Life, Health & The Universe
Life, health and the universe are all connected. In a world where we are more connected than ever, we have become disconnected from ourselves. In this podcast, along with guests, I discuss ideas in a celebration of life, an exploration of health and some wonderment of the universe.
Contact Nadine: https://lifehealththeuniverse.podcastpage.io/contact
Life, Health & The Universe
Psychedelic Insights: Bridging Ancient Wisdom and Modern Therapy
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Welcome to a captivating exploration of the psychedelic landscape and esoteric wisdom with none other than Julian Vayne, a British independent scholar and author with over four decades of hands-on experience in esoteric culture.
What happens when ancient spiritual traditions intersect with modern therapeutic techniques? Julian, who draws inspiration from figures like Aleister Crowley, invites us to question our understanding of consciousness and spirituality.
Prepare to learn how psychedelics, particularly micro-dosing, can be powerful tools for enhancing mental clarity and managing anxiety, as Julian shares his personal journey from encountering magic in his youth to his vision of an earth-centered, open-source spirituality.
In this episode we traverse the historical tapestry of indigenous psychedelic traditions and the transformative Eleusinian Mysteries of pre-Christian Europe, where the mysterious potion kykeon played a pivotal role. Our discussion uncovers the potential cultural impact had these practices continued, inviting listeners to ponder the evolution of psychedelic ceremonies into modern-day rituals like raves. These gatherings, often seen as rhythmic celebrations, echo the communal essence of ancient rites, offering spaces for experiencing psychedelic transformation in a safe and meaningful way—a potential rite of passage for future generations.
Dive into the promising realm of psychedelic therapy, where recent research from Imperial College London sheds light on its potential to tackle mental health conditions. Julian discusses how psychedelics can inspire "lantern awareness," offering unique perspectives on personal challenges.
This episode underscores the importance of safe environments for these transformative experiences, whether through individual sessions or communal ceremonies.
As we explore the courage required to engage with psychedelics, we envision a future where these substances are decriminalised, fostering an open-source spirituality that embraces the physical world and its profound mysteries.
You can find Julian's full profile in our Guest Directory
https://lifehealththeuniverse.podcastpage.io/person/julian-vayne
Welcome to Life, health and the Universe, bringing you stories that connect us, preventative and holistic health practices to empower us and esoteric wisdom to enlighten us. We invite you to visit our website, where you can access the podcast, watch on YouTube and find all of our guests in the guest directory. Visit lifehealththeuniversepodcastpageio. Now let's get stuck into this week's episode. My guest today is Julian Vane, who's dialing in from the UK. Julian, I have pinched a whole bunch of information from your website for my intro, but I have to do an abridged version. It's still pretty impressive though.
Speaker 1:So Julian is a British independent scholar and author with over four decades of experience with esoteric culture, from Druidry to chaos magic, from indigenous shamanism through to Freemasonry and witchcraft. Growing up in the Britain of punk and then rave culture, julian immersed himself in the philosophy and techniques of magic. His journey into group ritual practice began within the Western esoteric tradition when he was 16. Since then, he has worked in ceremony with practitioners from many different lands and lineages. Today, julian is the author of books, essays, journals and articles in both the academic and esoteric press. He sees his work as part of the process to help reimagine an earth-centered, non-dogmatic, open-source spirituality. Thank you so much for joining me. I nicked the stage then.
Speaker 2:No, Nadine, that's delightful. Thank you very much for inviting me here. It's most appreciated, my friend.
Speaker 1:Before I kind of hand over to you and you can give us a little bit of uh background or you know the the the short history of julian vane um to where you are today, a little bit of a backdrop. So I um have kind of been interested in the use of psychedelics in terms of micro dosing. Haven't done very much of it myself, like as a practice, but have a background in health and wellness and have followed sort of some biohacking communities you know about basically just up leveling our health in in lots of different ways mentally, physically, spiritually, all of those things. And so I've become interested in this idea of microdosing and I know that some people are starting to do it more regularly as a practice for mental clarity, to help manage anxiety and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:My niece is in the UK and she went to Breaking Convention, the convention that you're a part of in the UK, which is all about I'm going to ask you more about it anyway it's all about psychedelics, right, and? And so she told me about it. She said she had an amazing experience. She does some microdosing herself and I was like I really want to talk to someone, but then I went onto the website and it was like there's so many of you and I said to my niece who do you recommend?
Speaker 1:and she said Julian Vane and so I emailed you.
Speaker 2:I'm grateful for the recommendation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you were kind enough to accept the invitation, so here we are. I've again stolen a whole bunch of the limelight. You've barely said a word, so I'm going to hand over to you if you could tell us a little bit about you, um, and then maybe we'll kick off with, like, just finding out a little bit about breaking convention.
Speaker 2:Okay yeah, thank you. Um again, thank you, thank you, your niece, for the recommendation. So so, um, uh, it's interesting when we talk about it. Uh, you know my work in relation to psychedelics. So, as your intro explains, I come into this field from the extreme left field, I suppose we would call it. So I'm not a therapist and I'm not an academic researcher. I'm not a medic, not medic, um, uh. What I am is I'm a cultist.
Speaker 2:I'm a person interested in um, uh, the, the mystery of existence, our experience of being in these bodies in this time, in this way, and so forth. Um, and I'm interested in magic and I my my working definition of magic is that it's the technology of the imagination. So I mean, this is the field that really fascinates me. It's fascinated me from basically as long as I can remember. If I'm being romantic, I would say that it was a vocation or reincarnatory memory. If I'm being less romantic, I might say it's a mental illness. But from as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by this whole thing and I read loads of stuff as a kid. Um got involved quite early on with uh, with wicca, because that was the most accessible form of esoteric sort of um, uh, practical kind of particularly group sort of uh activity that I could, I could access, and then from that I've worked, as, as it says, um, with you know, lots of practitioners, lots of different styles of of practice. So I come into this as somebody who is interested in, um, altered states of consciousness, let's call them so, the kinds of things that we encounter in trance, states, that we encounter with ritual, that we have, you know, where we do meditation or drumming or chanting or all of these things.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that particularly fascinated me, uh, and it fascinated me partly because of encountering the work of people like alistair crowley when I was young, was this idea that there were these strange and, uh, frankly, magical kind of substances, um, which are the, the uh, psychoactive drugs generally, but specifically the psychedelics, and um, crowley, of course, is well known as being, you, you know, the bad boy, a cultist, the sort of the 19th century, with the arrival of mescaline, which is taken primarily from the peyote cactus, the traditional medicine of a number of people in, you know, the america's areas that we now think of as mexico in particular, and crowley was very interested in this and he was an early adopter and early experimenter with a lot of those materials, um, and so, you know, I kind of do my stuff, I join a coven, I get involved in sort of you know, ritual practice and so on, um, and then over the years, uh, you know to to cut a long story short I've become more and more fascinated with these substances which which, um, it turns out have a have a huge lineage within what academics call the Western magical tradition. So the Western magical tradition is all of that occult stuff, all of that capital O occult stuff that you can think of you know Cornelius Agrippa and you know ancient Egyptian blah, blah and all of these sorts of things. The lineage basically comes from North Africa, comes from Egypt ultimately. So alchemy, things like that, and hidden within that tradition are lots of uses of mind-altering substances. They tend to be an incense, so it tends to be, if you imagine, a sort of one of those early modern engravings of a magician in their room and they've got all the things and they've got the crocodile hanging from the ceiling and they've got weird bottles and jars and things going on. They've got some sort of strange circle drawn on the floor and they're shouting and pointing things they're trying to conjure into existence and one of the things that they're doing is they're burning incense.
Speaker 2:And if you go back and look at the history of the Western magical tradition, you look at what's called workbook grimoires, which are the spell books essentially of the medieval and early modern period and right up to today, a lot of those kind of techniques of altering consciousness. A lot of them pivot on the existence of ointments containing mind-altering substances and particularly incenses. So I kind of get interested in this field and this becomes my kind of little obsession for several years, and then what starts happening is that broader culture begins to become more and more interested in these things. There is a another wave of research that starts, I guess, with, like you know, things like gases research and lsd in about 2008. One, you know you could pin it at various points.
Speaker 2:But in the last couple of decades, basically the last decade and a half or so, the whole thing has been as really gone into a much wider awareness within lots of kind of cultural settings, not just in terms of you know, these drugs have been around for a while. Lsd was available throughout all of that period after it was criminalized and so on but this sort of re-understanding of these things in the light of two important factors. Number one is the repeat of um scientific and therapeutic research that says do you know what these things actually? There's some, there's some value in this which is really interesting. So there's kind of that western re-understanding of the potential of these and I'll call them in this context, medicines, and also to call the medicines in another context, there is the fact that there are there's a lot more kind of connection between, uh, many broader cultural stories and the story of what we could call indigenous or entheogenically lineaged communities, so ayahuasca and the people like the shipibo conibo people and so on.
Speaker 2:Um they the use of things like peyote and the wararica people, um the the use of iboga in west africa and so on. So there's there's also this kind of awareness of like, oh we, we have this, we are rediscovering again. We've done this three times now early 20th century, mid 20th century and now in the early 21st century turns out these things have a therapeutic and healing role and it also turns out that there's a whole bunch of cultures busily using these substances in a variety of different kind of ways, which kind of some of which sort of look like what we think of as therapy or or healing. So if we take the example of maria sabina, uh, so the very generous uh mazatec, uh lady who uh shared the the use of the um, the sacred mushroom site of psilocybin mushrooms, back in the 1950s a great personal costume, I add, you know, didn't work out well for her, but her work was healing work. That's where, you know, you would go to see Maria Sabina, not necessarily to have some sort of spiritual epiphany but to be better of some condition or some problem.
Speaker 2:So it's those two sort of strands that have kind of woven together and I found myself as an occultist, actually having experienced things to say within this world. Then there is this kind of emerging culture. I'm here in the British Isles, in Devon, and there's an emerging story here with things like, you know, academic research, therapeutic research, breaking convention, which you mentioned, which I've been involved with for a few years now, um, which is the largest and I like to think one of the the most diverse conference on psychedelic consciousness. So it's all about all the different aspects of you know how we can be with these substances in the world and what they might mean for us, and that has also meant that I've become involved with being a research subject in some licensed research trials, writing on the subject and so on. So probably not as briefly as might have been helpful. There we go. That brings us up to date.
Speaker 1:That was brilliant. Keep going. You got your turn after I stole the stage for the first bit. Amazing, there were so many things that you talked about there and I love that part of the part of this whole thing with life, health, the universe. The podcast is like there's that there are all of these threads that kind of start to connect together and it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing. You know, looking at that kind of Western therapeutic academic, you know research approach and how that kind of where is it? Where's the intersection between that sort of spiritual or that shamanistic or that more deep cultural stuff?
Speaker 1:I'm really curious because I'm from Australia and I don't know if this I'm sure you would have some insights for this Just historically, because you know the indigenous culture here and this is not necessarily anything to do with drugs.
Speaker 1:I don't know if they've used psychedelics in their culture, but it's ancient culture and there's a great deep respect for that culture. But I'm kind of like I'm from the British Isles as well and I don't actually feel like I know very much about the very far history and where we came from. But we've obviously got some like we all came from somewhere a long time ago. I don't even know where I'm going with this. There needs to be a bit more sort of respect or like exploration of those traditions that are part of where we come from, that go beyond kind of like kings and queens cutting off people's heads and having battles, right. I don't know if you've got anything to say about that, but I'm just kind of curious about that kind of like where we've evolved from in that kind of those small British Isles in that part of the world, compared to some of those indigenous cultures.
Speaker 2:I mean the indigenous Australian, to use that name of the island, culture or continent. I know very, very little about its relationship with the pharmacopoeia and the herbs and plants of those bioregions and that landscape. I suspect that those that there's, because there are lots of things in the Australian landscape, but notably the acacias, which have things like DMT dimethyltryptamine, of which there are many, which have things like DMT dimethyltryptamine, of which there are many. So it would surprise me, frankly, if, for the tens of thousands of years duration of those communities, that they haven't experimented and explored those things. But who knows, sometimes people don't.
Speaker 2:What we do know is that there are various ways we can trace the use of psychedelics and psychoactive substances. The most common one in for the west, uh, western europe anyway, uh, that sort of comes in because of its connection with the middle east is cannabis. So cannabis is is, um, uh, although it's not what we call a classic psychedelic in terms of the way it works in the brain, it is undoubtedly a psychedelic in a phenomenological sense, like what it does, how it feels. So that's a really important medicine. But what we also have to remember is that we're talking about, you know, people often ask me you know, what about the Druids? What about the Vikings? What about all these people? These are people who didn't leave us very much or anything really in the way of written records. Significantly, there are things we can point towards and we can get into the guts of the history and kind of go oh, this is interesting, here's a peculiar sort of thing. There's various possibilities.
Speaker 2:What we do know is this that there was a thing called the Temple of Eleusis. The Eleusinian Mysteries and people who are interested in looking at the kind of the indigenous roots of psychedelic very briefly, was the most important initiation of the ancient world uh, through the greek and the? Um into the sort of the roman empire kind of period. Um, it was a, a big, big temple uh, that was um about 20 odd kilometers outside of athens, and every september there was a massive ritual uh held there, um, at the temple of Demeter. Demeter is the goddess of the grain, uh, and on the grain uh, there is a fungus that grows called claviceps purpurea, and that's the raw material that you make, that you use to make LSD uh, and there's there's uh circumstantial evidence and I think as of a find that was made in Spain a few years back, some increasingly firm evidence that this was a huge psychedelic initiation ritual that vast numbers of people would go through. It ran for over a thousand years, so it ran from the Bronze Age through to, I think, 399 AD, when it was closed down because a new religious movement had taken control of the Roman Empire in the form of Christianity and the temple was closed. But before that, 3,000 people at a time were given this magical substance, a potion, essentially a psychoactive potion, called the kykeon. Kykeon is just a Greek word that means potion, called the kykeon. Kykeon is a greek word that means potion and um.
Speaker 2:So there was a, the beating heart of ancient, pre-christian uh, european uh culture. The most important ancient initiation was an initiation which which included very likely the use of a psychedelic drug, and that's how it ran. And anyone could go along to this initiation. You didn't, you could, you could be um, you know, men, women, the emperor, nearly every philosophy you've ever heard of went through this initiation. Lots of the judges, lots of the, a number of the uh, the emperors themselves would go to it, but also people would just save up their life savings and do these two initiations in much the same way that a mus might do the harsh might do the pilgrimage to Mecca. So there you go. That's how it ran, and it ran like that up until the advent of Christianity and the Roman Empire becoming sort of fused as a monotheist patriarchy. Patriarchy, it then stopped.
Speaker 2:Psychedelics then drops out of european culture and it's counterfactual because we don't know what would have happened. But what happens to the culture is, the culture then becomes this incredibly efficient exploitative machine that rages across the rest of the globe looking for other drugs, and what it mostly finds are uppers and downers cocaine, tobacco, coffee, sugar, uh distilled alcohol, um opiates and whenever it encounters psychedelics it has a terrified reaction against them and basically bans them and disables the cultures that are using them. Now, if that was a human individual, on the basis of today's kind of uh use of psychedelic therapy to address things like addictions, we might say well, you've got this terrible addiction to uppers and downers, haven't you? You've got this terrible addiction to things that get you up in the morning to run the machines and pick things that in the night time you used to self-soothe and shut you up because you're suffering. We have these other substances which are quite distinct from uh uppers and downers. They act in a very different way and we can use those to help you as an individual, maybe address your addictive, problematic behaviors. That's what we might do to an individual and what I would suggest is that as a culture particularly the culture of people who have skin color like me then one of the things that our culture has lost as of 399 ad was its connection to the psychedelic experience which we know, when held in certain ways, is incredibly therapeutic. It has all kinds of other uses as well and other other difficulties and things associated with it. That's undoubtedly true, but we know that it's, it has this therapeutic potential. So I think that that, coming back into our culture and lord knows it's taken a while. I mean even the last hundred years it's gone.
Speaker 2:You know, we had a big wave of research in the early part of the 20th century. Then that stopped because we got busy with two world wars and then we started seeing these substances going out into wider culture and then everyone got incredibly worried because terrible things were happening, like massive rock concerts where white and black people and men and women were sitting down and having a perfectly nice time together, and in the shadow of post-war america yeah, exactly, weirdos. That was really frightening and I can kind of understand how it was frightening. You know, this massive social change happening in this way that's mediated by this stuff that people are putting in them and then doing these weird behaviors like sitting on the floor or listening to music from india or you know whatever it was. They were getting up to no-transcript and it remains incredibly hard.
Speaker 2:I mean, I I'm fortunate that I have, you know, plenty of my mates are licensed legitimately in england to or in britain to you know handle and to give out in research trials these substances. But even for them it's incredibly hard for them to even get to the stage of actually starting to kind of apply some of this in terms of, um, uh, you know medicine. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect is is what you're talking about but indigenous, or let's call it indigenous wisdom, just to keep it easy how do those things uh, influence what's going on? And the answer is that they do quite significantly, and I, I can say, say that wholeheartedly, because people from licensed settings come to me to ask my advice about how to set up their research trials, because they understand that what they are essentially running is a ceremony and that's what.
Speaker 2:What I do, that's what I'm interested in, that's my, because, even in the most kind of materialist, reductionist sort of approach to these substances, it's very hard not to come away with a sense that we are dealing with something that's not purely pharmacology here, or not simply pharmacology. We know that the environment in which we take these drugs is incredibly important. We know that we can optimize that environment to support people who are dealing with, let's say, an addiction. So there is, you know, there are plenty of friends that I've got in a variety of different nations who run licensed trials, and they talk about them often, not necessarily in writing, but they will always talk about them in terms of ceremony, you know, and so so, yeah, there is a, there is a crossover.
Speaker 1:It is a very interesting, powerful and, of course, therefore contested time and um space it's really interesting what you said about the like, that replacement of the psychedelics, um, in west, in western culture specifically, and and how there's this? There seems to be some kind of fear of them, um, but there's that, like, all of those replacement addictive things and, um, like, how do you, how do you feel that that emerges in a culture Like, is that kind of like, you know, going out and finding other things to? Is it like to placate the people, you know, do we give them coffee and opioids?
Speaker 2:I mean that's part of it. I mean, if you look at let's look at World War II, let's take an example like World War II. So one of the things that happened in World War II was the British spent an awful lot of energy making sure that tobacco supply lines remained open with North America. Because tobacco is very useful. It's a drug which, taken habitually, is an appetite suppressant. It also allows people to maintain their focus. That's one of the reasons it's used ritually in things like the native american church peyote ceremony. We use the tobacco to smoke when we pray because we're focusing our attention on on the prayer. But also tobacco is is a substance that doesn't sort of radically particularly the way that it tends to get used doesn't radically change people's awareness, so it can keep people being convenient cogs in the system and cogs that don't have to go off and and and eat uh, as much as they might have done otherwise. So, um, I think the part of it is is like if we pan right the way back this is I don't want to get too metaphysical about this part of it is about notions of fixity versus notions of fluidity. So the thing is that what you want is you want, I say you like. It's like some terrible group of people, but it's an emergent property from from all of us in culture.
Speaker 2:What this style of culture wants is it wants um, repeatable, um, regularity in the body, and that's part of the reason that, you know, if you just do a Google search and you put human body in, you'll see pictures primarily of male bodies or what appear to be male-identified bodies, because you know, women's bodies, they're always changing, aren't they? They're always having fluctuations and things are going on. It's not the sort of thing you want, that you know. Then they go and get pregnant or have you on. It's not the sort of thing you want. Then they go and get pregnant. That's not what you want. You want fixity. You want kind of reliable, repeatable.
Speaker 2:This is a culture that runs around the clock, and the clock and the repetition and regularity of that is what you want. So if anything that appears to disrupt that is problematic. Now, even psychedelics can be co-opted into that sort of system. You know, here we have sort of tech bros microdosing in order to be more efficient at the the thing. Although there's still that notion that things like microdosing is actually about things like creativity, we know that creativity is not about pendulum regularity, it's about the unusual, the strange and the unexpected. Um, that's part of it anyway.
Speaker 1:So, um, I don't know if that answers the question I don't know what the question was, but it was great and what was I oh like about that? Um yeah, whether, like it was, it's kind of like a deliberate, that was what I was asking. Whether it was kind of like a I think it's kind of like a deliberate. That was what I was asking.
Speaker 2:Whether it was kind of like a. I think it's an emergent property.
Speaker 1:And, like, as humans, we generally, like you said, we like the certainty, the familiarity, and, yeah, we're not encouraged to sort of break free from that. Right, we get pulled back in, right from being a child who's um, you know, totally in their imagination and in their creative flow and we just go, no, stop looking at that, it's just a leaf like and and and we kind of it's behavioral, isn't it?
Speaker 1:because there's that whole thing with like having habits and routine and familiarity that we can switch off, we can do it on autopilot, um, and I guess that that whole other, the the idea of creativity flow and like using psychedelics to open up this whole other part of life, um, it could. Yeah, it's, it's a different, it's a different way of seeing it it's a different.
Speaker 2:I think I understand, I think it's a it's a different way of seeing it like. What happens for most of us, right, is that here I am, I need to do my accounts okay, I need to do my, my excel spreadsheet so I have to kind of take my awareness, I have to focus my awareness into this thing, and that's a useful skill. That's undoubtedly a useful skill and it's a skill that all human beings have. It's not that it's like special to people in the west or euro-american blah blah. It's just a thing. But what we don't do so well and what particularly those people who are kind of increasingly these days outside of like a pattern of shared religiosity with their community, who live nearby, all those sorts of things what we don't do so well is what if we think of a flashlight or a torch? That there's that type of awareness, the awareness of focusing on the excel spreadsheet, but there's also the awareness that's like the global awareness, like an awareness that's like more like a lantern than it's like a flashlight.
Speaker 2:And what psychedelics do? One of the things that they do is they, they allow us to access that style of awareness more frequently, um, and that that's incredibly useful, it's incredibly adaptive, it's incredibly helpful, but it's also the sort of thing that you know, historically, for many reasons, um, our, you know, our education system and our, our processes, um, as as communities, does not, by and large, encourage um, and so that's part, I think, of the tension with these substances. It's like it's not just it's not just about, like you know, can we change the law so we can get these things recognized, how we can get? It's actually that I think that there's a there's a recognition that that these, uh, that psychedelics in particular, have a really profound transformative opportunity for culture, just as they do for individuals.
Speaker 1:You, know, so yeah yeah, yeah, um, and I guess that's where kind of ceremony comes in right, because you're doing it in those group settings, is that? Would that be right?
Speaker 2:I mean, it can be, it's, it's, I suppose, um, let's say. I'll give you an example. So in 2019, I was part of um, a licensed trial in king's college hospital in london, and I, along with six other people, were going to be given psilocybin it was a synthetic psilocybin, uh, and we didn't know if we were going to get placebo 10 milligrams, which is a sort of moderate dose, or 25 milligrams, which is a more significant kind of dose let's call it a higher dose. Um, I lucked out and I got a higher dose, which I was very pleased about. Um, but what they did was they? They? The idea was this was this was the. This was supposed to be what. It was the prequel for working using psilocybin to help people with treatment resistant depression. So it's not something I suffer from. So I was in the group before that, so we can sort of test does this system work? They dosed six people in a ward.
Speaker 2:Now, but what you have to understand is that if you do that in a normal ward with all the bleeping and the strip lights, everyone's going to get freaked out and it's going to be really weird but comfortable, and that's not what we're trying to do here. What we're trying to do is encourage people to go inward. So the way that we tend to do that these days with psychedelic therapy is we give people eye shades and headphones. There's music on speakers as well, at a low level, and the invitation is to go inward. In order to do that, you have to lower the light levels in the ward, so you have to have little led candles and you lower the light level. You also have to do things like put rugs on the floor so that when people walk across the floor it doesn't make too much noise. You also have to do things like tailor your playlist, because you're going to be listening to music so that it follows the arc of the experience, so the playlist holds the person. In this, you also have to have people who can support that person by giving them some encouragement, but without being overbearing or infantilizing or trying to direct their experience. So you have all these different components that have to come together everything from what you put on the floor to how you arrange the music, to what your light level is, to how the people need to be in the space with the people who are tripping for it to work. In every meaningful sense, that's a ceremony, and then you can wrap other things around it you can have.
Speaker 2:I've just been working with a licensed trial setting in the united states where they're doing psilocybin stuff and they wanted a little, I guess, like a multi-denominational prayer or opening, a sort of something that could be accessible for people if they were like humanists or sikhs or christians or it didn't really matter. So I wrote a thing which they're now using as a sort of a blessing or an opening process. It's very short, but they wanted that because they know that that makes a difference in terms of the way that experience will unfold. And I'm fortunate in as much as I've worked in that field for a little while. So, despite the fact that I'm not a therapist or whatever, they come and ask me and I can provide something that hopefully helps them with you know what they're doing, because they're going to be doing some, some very good stuff which ultimately will help people.
Speaker 1:So yeah, with with that research. Um, we so we use six people on a ward to get like in a room, hospital room, together. How do they determine, um, whether this is it? Is it about the experience and about the environment and making sure all of those things are right if they decide to go forward with treatment, or is it like because obviously everyone's experience is going to be quite different? Or was it about the amount of that you should dose someone or what Like? What was the? How did they assess what? The outcome, assess the outcomes or discover whether it was advantageous?
Speaker 2:I mean lots and lots and lots of sort of psychological questionnaires and lots and lots of process around that to find out how the experience was, how it seemed to change people, how the experience was how it seemed to change people and so on. And, like I say, we were just, like you know, we'd all met the criteria in terms of, you know, physical health, mental health and blah blah, so that we were all experimental subjects in this. None of us were people with a diagnosis of depression, at least you know at that stage. So, in the way that we would do that now in a kind of therapeutic context, is that there's quite there's a relatively there's, or there is an emerging sort of protocol for how we do this. So if you were to rock up with um treatment resistant depression into a setting where they were licensed to use psilocybin, um, there are various kind of ways of establishing sort of you know, where should we go with dosage? Is it safe to do this? You know there's a, there's a whole bunch of stuff that kind of sits in there. Rather, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a fairly nuanced um process. Uh, from a sort of medical point of view, obviously lots of people are experiencing these things anyway in recreational settings, in medicine circles and spiritual kind of settings, in underground therapeutic settings. So there are, you know, there is quite a lot of knowledge being gathered about how we might do this. Well, you know, there's there's the we can do this work actually quite pretty successfully. We can do this work actually quite, you know, pretty successfully. We know, we know we've got a good idea now of who might benefit.
Speaker 2:Um, and although the research is hampered by the legal situation, um, there are a large number of conditions that could certainly be supported by psychedelic therapy of one form or another or psychedelic experience. And there are also plenty of conditions where the where sometimes and we hesitate to use this word there are. Sometimes people get cured of stuff, yeah, and obviously anyone who's seen fantastic fungi or netflix how to change your mind knows some of the stories. Now, that doesn't always happen, and sometimes things okay, you know, sometimes things go wrong, sometimes things there are problems. You know, unsurprisingly, when you're dealing with a powerful thing, there's all kinds of stuff around that. But by and large, um, we, we can, we can create these experiences. We know who these experiences best suit. Um, we can make good strides towards holding the space for the experience in a good way and also then helping that person to kind of integrate whatever their experience is. And so, whether or not you have a terminal diagnosis and you're dealing with end of life anxiety in which case the mushrooms probably aren't going to stop you having cancer, they are but they are very likely to be able to help you with your relationship, with your experience of your own mortality.
Speaker 2:And we know that with a number of things like chronic pain conditions, imperial college in london have just not long finished a whole series of bits of medical research and they were looking, uh and getting some pretty good results with eating disorders, um, and chronic pain, um. So you know, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, all of these sorts of things. And the way the substance works in that sense is so really interesting, because what it doesn't do is it doesn't, it doesn't unmemory your bad experience, it doesn't doesn't ablate, it doesn't remove that section of memory, um, and neither does it do what antidepressants do, which are very valuable drugs. They're very, very valuable drugs and for many people, many times, they're incredibly important. But what antidepressants by and large do is they kind of narrow the emotional range so you might not feel sad, you might not feel incredibly happy either. So what psychedelics do is that they allow to have this experience, which allows them to understand what's going on for them in a radically different way. It's this lantern awareness. You step outside of the flashlight, focus on whatever your problem is and you see your problem from such a different perspective that often that's actually sufficient to change the thing. And that's actually sufficient to change the thing.
Speaker 2:Um, a good example of that is just to be had from straightforward, mindfulness-based stress reduction and pain management. So we all know that mindfulness and practices like body scans can help us with managing pain, because the pain that you have let's say you've damaged your shoulder the pain you have in your shoulder, there's the actual pain in your shoulder, but there's also your anxiety about the pain in your shoulder. You know, is it getting better, is it getting worse? Every time I move, I worry that I might hurt it. So a lot of the pain is the anxiety about the pain. So we know that by doing things like body scans and, you know, mindfulness-based practices, if we can reduce the anxiety about the pain, the pain gets less.
Speaker 2:So in a psychedelic experience that works well, we may not be able to address fundamentally the condition, although, frankly, occasionally that is possible.
Speaker 2:But we can probably address your relationship with the pain and, more importantly, you address it through your own experience.
Speaker 2:You see, that's the interesting thing.
Speaker 2:It's not like someone's talking to you through this experience or guiding you towards a particular way.
Speaker 2:Um, it's more like, if you can create the right environment and you can find the person who is ready for this and you can prepare them in various ways and then you can support them afterwards, you can drop this person into that experience, in this safe container, as they sometimes call it these days in this ceremony, and the process kind of works and I'm allowed to use this word magically, like it works in a way that that sort of is very, very, you know, very often very surprising. It may simply be that these substances are clicking into action an inherent healing property that exists within the brain, and it may well be that these substances even exist again, if we want to be really philosophical about it, maybe gaia makes these things so that a monkey with a giant brain like us has a material that helps it activate this inner healing process, which works psychologically in the same way that my body has inherent processes to activate if I cut myself. So there you go, there's a bit more.
Speaker 1:I like that and I was like, oh yeah, I was going to ask something and now it's gone. So I'm going to go right back to the ritual stuff because obviously, when you did the research, you were in a group and you've talked about ceremony, but in this specific specific um kind of therapy or?
Speaker 2:treatment.
Speaker 2:The ceremony is for an individual, isn't it? It varies, okay, it varies okay. So, so, um, uh, there are, uh, in lots of kind of um, underground settings or settings where I mean I can fly from where I am now to the netherlands and I can go and do a lot of this work and it's totally fine. And so in those settings sometimes I work with kind of groups of people and in fact I'm part of a community where what we do is we teach people how to do this work and we take 20 people over to the Netherlands and we get one. You get half the group to have an experience and the other group do what? In the trade week we're sitting for those people, okay, um, and then a couple of days later we reverse that process. These are all experienced psychonauts. All people are already involved in this field in one way or another. Um, so, yes, you can do it for individuals. You can do it. You know you can do it. Um, you know the minimum, of course, is one to one, and plenty of people do that, plenty of people. You know that's, that's, that's, that's, that's perfectly doable. Yeah, absolutely, because what you have to do with that is you have to kind of create a good environment where the person feels safe.
Speaker 2:The purpose of the ceremony is to help them feel safe. So the ceremony doesn't have to be some dude with a crazy hat and loads of feathers or whatever, or shaking bones. It's about making that person feel safe and the ceremony is everything that you say to that person the way that you, you know, when they're in the bathroom, you make sure that their water is refilled. The way that you provide care, but without being overbearing that's how that kind of looks. The way that when you serve the food at the end of the ritual, at the end of the ceremony, you do it in a really so it's really beautiful.
Speaker 2:There are all these tiny little details that are about making that person feel really safe so that they can do this deep movement inward to encounter the experience which can unfold in loads of different ways, knowing that you're there, um, so you're kind of like a, you know like a nurse or a chaplain or a doula or midwife, you know you're more like that. You're not kind of trying to direct it, you're just there to say, hey, you got this, no problem. You know, if you need another blanket or hot water bottle, I'll sort that out.
Speaker 2:that's fine, you know yeah amazon guy comes to the door. We've got that covered, it's okay. You let go, let go, let go, you know, let them, you know, go and do this work so that would be like they would be going more internal.
Speaker 1:So would they? Would you do the like, the headphones and the yeah, eye shades and that sort of stuff as well, even if it's in a group?
Speaker 2:yeah, uh, I mean, it depends if it's in a group. Sometimes people I mean occasionally people will have headphones as well. Usually you have the music, just sort of ambient, because it's easier than having loads of wires or weird bluetooth things doing stuff.
Speaker 2:Um, I mean the the thing is about the eye shades and the headphones. Is that that is just the modern version of you travel to South America? The Shipibo people put you in the maloca, put you in the kind of the ritual space they give you the ayahuasca. Then they turn all the lights off. Then there's some, the icaros are set, it's exactly, and the sound of the jungle in the background between the songs. So it's actually just the same. It's just a modern, high-tech version of saying we're going to take the experience inward. That's what we're going to do.
Speaker 2:You can. You can have lovely and and certainly very healing and rewarding times taking, let's say, mushrooms and going walking with your friends or dancing at a party or whatever. That's great, that's absolutely lovely. Um, but for that kind of self-transformative work, what seems to be most reliable is to invite most people to do this inward movement and to go inside and to have just the stimulation of, you know, maybe a soundtrack which is kind of like of like you know, moving them through the experience, but hopefully not scripting it too much.
Speaker 2:Some, I mean, you know, the classic way of doing this stuff is actually do it in silence, and there's some, there's some value in that. But for most people, having something that kind of helps them move through the journey is beneficial. You can do this stuff on your own but again, for most people, having a friend that's there, who's experienced, who knows the territory you know it's like you could climb down a rope, down from a rocky ledge, knowing that the rope was well fixed. But if you climb down that rope from a rocky ledge knowing that a skilled climber is at the top, where the rope is, you probably feel a bit easier about it yeah, yeah, same same.
Speaker 1:Okay cool, it sounds amazing. I'd love to talk to you about a kind of there's a couple of couple of things. Um, we're we're getting closer towards the, the tail end, and so I'm conscious of like getting some more stuff. Um, but I'm really interested in um I I think we're probably from a similar era and growing up in the UK. Um, you mentioned in your uh, the, the intro that I read from your website about being um in punk and rate rate. Did you mention raves? I did mention I was well into raves. I loved raving when I was a teenager and I'm kind of interested in this.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know what direction to take this in. Like, okay, so there's probably two parts to this. The first part is like there was some generally some kind of things involved, some some dosing involved in these experiences and there's a kind of like that um, ritualistic kind of you know, people getting together, getting you know, loving it up, dancing, so so I kind of wonder if that is like, has that been sort of like part of that cultural cycle that you're talking about? It feels like there's a lot of people our age that are now going.
Speaker 1:Oh, those things that I did when I was a teenager. I can kind of start to see a different like, a connection to it and like oh gosh, where am I going with this? Like for our, for for our younger generation? Like is is our experience. Has our experience as teenagers be and like and like, coming full circle into our, you know, into our midlife, let's say um, and understanding it from a different perspective. Can that help with, like, the evolution of bringing it in um to like younger generations? That was a little bit long-winded and kind of all over the place. I, I think I know what you mean.
Speaker 2:I think I know what you mean All right.
Speaker 2:So look raves, by which I mean spaces where we are dancing and where there is probably MDMA, which is a psychedelic amphetamine and is the daughter chemical of mescaline, which is the principal active ingredient of peyote. So this is, this, is this is this is a psychedelic ceremony. A rave is a psychedelic ceremony. It's an indigenous psychedelic ceremony invented in places like detroit. It grows out of things like, um, uh, black disco. It grows out of industrial music. It grows out of a number of different kind of cultural influences. And you know, I've sat with peyote, with people from the native american church, you know, in that kind of ritual style and in that ritual they play a thing called a water drum and they play all night long and it has one rhythm. The rhythm is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right, okay, so the rave is an, is a is an attempt by an industrial, post-industrial culture to kind of with this substance that comes into it, which is basically a pro-social, uh, um, uh, psychedelic. So it's pro-social, it's an amphetamine, it's, it's, it's uplifting, it's engaging. You know, you might conceivably want to kind of like lie down and chill, but possibly you want to dance, you want to interact with people and so on. So it's a way that we found we meaning people that might you know with my, my cultural sort of background we found a way of holding that space and we just we developed two spaces. We developed the dance floor, we developed the chill out space and they have different sort of you know architectures and different kind of you know stuff around them.
Speaker 2:And, of course, what happened with um ecstasy is it became incredibly popular because a drug that makes you enjoy music in other people's company uh, why would that not be popular, you know, particularly a drug that makes you enjoy music in other people's company uh, why would that not be popular? You know, particularly a drug that is, by and large, remarkably safe. So, because of that popularity, that was another wave. So we had that kind of wave in the 1960s with lsd, when it escaped the, the uh, the military and laboratory settings and came into general culture and and we created a space. Then, actually, we created a thing called the, the rock music festival, which was a space for holding the experience of being on acid. And then we created the brave, which is a space for holding the experience of being on mdma, and it was incredibly popular. Lots and lots and lots of people went there.
Speaker 2:Those people I'm 56, so those people are now in those situations where you know many of the people, you know lots of those researchers. Did they go to raves? Of course they went to raves, absolutely they went to raves. And the people who are kind of now going with psychedelic therapy is that a thing? Yes, but they know that because they, you know, they've seen, you know how these things also, they've they've understood experientially how these substances, which were incredibly demonized and incredibly thought to be something you know, they're still in things like UN Convention on Drugs. They're still continued. We continue to place them in the most dangerous category, despite all the stuff that I probably don't need to tell you or the audience about why they're not.
Speaker 2:And it turned out that these things were actually remarkably safe. And so lots of people who are kind of, you know, in the, you know, for example, my mates in their 50s had had perfectly nice 20s and 30s raving and none of them, you know, went mad or died or any of these sorts of things. But you know, by and large it was that it worked out incredibly well and that was even under circumstances where it was all criminalized. So you think actually, maybe if it wasn't criminalized and we could test things, we could support people better, we could do. Maybe we could actually turn, turn this into a really lovely engine within culture where it's just like oh, you're, you're 18, oh, you're gonna go to you know, do you know what I mean? It's like it's a rite of passage. You know that might be great, that might be great.
Speaker 1:I was going to sort of ask you. You know well, for me and I feel like that kind of night that you know, growing up teens in the 90s it almost feels like an initiation right, feels like an initiation right but unfortunately to a degree because so much of it has to be kept secret. You don't really know what you're doing because it's all kind of like underground. You don't necessarily have the the experience or as good an experience. You can have a good experience. But you know, I took some LSD. When I the first time took LSD it was like a disaster because I didn't know what to expect. I didn't have anyone holding space for me. You know, I was in a pub with a bunch of people that were kind of like and it could have been a completely different experience, but certainly an initiation. And yeah, I just think it's kind of interesting how that's, yes, that our age group had that experience, and now there's this kind of like.
Speaker 2:Now we're we're grown-ups, mature grown-ups, that we're kind of appreciating the value that it could have um in the future for us as well um, those, those people in the ancient world who were having their initiation of the temple of elusis 3 000 people at a time for at least 1,000 years. So those people were doing that and that was part of their story. However, inexpertly and however ignorant of or unable to access the wisdom of those who are more experienced than us, and having to do these things in, you know, illicit contexts, we had effectively created our own initiatory process, dissolving in your, your awareness into the crowd and being utterly yourself and also utterly part of all these people. And at its best, that is undoubtedly an initiation. That is undoubtedly an initiation in the sense that it is the beginning of something new and even if you then kind of don't go anywhere near psychedelics, possibly even ever again, that has given you a new perspective of the world. And, like I said, this is what these substances do. They don't. When we, when people meet these again, when they come back to these things, maybe they've, you know, they've got to their sort of 40s, 50s and now they go. Oh, you know, I need to sort myself out like there's, there's a lot of people that I speak with who've kind of gone back to a more supported, carefully organized, organised, thoughtful setting to reconnect with those things because they could see their value. They want to kind of engage with those in a different way. You know, long may raving continue and may also those people who experience those things find ways to develop their practice, develop their engagement with those, those experiences and those encounters. And I hope very much that we can, you know, we can change elements of the cultural conversation so that it becomes more accessible for people, because that's really really important, yeah, really really important, and it will change culture.
Speaker 2:Well, one thing that happened when mdma came to british culture in the early 1990s in particular was it's overnight, pretty much soccer hooliganism, football hooliganism stopped in britain. Wow, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a lovely book that that traces this. Um, exorcising the dance culture by nicholas saunders. Um, but, and you know what were violent, pitched battles every single Saturday, stopped. Now, we could have capitalised on that and built all sorts of things from that.
Speaker 2:People often sort of say, well, you know, you've taken MDMA. They go oh, wouldn't it be great if all the political leaders could all take MDMA, at least before they start a war? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you see, the thing is, everybody laughs at that. But the funny thing is, or the sad thing is, they should be absolutely made to do this Because before we light the touch paper on a war where vast numbers of people will suffer, this is a tool.
Speaker 2:These things are a tool.
Speaker 2:These things are an opportunity to change our relationship with our story and we laugh at that, even though up until 399 ad, all of the philosophers you've ever heard of and many of the emperors I'm not saying that the culture was perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but those people were sat in the telestereon, the great initiation hall, the goddess demeter being given the kikion, the sacred potion, which contained essentially LSD in it, and that changed their relationship with all kinds of things, including the notion of their own death.
Speaker 2:There's we know very little about what happened, but we do know from some of the accounts that people felt differently about their death. Now, many of the more unpleasant political leaders that we have, we know, are people who have a kind of a rampant egotism and sense of their own self and often the fear of their own demise and their own death. So what would it do to a culture if all of our leaders did have to undergo a psychedelic initiation? I mean it might make things worse. Worse, although that's hard to imagine and, frankly, it is worth a try. Yeah, so all those people sat around in the raids back in the 90s going, oh, wouldn't be good if yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, let's insist on that before they send people to their deaths, let's insist on that yeah, the reason I laughed was um, because I was probably one of those people that was saying it.
Speaker 2:Yeah me too, mate, it was a familiarity of like yep.
Speaker 1:I've been in one of those conversations yeah, yeah, and you just go.
Speaker 2:Well, okay, you know before, before you ask me to put my children in the firing line for your war, which will all you know, which which probably after n years will look completely pointless and vacuous, anyway, I would, frankly, I would like you to have some sort of supported mdma session. Um, just as an individual and then possibly in relation to the people who you're about to try and destroy, yes, yeah. Worth a go.
Speaker 1:Definitely. Okay, I've got a couple more things that I want to ask you. I want to ask you and this is kind of a little bit random, but I think I'm just curious about it You've been doing this work and, like you said, you said right at the outset that you've almost feel like it was, you know, meant to be um. You've been doing working in this um with occultism, magic, psychedelics, um, for 40 years, 10, uh, four decades. What can you tell me about courage? Because I feel like it's being left of center, like that left, you know, far, far, far left Um, like you could face, uh, a whole bunch of ridicule. Maybe didn't, I don't know? Um, but like what. What can you tell me about being courageous in, in that, like in your journey?
Speaker 2:okay, that's a very interesting question. I'm very interested in that, actually, because courage is, um, again talking about kind of classical culture. Courage is a virtue and I'm very interested in the idea of virtues. So, um, I was writing, I was, I'm writing, I'm writing another book at the moment and I was writing today, um, a little bit about virtues, which is that, um, it's all very well to kind of like codify how you should behave, not to write lists of what you should do, what you shouldn't do, but what I actually quite like is the idea of, uh, aspiration towards a virtue, and so there is a virtue called courage, and courage, uh can be imagined as the middle point on a scale, and at one end you have cowardice or timidity, you're not prepared to do anything, you're too, you're very frightened of the world. And on the other hand, uh, the other extreme, you have being foolhardy, being too gung-ho about stuff, and somewhere in between the two is courage, and courage is a virtue that you aspire to. So running into a burning building, by and large, is foolhardy, unless you're trying to save someone, at which point it becomes courageous. So the context of courage, the context determines whether an act, act is courageous or not, and there's no, there's no absolute answer to this, but I rather like the idea of aspiring towards a virtue rather than just trying to live up to a series of edicts that have been printed out where you know, different circumstances mean that that sometimes those, those things are not the best way of articulating an ethical way to be. When you sit in front of a dose of psychedelics, that will be a let's call it just a significant dose, a dose that will allow you to put on the eye shades and headphones and go into the deep internal world. That is courageous, because that work can be difficult, because we all have all kinds of difficult stuff cluttering up the back of our heads. I know, I certainly do. I imagine many other people do, and even if we don't have very much going on for ourselves personally, as a community, as a culture, as a species, we definitely do. So there's a courage in stepping into that world, you know, aside of even the legal situation, which is a whole other kettle of proverbial fish. So I think that, um, I like the, the idea of the aspiration to a virtue of courage and sometimes that that that's, that's a continuous process of navigation.
Speaker 2:I'm very fortunate, partly because I could write about psychedelics because I'm an occultist and so I could basically be written off as a crank. That's fine, I'm happy with that. The guy believes all kinds of weird stuff. No one really believes that these substances are useful. So I was able to write stuff, you know, literally 20 years ago, which now people go, oh, that's a very good idea. Well, that's wise.
Speaker 2:But of course at the time it was, like you know, small scale publications, little books. You know, like you know, very narrow small number of people who kind of were, um, of similar opinions. But but that number has grown and more and more of those people by kind of witnessing, as the Christians would say, bearing witness to well, look, I took some mushrooms and it's like the Bill Hicks thing I took some acid and I had a thoroughly lovely time. Or I took some mushrooms that actually really helped with my PTSD, or I started microdosing and now I don't have to take my antidepressants anymore because that seems to just do the job perfectly happily. So yeah, courage, it is important cool, thank you.
Speaker 1:One last thing I'm going right back to a line that I used in your introduction and your work as part um. You see your work as part of the process to help reimagine an earth centered, non-dogmatic, open source spirituality. Have you?
Speaker 2:got any?
Speaker 1:uh, I think that that's just one. Like wonderful, have you got anything that you would um like to say about that as we head to our farewells or close?
Speaker 2:oh, sure, sure, it's very easy when we get interested in, um, you know, any of these subjects, the esoteric or even health or well-being or whatever to start to develop an idea that we are somehow better than everybody else. Oh, you see, I, I do this supplement, or I do this activity, or I do this other thing, and, um, I'm of the opinion that, uh, if we have some, um good medicine, then we should attempt to share that good medicine, because I'm of the opinion, like the vajrayana buddhists, that there's no point me being liberated until all beings are liberated. So, uh, I need to work on myself, whatever that means. But myself immediately implies others, and so that's what I mean by an open source spirituality. So I I'm very, very I spend all of my time. It's basically what I do, is I spend a lot of my time like sharing the stuff that I know with other people, working with them to develop their practice in a in a lot of different kind of fields.
Speaker 2:Um, earth-centered, because I think it's important that we think about our relationship with physical matter and the species that we share the planet with, and one of the things about psychedelics is their stuff. Their stuff, they can be bought and sold. They can be given to you, with or without your consent they can. All kinds of things can happen to them. So by having a good relationship with this special type of weird, potentially dangerous, potentially incredibly healing, magical stuff, that's one way in which I see that kind of relationship with the earth, aside of other kind of environmental, political stuff which I'm interested in and non-dogmatic in the sense that we all tell stories about the world, and each one of our stories comes from a particular viewpoint and will illuminate something, if we're able to really listen to other people's stories, that perhaps we haven't ourselves seen. But it is also the case that we may see, which is clearly nonsense.
Speaker 2:Anyone who says that is at best a little mistaken in my view. I'm being really on an Australian podcast. I should be a bit more frank, but so it's like. So that's what I mean by non-dogmatic. It's a complicated world out there. I certainly have no idea really how it works, and so you know, if we can just be a little bit sort of thoughtful about the multiplicity of interpretation of the world, then we will know more about it. Otherwise we are like the wise, wise men feeling the leg of the elephant and declaring that it is undoubtedly like a tree and the other wise man feeling the ear of the elephant and declaring that it is undoubtedly like a fan. It's like we all know part of this. So rather than trying to tell us, tell other people, that what you know is right, it might be better to invite this multiplicity of interpretation and see if, collectively, we can figure things out from there I love that beautiful.
Speaker 1:That's so lovely. Thank you so much. I've really loved having having you here with me for this hour. Appreciate your time, yeah, in sharing your, your wisdom and teaching us a little bit about the magic.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for inviting me. It's really really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:It's been great.
Speaker 2:I wish you every success. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for inviting me. It's really really appreciate it. It's been great. Wish you every success. Thank you, ditto. Thank you so much, julian. Bye-bye. Before you go, can I ask you a small favor? If you've enjoyed this show or any of the other episodes that you've listened to, then I'd really appreciate it if you took a couple of moments to hit subscribe. This is a great way to increase our listeners and get the word out there about all of the wonderful guests that we've had on the podcast. If you'd like to further support the show, you can buy me a coffee by going to buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash, life, health, the universe. You can find that link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.