yo, I don't want to gate keep this. Ultimately, educate yourself and make the choice that makes the most sense for you. Well, I really want to thank you for your work, because you're, you know, you're doing a
01:04:56
Speaker
you're working very hard to educate and push the acceptance of psychedelics in our society further. So I really want to thank you for your work. Before we wrap up, can you please tell our listeners where to find you, your podcasts, your books, your essays, your videos, all that good stuff?
01:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, so everything's at jameswjesso.com, jameswjesso.com. We have the links. That's the Adventures of the Mind podcast. All the links for the platforms, be it Spotify, iTunes, I use Podcast Addict or whatever it is, Stitcher, Podbean, they're all on jameswjesso.com.
01:05:43
Speaker
My social media stuff is all at James W. Jeso, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And then if you want to join the subreddit, we have a, I post, we have discussions there about the content. That's the R at my podcast. If you know what Reddit is, it's subreddit for at my podcast, a TTM IND.
01:06:06
Speaker
But it's ultimately jameswbjesser.com. I have recently been trying to extract myself from social media. As a recent video I put up on my YouTube channel about social media's impact on my attentional patterns and my self-worth and my reality. And so if your listeners are on that similar sort of vein, I encourage them fully and completely to go
01:06:28
Speaker
all in on extracting themselves from social media, and if they'd like to follow my content and be off social media, just sign up for my email newsletter. I don't spam, I send it out every couple months with some updates and stuff, and you can check it out that way. Christian, thank you so much for having me on the show, man. I really appreciate it. Thank you, brother.
01:06:58
Speaker
for listening to Connecting Minds. We hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it interesting, illuminating, or inspiring. For episode show notes, links, and further information on our guests, please visit christianjordanov.com. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it. Thank you for being here.